I'm blown away. Many reviews will say this is a time loop movie. (I would think something like should be spoiler tagged, but that's just me.)
It is not a time loop movie!
What I love about Triangle is that everything that explains what's going on is handed to us on a silver platter early on, yet the important bits to fill in the blanks are parceled out to the viewer at a near-perfect pace throughout the film.
The protagonist, Jess, goes for a first date on a boat with another couple, a single woman who the woman in the other couple invited along, and Victor, a young homeless man who the owner lets live on the boat. Aaaand now that I write that, I wonder if there is any deeper significance to those characters.
The film is beautifully shot. Some of the CGI is awful but that doesn't negatively impact the experience. The way it looked just made sense. I got the sense of a story being shown, and no feeling of an auteur showing off. I don't mind artsy films, but this film was well served by being shot straightforwardly...even if it may not seem straightforward at times. You may wonder why the POV of the camera suddenly goes from straight on the characters to looking down in the characters' backs from atop a staircase. Things like that.
The music and sound design were spot on as well. I just liked this movie a lot.
So disappointing! I read the book and enjoyed it a lot. The book seemed tailor made for a film production. But, somehow this adaptation managed to make the source material plodding. It drains the life (haha, no that's not a spoiler) out of the relationship dynamics between Justineau and Melanie, Justineau and the soldier, the scientist and Justineau, etc. All that makes it is a little of the tenderness Justineau has for Melanie. The guy playing the solider did the best he could with a crappy script and pacing.
Having read the book, I was able to fill in some blanks, such as the depth of the scientist's motivations, and the full meaning of the spores.
But I found myself fast forwarding through the second half of the film, stopping when Melanie appeared or when a plot point seemed to be coming up. The movie was that slow. I never fast forward through movies. Usually with a bad movie I stop watching, but with this one I loved the source material so much I was certain there would be great payoff at the end. Instead, the end, while hewing pretty well to the book, still was meh. It just wasn't able to tell the story in a way that felt complete or interesting.
It gets one star for the apocalyptic city/suburban vistas - I LOVED that they had overgrown office-park trees. You know the ones. The fast growing, narrow evergreens they put in office park landscaping. That was a thoughtful touch. It gets the second star for the child actor who played Melanie. She was wonderful at portraying a child not quite human yet also very human, and I hope she does more work.
