Kevin has been bringing us Halloween specials for six years now, and this one finally happened to fall on Halloween itself, and you know what that means – it means that instead of sitting at home, turning out the lights so that nobody rings your doorbell because you’ll be damned if you’re going to buy 10 pounds of candy bars you’ll have to eat yourself after passing out maybe two of them*, you get to lock the door and leave for a movie instead, and not have to worry about it. This time around, Kevin picked a pretty unknown 2017 film he stumbled upon called The Endless, directed by Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead.
Hey, what if *I* play Justin and *you* play Aaron! That would be totally rebel-chic, right?
In The Endless, directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead play the creatively-named brothers Justin and Aaron, a couple of down-on-their-luck Los Angelinos who run a cleaning service and who were raised in a community that Justin refers to as a “UFO death cult”. (Sadly, the film does not deliver on the UFO in any way.) I’m going to skip the exposition and just tell you straight up that they were raised in this cult as a result of their mother dying in a car accident near the cult compound when they were young. The cultists saved them from the burning wreckage, or whatever, and so were naturally given custody of the children under the legal principle of inventoris custodies. Eventually the elder Justin decided that they were a bit too culty for his liking and whisked Aaron away to the real world where nobody acts weird or has strange beliefs at all and everybody has to work for a living instead of living their best life while mooching off of the cult’s profitable microbrew business. (“India Pale Ale-ien”! “Hefe’s Gate”!)
How To Confuse A Lycanthrope
But we wouldn’t have a story if they didn’t go back to visit, so…naturally, they go back to visit. Their return, about ten years after they left, is prompted by the receipt of a videotape sent to them in the mail featuring one of their former co-cultists talking about the Ascension, and how they should come visit, and not to worry if they’re out for the Ascension because they’ll be right back, that sort of culty thing. Justin wants nothing to do with it, but Aaron, having been younger when they left, feels an attraction to his former life – one which Justin insists he doesn’t remember as well as he thinks.
When I said to hitch your wagon to the stars, it was a METAPHOR!
As you might imagine, there’s a bit of cultish indignation at Justin for leaving the compound ten years before, and everything else is about what you might expect except for the fact that nobody at the compound appears to have aged at all in the intervening time. They engage in some cult-building exercises like trust-falls and tug-of-war-with-a-rope-disappearing-into-the-darkened-sky, and Aaron is really kind of getting into the whole thing again. Because Aaron is reluctant to leave, they spend a few more days than Justin intended to, and like any good cult, their former friends are trying to draw them back in.
Say what, cowboy?
But it’s not all just tales of Xenu and practice Kool-Aid – there’s some legitimately weird stuff going on, like there are two moons and seeming space-time anomalies, and some bizarre unseen entity that seems to try to communicate with them using conjured-up Polaroids and cassette tapes and the like. Meanwhile, the cult is talking about Ascension happening when the three moons are full and Justin sure as heck wants to get the hell out of there, and it’s not easy to explain but the upshot of the whole thing ends up being this: They discover that outside of the cult compound there are several people in nearby locations who are caught in time loops of varying duration – one is about five seconds long, others are clearly longer, but all end in the same way: the people in the loops either kill themselves, or they are killed in some sort of brutal fashion by the entity, only to reboot and start the whole thing over again with full memory of what just happened. The cultists are merely stuck in the longest time loop – about nine years or so. Evidently, Justin and Aaron got out about a year before the last “Ascension” and have now arrived nigh on the next one.
Three moons in the sunset/Could be the human race is run
And this is the kicker – If Justin and Aaron don’t leave before the next Ascension they get caught in the time loop themselves, and will be forced to hang out with their cult buddies and make microbrew for the rest of eternity. Since they’ve been present at the end (or multiple ends) of three other time loops, it’s not entirely clear why they didn’t get sucked into those loops, but believe me, if they don’t get the heck out of Dodge in about the next four minutes they’re stuck in this one, I promise. And their car doesn’t want to start, and they have to bump start it, and they barely escape the expanding nuclear blast of their upcoming Armageddon like this was a cartoon or a Marvel movie or a TV show where the bomb technician correctly cuts the red wire (I mean the BLUE wire!) with one second left on the conveniently-informative LCD dramatic countdown clock. The End. Unless you want to believe that Justin and Aaron are actually caught in a diabolical, even-longer-time-loop and shortly after the film ends they’re just going to get ascended right after they thought they escaped, only to wake up in the car crash only to get adopted by the cult and then escape from the cult and then return to the cult and then almost escape again. I’m kind of partial to that interpretation, but I don’t think there’s any good evidence for it. So, The End.
So was it a good movie? It was OK. For the first half I thought it really built well, but the “answer” was just so haphazard and arbitrary and ultimately unexplained (from a mechanistic point of view, at least) that I can’t really say the movie delivered. I think back to one of those authors that I both love and hate, Neal Stephenson. Stephenson can really write, and he spins an incredible and compelling yarn for like 700 pages but then he realizes that his publisher will only give him 50 more pages and he has no idea how the story was supposed to end anyways so he decides to engineer an inexplicable but massive battle with tons of explosions and stuff that has nothing to do with the actual story and doesn’t wrap anything up but by the time the carnage is over you’re supposed to feel like something, something, denouement happened. Every single novel. All right, my beef here is with Stephenson and not with Benson and Moorhead, but the underlying principle is the same – I feel like when they started their script they had no idea how they were going to end it. So we got…something, something, denouement. It had a lot of promise. I just don’t think it delivered in the end.
*Note: I must admit this story about not buying candy to pass out rings false in two ways. First, (basically) nobody trick-or-treats in my neighborhood. This is because not only do I live in the poor neighborhood, but I live in the really poor neighborhood literally a quarter of a mile away from the really rich neighborhood. It’s right across the soccer field. The parents know to send the kids over there, because it’s well lit and that’s where you get the King Size candy bars instead of the Double-Bubble or Smarties or whatever. Somebody brought some packages of what used to be called candy cigarettes into work. They’re awful. They’re like what sticks of chalk would taste like if Harry Potter as a ten-year-old tried to turn sticks of chalk into sugar. I’m not even sure they’re sweetened with sugar, it’s probably aspartame or something. I mean, seriously, the only reason to make these things is probably because they’re a way to dump off that old, expired, carcinogenic saccharin without having to pay hazardous waste fees to dispose of it. “What?” the old saccharin manufacturers say, “$12,000 a ton to dispose of this? Why, if we make it into candy cigarettes and sell it in the bargain bin at Walmart for 50 cents a pound we’ll only lose $1,000 a ton! The people that live in the poor neighborhoods will love it, not only because it’s cheap, but because next year the kids will all go over to the neighborhoods that are giving out the King Size crap!” Umm, anyway… The second reason this story rings false is that several years ago, some schlub evidently cut the 5V power line in my condo building for whatever reason, and the HOA won’t fix it. So my doorbell doesn’t even work. I don’t have to worry about anybody ringing the doorbell. I mean, they might try, but I won’t know any better and therefore I don’t have to feel bad about not answering the door.
Is there a word for somebody who’s a Scrooge, but for Halloween? Because that’s me. I’m the Halloween Scrooge. Boo Humbug!
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 