Release the Kraken! 🦑
James Bond. Indiana Jones. Flash Gordon. Highlander. Clash of the Titans.
My dad raised me on a diet of action adventure. We bonded at the movies and afterward over a piece of apple pie à la Mode.
Pumping his fist in the air in a crowded restaurant, dad would shout, “Release the Kraken!”
We loved those movies.
Hoping for a similar experience, this past weekend I watched INFINITE on Netflix.
INFINITE is based on the novel, THE REINCARNATION PAPERS, self-published in 2009. I haven't read it, so I don't know how faithful the movie is to the original story.
INFINITE is about select persons who reincarnate over and over into new lives while keeping the memories of all their previous lives. Two groups of immortals clash over their desire to guide humanity or annihilate all life. The protagonist discovers that instead of a schizophrenic, he’s really a reincarnated badass who needs his memories unscrambled so he can save the world. All this with a dash of cool cyber techno gadgets.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Like some sort of 21st century Highlander and Jason Bourne love-child.
My father and I would have loved watching it together.
It was total popcorn entertainment. Lots of impressive stunts. Never a dull moment.
But in the end? As a story, it’s sadly uninspiring.
What made it uninspiring? I never logically or emotionally connected with the story.
I won’t go into great detail on the logic disconnect because of spoilers, other than to say there were several plot holes the size of Kansas. They needed those holes for the script to play out or there wouldn't have been a movie to watch.
Action adventures don’t necessarily have to have emotional connections, but INFINITE wanted me to care. It took great pains, in the beginning, to show me why I should care.
Our protagonist is a guy who has led a troubled life. He’s fought his whole life with mental illness. He can’t keep or get a job. He’s about to lose his apartment and become homeless. We see a photo of a couple kids (his?) on his wall. He can’t afford the prescription meds he’s been rationing, so he's forced to buy meds from a street dealer.
This is a guy I could totally care about. I wanted to care about him. I should have cared about him. I didn't.
Why? Because all of his problems come without risk or consequence to him. There was no evidence that his struggle cost him anything.
He was fired from his last job because he broke an abusive customer’s arm. He doesn't get a job because he's confrontational with a difficult interviewer. He runs out of prescription meds, so he forges a one-of-a-kind samurai sword in exchange for drugs from the street dealer. When the dealer's girlfriend gives him the inevitable interested look-over, conflict ensues and our guy has to fight his way out of the apartment. He's arrested, he's saved... and so on.
(He's broke, but somehow he gets the metal and time at the forge... so why doesn't he just forge swords and sell them for a living? Or utilize any of his other amazing past life skills to make money .....? Oh wait, I said I wasn't going to talk about logic holes. Argh.)
In the beginning, his problems are explained as metal illness (which is problematic in itself) and later easily resolved by external intervention.
So what? Why bother? Who cares?
People around him suffer and sacrifice, but he stumbles through the story being pulled along by the far more compelling secondary characters.
The film has been likened to THE MATRIX. A comparison I find puzzling. THE MATRIX had a philosophical soul at the core of all the eye candy special effects. In INFINITE the story feels tacked on around the stunts, instead of the stunts amplifying the story.
(You know you're in trouble when the deep philosophy has to be imparted in a voiceover.)
What should be a climactic MATRIX style bullet-slide-trench-coat moment in INFINITE, passes with us wondering, "WTF just happened?"
INFINITE is a two-hour race through a Kansas-sized hole to a predictable uninspired conclusion.
It could have been so much more. I wanted it to be.
We want our heroes to suffer so we can cheer them on to victory. It's why we’re pumping our fists in the air and shouting, “Release the Kraken!”
Hello!
My name is Jocelyn.
Story warrior, book lover, day dreamer, gardener, and creative. I help serious writers roll up their sleeves, get their novel ready for publishing, and reach readers. When I’m not elbow-deep in the story trenches, I’m outside world-building in my garden and battling weeds with my three criminal mastermind cats.