She refuses and accidentally shoots Renton during a scuffle. Renton reneges on the deal, demanding that Hannah abandon the Bloc and come with him. They work out a deal where they will split the scrips after using the cyanide gas to force Father and his group to stand down. Though he does not trust Hannah, Renton frees her. Renton says he never gave up looking for her after he escaped. She says she grew to resent Renton after he abandoned her to Torus, who tortured her. After reviving, Renton questions Hannah about her past.
Renton surrenders the scrips, only to be killed again after Sonny shoots him. This fails when Hannah reveals herself as allied with them. This time, after freeing himself, he asks Hannah to help poison the intruders with cyanide gas. Renton wakes up gasping, only to relive the same scenario. After freeing himself and Hannah, he is killed while trying to escape. Renton believes the Bloc members to be after the ARQ rather than the scrips, though Hannah urges him to comply with their demands. After Torus shut down the project as an impossibility, he stole it and ran. Renton explains to Hannah the ARQ is a working perpetual motion machine he designed while working at Torus. He gives them several minutes to comply and leaves the room with the others to get food. Father says he represents a rebel group known as the Bloc and demands Renton surrender scrips from their rival organization, the Torus Corporation. The leader of the group introduces himself as Father, identifying the others as Sonny and Brother Cuz died of electrocution after touching a large device, the ARQ, in the room. He and Hannah are taken to another room and bound to chairs. As he strokes her face, three men in air filtration masks break into his bedroom and take him hostage. It’s the loop we’re all stuck in while we wait for the next visionary to break us out.Renton wakes up beside his former lover, Hannah. If it relies too heavily on its influences, it’s certainly not alone. But it makes good use of its format, finding new ways to spread out revelations while doubling back on itself again and again.ĪRQ’s reach may never exceed its grasp, but its performances, zig-zagging plot, and slick cinematography leave little wanting for science-fiction fans in the mood for something a little heartier than usual. My rule of thumb for movies structured around narrative gimmicks is to ask if the story’s any good if the gimmick is completely removed, and ARQ doesn’t exactly pass this test: its world building is surprisingly evocative of a certain scarcity-themed franchise that has itself been accused (often incorrectly, but now’s not the time!) of ripping off its own share of dystopian predecessors. The Memento-like twist is that Renton, and eventually Hannah, can remember previous iterations, allowing them to outwit their captors while they play a longer game of regaining each other’s trust following a year of changing allegiances. Evidently, apples are highly prized.Īnd at least in this building, time itself is decomposing, because the technology Renton created, and then stole, from Torus-a perpetual motion machine called ARQ that could perhaps solve the planet’s energy crisis-has gone on the fritz, trapping everyone in a 3 hour, 14 minute loop that resets indefinitely. The pope is a woman, and the symbolic leader of the rebel “bloc”, whose members are currently raiding Renton’s apartment. Eventually you piece together: a fugitive engineer named Renton (Robbie Amell) has just reunited with his activist wife, Hannah (Rachael Taylor) at least a year after she was kidnapped and tortured by his former employer, a defense contractor turned ruling global supercorporation, Torus. It’s 6:16 AM.ĭropping an audience into the middle of the action is convention in thrillers, but ARQ is especially jarring, delivering rapid fire, incomplete backstory in its earliest scenes, giving the deliberate impression that you’re starting the movie itself at a midpoint, almost like flipping channels and landing twenty minutes into the film. He changes course, trying to gas his assailants with cyanide, but a disturbing revelation about his wife leads to a gunfight in which he is killed a second time. A man wakes up next to his wife moments before his bedroom is invaded by assassins, is beaten and kidnapped, and his brief attempt at escape is foiled when he’s stabbed in the stomach and dies.
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