But while What We Do in The Shadows was filmed similarly to capture comedic organicism, Coherence was filmed this way to create organicism in the growing tension of the film’s sci-fi premise. I have my gripes about the film (discussed below), but overall it was incredibly successful and a compelling and unique film that I’ve already recommended to other people. The cast’s performance is outstanding, and the premise and how it unfolds is fascinating.

At some point as I was watching it with Hannah, I remarked, “this is making me want to make you watch Primer.” The writer/director stated that Primer “…wasn’t really an influence so much as it was a sign to us that maybe there was an audience for this kind of movie.” It’s true that although the overall tone and atmosphere have marked similarities to Primer, the brotherhood of these two films feels connected only loosely in the same way that tomatoes are connected loosely to ketchup.

There are two main gripes I have with the film. The one I can’t talk about is that i’m not particularly fond of the resolution/end.

The one that I can talk about is that the beginning of the movie sets a tone of ordinariness and realism, and when the sci-fi premise is “discovered” (for lack of a better word) by the cast, it felt like they were generally too quick to accept it and there was no true time spent in disbelief. It would be like if the cast were all together in a house and ordered pizza delivery, and the pizza delivery guy was a green alien that got their order wrong. Coherence spent the equivalent of a metaphorical minute focusing on the fact that the pizza delivery guy was a green alien, but after that minute was over, they immediately moved on and started to complain about the wrong order, and the fact that the pizza delivery guy was an alien became commonplace.

I think that’s where the improvisatory and limited-information nature of the film hindered it to a small degree because discoveries like that made the film feel more like watching a group of people trying to get out of an escape room – engaging in the puzzles, riddles, and mysteries out of a competitive spirit but ultimately with no sense of real world stakes or urgency. That transition moment passed and then i was snapped back into the story, but I can’t help but wish that there was one more scene during that moment where the index cards were something like, “You’re struggling to believe that this is real.”

But maybe that had to be balanced with the overall pacing of the movie and passing over that was preferable to sacrificing the development of the intrigue once the sci-fi elements were established. I’ll have to think about that more on a second viewing.

If I had to label the look and feel of the show, i’d say that it was trying to be a Turkish version of Marvel Netflix shows. The story development is a slow, measured pace that sets up the main protagonist as this clueless dreamer who gets slapped in the face with His Destiny. The cinematic style is a weird blend of grounded reality vs comic book – on the one hand, the main protagonist and most of his family and friends feel pretty “real” looking, for lack of a better word, with realistic expectations of how they dress, work, and act on a day-to-day basis. On the other hand, one of the side female characters has perfect makeup and perfect hair no matter where she goes (enough that I felt like someone might as well have been blowing a fan off-stage the entire time) and one of the primary antagonists is always wearing black slacks with a black shirt with a black tie and a black suit – even when he’s supposedly trying to “blend in with the crowd”.

I found it difficult to get drawn into the story because there were beats that felt off to me, but I also found that I was giving it benefit of the doubt since it’s clearly not geared towards a US audience – I told myself that maybe it was because of cultural differences in expectation and that I should reserve judgement. At the end of the first episode, I remember saying to myself immediately, “i don’t know if this is good?”

What made me give up on it was events that lead up to the middle of the third episode. Without spoiling much, the last interchange at the end of the second episode was the protagonist, seemingly now believing in His Destiny, telling his new allies, “We need this ring? Let’s go find this ring!” and the allies smiling like, “Yes! He finally gets it!” But then at the top of the third episode, they’re not going after the ring, and when he asks “why aren’t we going to get the ring?” the allies say, “We’ll get to that later, first we need to make sure that you’re trained.” So then there’s a few scenes of him going through fighting training and mind-over-matter training that’s montaged in such a way that Time Has Passed. And after said montages, the allies then say, “Hey, our enemies could attack us at any moment, let’s go get the ring!” which apparently involved just visiting a friend who had been holding on to the ring for safekeeping.

So the show was sending mixed messages about the urgency of getting the ring, but more importantly, getting the ring apparently wasn’t a Quest, they don’t need to bring the protagonist to a gate that only he can open, they don’t have to do any research to find the ring because it was lost; it was as simple as an errand, like going to a friend’s house to return a borrowed propane tank. So couldn’t one of the allies just go get it while training was still happening?

I don’t know the result of that errand because that’s the point when I stopped watching, but I assume that the answer is boring: retrieving the ring won’t be as simple as they think, there will be some sort of scuffle or fight because the antagonist has been following them or some other nonsense. And that’s where the show ultimately fell apart for me, because while there were a few beats from episodes 1 and 2 that similarly created a very contrived sequence of events, none of them did it so blatantly and grossly.

It’s a shame because there’s a lot about the show to like, and for its faults, it’s still better than some other shows that I’ve watched to their completion in the past. It could just be the frame of mind that I’m in right now where there are too many things I’m currently watching and I have too much other stuff going on in my life to be as forgiving of this in a way that I would have in my past. It did get greenlit for a second season, so maybe if it runs for a few seasons i’ll give it another chance to dust out the freshmen cobwebs.

The answer? Kinda.

I never saw Episode III because the degree of loathing I had for Episode II was so high that I was done with the whole franchise. Given that perspective, Solo was still annoying, yes, but it was also mostly fine and doesn’t turn me off of the franchise or the idea of exploring other Star Wars characters (even though Disney has announced that this other star wars spinoffs are now on hold). Given the troubled production, I’d say that Ron Howard did the best that he could, especially because i heard that he did it for practically no pay after Lord and Miller left.

The biggest success of the movie was the train sequence. And i thought that all of the characters acted their part pretty well, even not-Harrison-Ford-Han-Solo.

The biggest annoyances of the movie were, well, everything else, but I think that what bothered me the most in the end was that all of the Star Wars-ness of the movie was immensely distracting and took me out of the movie more than pulled me in – a drastic contrast to the excellent Rogue One. I found myself thinking that the movie would have sat better with me if it was new IP instead of Star Wars because all of the easter egg references to the original trilogy felt more like a nostalgia pull rather than something that would naturally occur over the course of the events of the film. That’s always a fine line to cross, but in general I tend to think that such things fail more than they succeed – lines like “Come with me if you want to live” and “I’ll be back” were incredibly iconic in the early Terminator films and will live in infamy until the end of time, but even if Genisys was a critical success, who is going to consider the reuse of those lines in that movie to be just as iconic or even appropriate?

Trying to force-feed that sort of iconicism down the audiences’ throat is where Solo ultimately fails. The trailer itself tried to tug on that iconicism immediately by featuring Solo saying the line “I’ve got a really good feeling about this” as if to say, “We know you loved that line in the original trilogy, so here it is again, love this film!” Too much of the film was littered with those sort of metaphorical empty calories, and I think in the end that made me feel like i metaphorically didn’t eat anything of real substance while simultaneously making me feel metaphorically uncomfortably full.

I think this fails the Bechdel test? There were a few prominent female characters in the film, but I don’t think there was ever a point when they interacted with each other.

There were a lot of interesting visual parallels i felt myself making between this movie and some of the earlier ones (particularly IV V and VI) that at first i thought were annoying because gimmicky nostalgia, but later on as i got used to the whole universe again i decided that they weren’t gimmicky, they were just consistent with the way the universe was created in the first place, and to be annoyed by those parallels would be the same as saying, “oh, light sabers, why’d they bring *those* back again?” which wouldn’t be fair.  even some of the ‘nostalgia build up’ moments which normally would have annoyed me felt okay.  That’s surprising to me, but i think that that’s because despite some of the awfulness and some of the annoying predictabilities, it was mostly a great film, much better than what i remember feeling after leaving the theater after episodes I and II (i never watched III).

One of my colleagues here who watched it with me commented on how there seemed to be an overabundance of silly dialogue and one-liners that bothered him and felt over the top, not so much in comparison to how telly and film can do it these days but in comparison to the star wars legacy (which he felt had no real silly one-liners at all). i said that even if that were true it didn’t bother me because it felt like a good modern update that still paid respect to the legacy and enhanced it.  In fact the dialogue and general character interaction is what i liked the most about the film, it hardly ever did too little or too much.  i remember after episode II i was rolling my eyes a lot at the bad dialogue, and here i hardly rolled my eyes at all – although part of that might have been because i was sitting in the third row, so my eyes were already rolled up to be able to actually see the whole screen.