First impressions – The Shift (Angel Studio’s first original movie)

(I got a discounted ticket through Angel Studios, but this was not in consideration of a review and has no bearing on my opinion of the movie.)

Christian science fiction. On one hand, I would expect someone like Jonathan Pageau to say that it’s not so far-fetched because even when one has a story depicting dystopia, a good story can’t help but ring true because of the way it resonates with the Great Story, that is, Scripture, because even our attitudes of what makes a dystopia dystopic is in our attitudes of truth. I know a lot of people scoff at science fiction as not being “real” literature, but I think the genre is very important in its function that it gets to bend the edges of reality a bit in order to highlight a point, and many of those points are ahead of the curve as far as society goes. On the radio today, Mark Belling commented that the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was 60 years ahead of the conversation on artificial intelligence, as an example.

I think Christian science fiction is hard because a lot of sci-fi relies on the importance of technology, from its ubiquitous nature to reliance upon it and even as far as fear and reverence of it. Adding a Christian element necessarily changes the focus somewhat because here you have an element that usurps the superiority of the technology. Again, this can be done, but I don’t think there are too many authors that manage to do this well.

In any case, to the story. In the beginning of the film, a man who is not dressed to be swimming is struggling for his life in a lake, where he makes it to the shore with great difficulty. We see the man is injured, he is looking for somebody, and then he disappears.

The viewer is then pulled back, five years earlier, on what started out as the worst day of this man’s life. He was employed by Bear Stearns, and the whole house of cards went falling, and the man – Kevin – sits at a hotel bar having just lost his very well-paying job. However, as he’s sitting there, an attractive woman comes to chat with him. She said she was dared to talk to him by her friends, but they decide to keep chatting from that point.

From here, we start getting glimpses of what life was like going forward. There are the very good things, but we also get clued in that there are some very concerning things as well. We’re brought to a point where Kevin seems to be on the brink of losing his job, things at home are not well, and he’s emotionally stretched beyond what he can take.

Of course, life often throws us curveballs when things are the most stressful, and here is no different, for as everything else is happening, Kevin ends up in an accident, but instead of waking up to an ambulance and a ride to the hospital, he finds himself face to face with a man who calls himself “The Benefactor”. The Benefactor has a veneer of caring about him, but it quickly becomes apparent that his anger has cowed people into doing what he wants.

There was a little bit here that reminded me of the movie The Butterfly Effect, because it turns out that the Benefactor can send a person into an alternate timeline on a whim and can also create doppelgängers of people to cover (or replace) the person “shifted” out of their own time. So, at any point in time, there are thousands upon thousands of multiple timelines happening.

Kevin is resistant to the Benefactor, and does something that affects the Benefactor in a way that no one else has been able to do before. In fact, some people even think the Benefactor may be dead, but in the meantime, Kevin is trapped in this dystopian alternate reality with little clue as to how he might escape. The movie then becomes the story of how Kevin has to survive, what he has to anchor him to keep him from going insane, and how to figure out a way to get back to his real life.

The movie is purposefully confusing, and even somewhat clunky in some parts. Twice, they went with voiceovers to move the story forward. It worked, and it probably would have taken a ton of time to show the information given there, but it probably wouldn’t have been every filmmaker’s choice. They used a lot of slightly shaky close shots, probably to increase the feeling of tension, but I wasn’t a big fan of that either – shaky cameras always remind me of feeling sick from watching the Blair Witch Project in the theater years ago, and while this was nothing like on that level, I did notice it.

That being said, I liked the movie pretty well, and I’ll probably get the DVD when it comes out. It’s interesting and original, and it’s saying something that almost no one these days is saying, which is there is value in resisting evil and following the good even if our resistance isn’t perfect, and even if we remain unknown, and even if we “fail”. Strangely enough, I finally got around to watching the movie A Hidden Life this week. It is about an Austrian farmer who became a conscientious objector to Hitler and paid for it with his life. There are certainly some parallel themes here, and as much as I like history, it’s fun to see someone use science fiction to portray this.

Apparently, the book of Job was more or less the template for the story, and the book itself makes a (paraphrased) appearance. However, because the story draws from Job, there is a very distinct sense that suffering, loss, and patience are both requirements to fighting the good fight.

There was one other thing that reminded me of The Butterfly Effect, and it was in the message at the end. Angel Studios crowdfunds projects, and there’s a little bit of a “pitch” from the character who plays Kevin after the movie has ended. He states that there’s an additional scene that can be accessed by people who make a “Pay it Forward” donation through Angel to help people who might not have the means for tickets to get them for free. In any case, from what I understand, the director’s cut of The Butterfly Effect has an ending there that is quite different than the original; because this movie also jumps realities, I could see even a small additional scene here giving the story a slightly different context.

In any case, if any of you have seen the movie, I’d love to hear from you! Also, if you’re interested in donating or receiving tickets through the Pay it Forward program, the link to that is here: https://www.angel.com/pay-it-forward/the-shift

---