INFINITE: Identity Theft or Crisis? A Review.
aka the one in which Dylan O’Brien’s agent sets him up, again.
When a studio like Paramount starts advertising their latest feature film starring one of the most well known actors working in the industry a week before it debuts, that should be indicative of what you should expect going into it. The film was originally slated for a theatrical release for August 2020, which should have already clued us in to what Paramount thought about its chances. However, it was then eventually given a new release date of September 24th of 2021. Not bad, right? September has unexpectedly become a very lucrative month for the mid budget, non-IP film. Infinite would have done well here! Wrong. That date belongs to Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage. Full stop. So can Paramount truly be blamed for pushing Infinite to Paramount +? Well, yes. But also not really, because I assume that sometime between last summer and now more people at the studio bothered to watch the movie and like many of us this weekend, were absolutely shocked at the results for which they had spent millions on. More realistically I suppose, is that content, content, content is the name of the game now, and P+ is desperate for it. (There’s a reason why they’re giving every Star Trek idea anyone’s ever had a spin-off show.) Infinite was something they already had on the shelf, ready to go. It also wasn’t an established IP, and with the way the quality of the film is set up, it wasn’t going to become one. Thus, here we are.
Where are we? We are watching a film that has so many cliches and tropes from better films running through its DNA that it not only lacks originality, which could be forgivable, but it also lacks a sense of self. Ironic considering the plot, no? To briefly summarize, the film stars Mark Wahlberg as a man who believes himself to be schizophrenic, constantly bombarded with dreams and memories that don’t belong to him…or do they? He meets a group of Infinites — the reincarnated, who refer to themselves as ‘The Believers’ (I laughed too, don’t worry!) who believe he can tell them where a device capable of Thanos snapping the world out of existence is located. Chiwetel Ejiofor is also here and he’s playing the leader of ‘The Nihilists’ (I laughed again!) who want to destroy the world and end the cycle of reincarnation. Are we all caught up? Very good.
I would describe to you more of the plot, but it has been a full 24hrs since I’ve seen the film, and I fear I’ve already begun to forget what happens. Probably due to the fact that, in Taylor Swift’s words, I think I’ve seen this film before, and it’s just not as good as those. The Matrix, The Old Guard, Sense8, Avatar the Last Airbender, and I’m betting even the upcoming Eternals, have all done the things this film attempted to do and have done them better. Which as an avid fan of sci-fi/fantasy storytelling, I find to be truly disappointing. The genre is capable of telling some of the most interesting, and compelling stories of any genre. Infinite’s premise alone had potential to be at least interesting and entertaining. All it really had to do to succeed was tell a fun and competent story, and maybe throw in some action every once in a while. The fact that this bar wasn’t met and wasn’t even close to being so, is quite shocking. Antoine Fuqua even at his most tedious, is better than this. He’ll usually make a film about some guy (sometimes a group of guys) who are good at violence, sometimes they’re corrupt, and we all leave the theater saying: “Well! I didn’t hate it! I had fun.” Not so here. Hate is a strong word but Infinite is so in your face and unsubtle about nearly everything its attempting to do. The film starts with car chase starring Dylan O’Brien as a song about not being able to die because you’ll just get reborn plays. It was something to behold. Though the most unsubtle scenes take place further into the movie where there are quite literally 4 or 5 scenes dedicated to just exposition. By the third one I started to think to myself: “I may as well be reading a book.” And that dear reader is problem (one of them anyway…): Infinite is based on a book. Is it starting to make sense why this film was so bad now? Not quite? Let’s keep walking.
Hollywood, for all its lack of originality and desperation for ideas, is still incapable of consistently making even okay adaptations, let alone excellent ones. (Catching Fire, we hardly knew you </3.) In the case of Infinite, I’m of the mind a lot of the issues here are just due to the poorly adapted screenplay. I’ve not read the book, so I cannot say with certainty, however, its not outside the realm of possibility that they’ve substituted a lot of the novels’ original ideas and unique personality for redundant tropes and character archetypes we’re more familiar with to perhaps make the film more accessible, or attractive to the average movie goer. Out of curiosity I ended up reading some reviews for the novel and to starts, a lot of them were tagged ‘sci-fi horror’. Which made me go…huh? There’s none of that in Infinite. Oh, the lead is a serial arsonist for hire you say? Hm? Don’t recall that. I don’t point to these exclusions to say: “This film is bad because it didn’t follow the book exactly!” nor to say “These are the only problems this film has and if they just adapted it right, we’d have something good here.” No, I think an adaptation can be almost completely different from the source and still be excellent. (The Shining, of course. More recently, The Edge of Tomorrow.) Similarly, I know that not being a competent adaptation is not the only flaw the film has. I list them to indicate just how much seems to have been lost in said adaptation, to the detriment of the film. Despite nearly every character having lived thousands of lives, and having died in hundred of different ways, Infinite lacks any and all personality or charm. Which should have been considered an essential element when constructing the film. They were already telling a story that’s been told before, with tropes we’ve all seen before, the least they could do was approach it from a different angle. Hollywood often thinks “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” When they should be thinking: “If we don’t have the talent to take inspiration from a better film and make something good, we shouldn’t even try.” The former rolls off the tongue better, so I suppose they can’t be blamed for sticking with it over the latter.
When the dust settles, the cast and crew of Infinite may just be grateful their film didn’t get a wide release. Particularly if I were Antoine, Mark, or Dylan. I’d be glad that this isn’t something I would be strongly associated with. It’s better to be invisible than reviled and lucky for everyone involved, audience included, Infinite will soon be a distant memory. Much like Mark’s character, we may soon find ourselves wondering if the memory is real, and if we ever watched this at all.
