#727 – manifest Destiny Down: Spacetime (2019)

Manifest Destiny Down: Spacetime (2019)

Film review #727

Directors: Jonathan T. Baker, Bo D.

SYNOPSIS: Two college students wake up to find that the world has been raptured and an AI construct is pursuing them. Between the eccentric physicist and the ex-Catholic Sorority girl, they must find a way to save all humanity and unify quantum physics…

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Manifest Destiny: Spacetime is a 2019 sci-fi film. The night after they apparently hook up, two college students: a theoretical physicist and a an ex-catholic sorority girl find that they are the last humans on Earth, as an AI has uploaded everyone to the cloud (or something like that), and the only hope is to discover the missing equation to reconcile quantum physics and relativity. The wholly improbable story is a blend of absurdist stoner film with quantum shenanigans, sci-fi references, and a story which is nigh incomprehensible in the details. I have some understanding of quantum physics so I could grasp the basics of the story, but the story itself insists on folding in on itself and changing the goalposts so much it’s hard to really get to grips with. While there’s certainly some possibility of cleverly entangling the story with concepts of quantum physics, this film doesn’t really achieve that, and I feel that more expertise in the production was really needed from this low budget production to get across what is happening.

The main characters (we never know their names) have a distinct contrasting relationship, and this kind-of road trip is where they develop something more significant or have personal revelations, but it never quite gets there: the characters mostly just talk past each other, and never quite click. The acting isn’t all that great, and the audio dubbing is noticeably not synched at times. The guy’s voice is incomprehensible at points, especially when he is trying to explain certain concepts, which makes things even more confusing. There’s a couple of revelatory scenes, but they are few and far between. There’s a variety of effects and animations, but the green screen effects in a lot of the scenes are pretty bad. There’s also a lot of music and sounds which are poor renditions or changed just enough to avoid infringing on any copyright, combined with the references to other sci-fi franchises packs in quite a lot, but nothing that ever really goes beyond a one-liner to a more substantial payoff.

Manifest Destiny Down: Spacetime is an ambitious blend of tricky concepts, references and stoner humour that tries to present itself as absurdist, but has nowhere near the expertise behind the camera required to balance everything it is trying to juggle. You can tell there’s some effort to incorporate the ideas of quantum physics into the storyline, but it’s never properly realised. There’s some small good moments, but this is nowhere near as smart or strong as it wants to be.