Synchronicity movie review: wormhole of the heart

by MaryAnn Johanson

If you could slap a fedora on Blade Runner — not a cool Indiana Jones sort of fedora, but the sort of fedora that has come to be a signpost of clueless dorky misappropriation of style and attitude — you’d get Synchronicity. A completely ridiculous attempt at a mind-blowing science-fiction drama, this amalgamation of pretentious yet accidental silliness gives us physicist Jim Beale (Chad McKnight), who is, like, a super genius, totally for real, but also put-upon and misunderstood. Because of course he is. Still, someone compares him to Nikola Tesla, he’s that awesome. And he’s just built a wormhole generator, and it probably even works, except his venture-capitalist backer, Klaus Meisner (Michael Ironside: Extraterrestrial) — and why not just hang a sign on the guy that reads “evil asshole” with a name like that — is being a total jerk about the whole thing. And Meisner’s mistress, Abby (Brianne Davis), is in fact so totally hot for Jim that she has even written fan fiction about him (I am not making that up; it’s a thing in the movie)… but still, she has probably been sent by Meisner to mess with him and steal his ideas, because women, amirite? Actual lines of dialogue spoken by Jim: “I should have know that someone as intelligent and beautiful as you, there had to be a catch” and “You must have had ulterior motives to fuck me like you did.” Things and people may or may not go through the wormhole; what happens next is like Primer lite. Very lite. It’s as if writer-director Jacob Gentry took the “it’s a time machine, Napoleon, he bought it online” scene from Napoleon Dynamite and tried to make it Serious, Meaningful, and even Tragic. Gentry gets his dudebro geek freak on even more by aping the look and feel of Blade Runner, all futuristic urban noirscape, as well as the sound: Ben Lovett’s (The Reconstruction of William Zero) score is more than a little Vangelis-esque. It’s all almost the most gloriously laughable bullshit I’ve ever seen.