So I knew going in that this movie had something to do with time manipulation, but I didn’t realize that it was a groundhog day — although in retrospect the slogan/alternate title “Live. Die. Repeat.” should have been a heavy clue.

So it’s in a genre that I like, and it’s got SF trappings, with an alien invasion of Earth, so the movie would have had to be pretty dire for me not to like it… and, thankfully, it’s not.

For the most part, it plays fair with the groundhogging. Like, maybe my biggest objection is that, like other movies in this genre, they cut straight between loops in a given scene. This always feels like a bit of a cheat when that scene is like 12 hours into a loop — it takes a lot of concentration and repetition to get precisely through everything up to that exact point again! — but even more so when, as here, there’s a physical combat stage in between the start of the day and the current scene.

Like, in a real way, playing Super Mario Bros. is a time loop, but just because I managed to get to world 8-1 once (using warps) doesn’t mean I can do it repeatedly and routinely after that. So if I wanted to try something slightly different in 8-1, it would take me not just playing the game all the way back to that point, but playing the game a dozen times, most of which involve dying way before that point.

And obviously, I understand why they don’t show all those iterations, but I feel like the character should be more jaded and frustrated by their second or third time through this scene, given the piles of repetition the editing is hiding. But like I say, I get dramatically why the elisions are just… elided.

Beyond that, I think there were a couple of plot developments that were under-motivated, and I have some quibbles with some of the character relationships (“these two people know each other very well” is true for one of the characters and for the viewer, who has seen them work together in loop after loop… but for the other character, they’re always being introduced for the first time, every time, and dramatic progression really requires finding ways to ignore that).

BUT: I am spending this entire write-up poking at small flaws only because the movie succeeded in sucking me in and making me buy into its premise. It’s a good solid story, and easily recommended to anyone who likes this genre.