Triangle (2009) follows Jess (Melissa George), Greg (Michael Dorman), Sally (Rachel Carpani), Downey (Henry Nixon), Heather (Emma Lung), and Victor (Liam Hemsworth) as they go on a boat trip.
About 15 minutes in, Downey asks, “Is that normal?” while pointing at a fauxminous CGI cloud and accompanying CGI lightning. Well, that depends on your definition of “normal.” Unfortunately, slipshod VFX has become the norm rather than the exception.
A sudden storm capsizes the titular boat. Heather is swept away, but the others climb onto the overturned sailboat when the storm clears. A conspicuously computer-generated ocean liner called the Aeolus approaches, and they board it. Wrecked by a shoddy visual effect, saved by another — how poetic.
On board, they find a photograph of the selfsame ship and learn that “Aeolus was the Greek God of the winds and the father of Sisyphus, the man condemned by the Gods to the task of pushing a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back down again.” While not a god but a mortal whom Zeus favored, an Aeolus was indeed the keeper of the winds. However, this Aeolus is not the same Aeolus who fathered Sisyphus.
If writer-director Christopher Smith was so eager to name-drop Sisyphus, why didn’t he name the boat the “Sysiphus”? Or better yet, the “Prometheus”? According to my calculations, not only could Sisyphus actually be related to Prometheus (his great-great-grandson), but Prometheus’s punishment, wherein his liver regenerated overnight after being eaten by an eagle the previous day, is closer to what goes on in this movie. More importantly, Prometheus was eventually freed.
Our hapless heroes roam around the ship and, except Jess, get picked off one by one, which thankfully puts an end to their tiresome bickering — until the Aeolus reapproaches the overturned Triangle and new (or old?) versions of the characters reboard the ship. Lather, rinse, repeat, yawn.
If Jess were Prometheus, her friends would be the regenerating liver. Why is there more than one Jess, though? And why does she have no recollection of any of this — which apparently has been going on for a while — other than a sense of deja vu?
Neither Prometheus nor Sisyphus were caught in some sort of hazy time loop. They didn’t go, “gee, this feels oddly familiar” as they were pushing up a rock or having a bird of prey dine on their internal organs. They were fully aware of their situations, which only made their punishments worse. Moreover, when Sisyphus made it to the top of the hill, he didn’t find a bunch of other Sisyphi up there waiting for him. Smith really should have let this Greek myth stuff be subtext.
It appears that Jess is being punished for physically abusing and accidentally killing her autistic son — which, of course, reduces autism to a mere plot device — but what about the others? What did they do to deserve this? Unless they’re not real — you know, like the storm and the ocean liner. If this is Jess’s personal limbo, why does she disappear from the action now and then? Why are there scenes featuring any combination of the other characters when everything should be perceived and experienced from Jess’s point of view? And the answer is, to mislead the audience.
In the end, we know what’s happening and why, and that it will continue to happen ad infinitum. The lingering question mark is, who is really being punished? Jess or the viewers? No time-loop film should conclude with the loop going around again unresolved for the simple reason that that’s not a proper conclusion — what good is a revelation without an epiphany? The only reason to watch Triangle is to see Jess break the cycle; otherwise, it’s as pointless an exercise as, well, you know where I’m going with that.
