Radius (film): A very unique plot that is unfortunately ruined by bad acting and a worse script

11 months ago

When they are able to do it well, I think that science fiction is probably my favorite type of film. I have always enjoyed Sci-fi but unfortunately for every excellent film in that genre that exists, there are a dozen turds. it is a tough genre to tackle and even though many people try really hard and even end up having massive budgets, they fail more often than they succeed.

I went into this knowing nothing about it other than the fact that it was sci-fi and rated near 7/10 on IMDB. Everything that happened after that was a surprise to me.

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I'm going to do my best to avoid spoilers but if you prefer to go into a film completely blind and knowing nothing about it, just know that I think this film has quite a lot of good aspects about it and is worth seeing for sci-fi fans and perhaps others as well.

We begin the story with a guy exiting a crashed vehicle on the side of the road. He is mildly injured but after attempting to walk away from the scene of the accident he tries to flag down a car to help him only to have the car turn on their turn signal to pull over and then nearly run him over as this car also crashes into the ditch, but slowly.

When he opens the car door to see what has happened and why they crashed he finds that the woman has her eyes glazed over with grey color and she is dead. He then calls 9-1-1 to report the incident and when they ask who he is and where he is he doesn't know the answer to either of these questions. His memory has been wiped. Soon after, a bird flies nearby and crashes on top of the car that just crashed.

He looks at his own ID card and finds out his name is Liam Hartwell as well as his address. Since he has no idea where he is and no recollection of anything (except how to speak English of course) he carries on down the road to a diner, only to walk inside and see that everyone in the diner is dead in the same fashion that the woman in the car that just crashed is.

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As he is leaving the diner a truck pulls up and crashes into the other cars and the driver has the same thing going on with him. Eyes glazed over and dead.

He is able to get a map and find out where his house is using his driver's license and takes someone else's car to get there. When he arrives he has no idea about this house although it is evident that it is his when he breaks in because there are pictures of him on the walls.

Conveniently, the story of these strange deaths is on the news and there is talk about it being some sort of airborne weapon, and terrorism is suspected. Fearing that the news is true, he begins to seal up the house with tape to prevent any of whatever this airborne agent is from getting inside. It is at that time that he spots a farmer at his truck and Liam attempts to shout at the farmer to "go home and that it is not safe outside." The farmer, being unable to hear him approaches Liam's house and as soon as he gets to a certain distance, the farmer immediately drops dead in the same fashion that the others did.

It is at this point that we the audience come to find out that it is actually Liam who is killing these people even though he doesn't want to and doesn't understand why it is happening.

This is kind of in the trailer so I don't feel so bad for spoiling that, but if you feel as though I have now ruined the film for you then you should have paid attention to my very noticeable spoiler alert at the beginning of this.

Additional characters are introduced including a woman who has the same affliction of Liam and the two of them are able to put together pieces of memory to the point where they can recall that they were in the same car crash together. Hey have no idea who the other person is and there are no pictures of her in Liam's house so this new information isn't terribly helpful. All that Liam knows is that unlike other people and creatures that he has gotten close to, this woman doesn't die by being in proximity to him. When a dog approaches them while they are talking, we notice that it, unlike the other people and animals that have gotten close to Liam, also does not die.

I'm not going to say anymore about that but if you put the title of the film and what I have told you already, you can probably figure out what is going on here.

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The concept of the film is extremely good but unfortunately the script and some of the acting that we can't really fully blame on the actors is really bad. The dialogue in the film is extremely bad and it gets to the point where it is just frustrating to hear the actors talk. I don't know how many times they said "we don't have time for this!" when they definitely did have enough time for this and the conversation they were on the cusp of having with one another would actually solve the riddle of their situation if they were to simply talk about it for a few more minutes.

I get that putting the pieces together is actually very necessary for this film to make it to the obligatory 90 minutes that a film has to be, but it just gets frustrating how bad the dialogue is especially between the two main characters who are played by Diego Klattenhoff and Charlotte Sullivan, two actors that I have never heard of before.

The budget of this film is a secret as far as I can tell but there isn't much in the way of special effects in this movie so I would imagine it was made on a shoestring budget and therefore they had to employ rather unknown actors in order to make it happen. I can all but guarantee that you haven't seen or heard of everyone in the film and most of them don't even have a wiki or even a picture on IMDB.

Should I watch it

I really enjoyed it and found it to be one of the more original concepts in the science fiction department in quite some time. That being said, the bad acting and terrible script might be too annoying for some people. Sometimes I can enjoy this sort of thing because well, not everyone can afford world class screenwriters for their projects. I know that I remained interested throughout the entire duration of the film and was very glad that I had seen it once it was over. It was so good in my mind that I knew that whatever I watched next (it was a 2 movie night for me) was going to be something I was going to be let down by, and this ended up being true.

I thought the films was definitely worth seeing but I realize that I am biased because I am such a huge fan of sci-fi. If you are not, I think you might not enjoy this movie nearly as much as I did. Therefore I am going to ignore my biases and just give it a straight rating of maybe. It currently has a 7/10 on IMDB and a 93% fresh rating on RT, but only from 15 reviews.