ARQ (2016) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Time is on my side.

You wouldn’t know it from the title, but ARQ is a time travel film. It explores a new aspect of time loop films with a small and intimate cast. Quite a departure from the many big action films of this year. It also helped demonstrate that streaming platforms were a viable alternative to mainstream cinema releases, for good or for ill.

First Impressions

This trailer shows a man waking up next to his wife just before two masked intruders break into their home. The two are dragged into what appears to be a basement and asked questions about an “arc” before eventually being shot. The man reawakens the same morning with no gunshot wound, just as things happen all over again. In the various repeated loops, he begs his wife to remember, which she eventually does. But just what is ARQ, and why is it causing this time loop?

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

In a near-future world, Ren (Robbie Amell) awakens next to a woman in bed. Two men burst into the room and drag him out. He fights with them, falling down a flight of stairs, snapping his neck. Ren awakens, again, just as he had before, with a strange sense of deja vu. The men, Father (Gray Powell), Brother (Jacob Neayem), and a third, Sonny (Shaun Benson), tie him and his girlfriend, Hannah (Rachael Taylor), up in the garage by a strange spinning lathe. They are looking for Ren’s scrip, and give the couple a few moments while they go and eat apples in the kitchen. Ren manages to escape from the restraints, and he and Hannah sneak through the house. A noise attracts the men, and Ren is shot.

Ren awakens a third time. Things progress as they had before, with him and Hannah being tied up in the garage. Ren explains that he believes the ARQ (pronounced ‘Arc’), the spinning lathe device, is causing a time loop and only he can remember what has come before. He makes a plan with Hannah to gas the abductors with cyanide, but when he returns, he finds Hannah talking with the abductors as her peers, and he realizes he’s been duped. In fact, she works with them as part of the Bloc, a rebel group opposed to the corporate Torus company, where Ren used to work (and where he took the ARQ from). They force Ren to open the safe and take his scrips. Hannah leaves, promising they don’t hurt civilians, but then Sonny kills Ren.

On this awakening, Ren refuses to release Hannah from the restraints, knowing she is working with the men. She explains her torture after being kidnapped by Torus, hating Ren for letting her go. He promises he tried to find her and offers her the ARQ. But when he later reneges on the deal, Ren and Hannah scuffle, and she accidentally kills him with the gun. On this awakening, the fifth time, Hannah remembers what has come before. Sonny killed her shortly after she shot Ren. Ren realizes that the loops are only lasting three hours, fourteen minutes, and fifteen seconds, and tells her they need to be in control before turning off the ARQ. Sonny kills Hannah, revealing he’s a secret Torus agent, before also killing Ren.

On the sixth iteration, Hannah takes control early on, trying to warn her Bloc boyfriend Father (aka Grimm) about Sonny. But Sonny kills Father and Brother, before they can take control. Ren and Hannah kill Sonny in retaliation, but a wounded Brother ends up killing Ren instead. The next loop, Sonny immediately kills Father and Brother, now realizing what is going on. Hannah argues with Ren that he should give the ARQ to the Bloc so they can fight against Torus, but he doesn’t believe anyone needs this much power. Ren notices that the longer the ARQ runs, the faster time seems to go. While looking for Sonny in the house, he is surprised when the dead body of Cuz (Adam Butcher) stands up, with Sonny having switched places. Ren commits suicide by shocking himself on the machine, taking Sonny with him.

On the eighth trip, Sonny immediately saves Cuz from initially being electrocuted on the ARQ. Cuz is his partner from Torus. They then kill the Father and Brother, taking control. Ren locks them in the garage and deploys the cyanide gas, killing them. He and Hannah return to shut down the ARQ, continuing their argument about the morality of using the ARQ in a war. Hannah steps into a puddle of blood and is electrocuted, having been laid as a trap before Sonny died. Ren experiences the end of the loop and wakes up in his bedroom that morning for the ninth time. This time, Hannah and Ren are captured by Sonny, who attempts to torture Hannah for the password to shut down the ARQ.

Ren causes a power outage, allowing him and Hannah to escape outside the house, where they discover a petrified boundary in a circle around the house, indicating the limit of the ARQ’s range. Cuz searches for them, singing a Christmas tune, which Hannah reveals is the same one her torturer sang while she was in Torus custody. They set Cuz on fire and confront Sonny. Ren kills the Torus agent, but not before he calls in ZMP backup. Ren tells Hannah that she should take the ARQ for the Bloc, before discovering that there’s a problem. Every nine loops contains an error, which starts the entire process over again. They begin to make a video warning their past selves about Sonny and the loops, when a robotic Torus drone enters, killing them both. Hannah starts awake in the bedroom that morning, breathing heavily.

“Those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – The Pope

History in the Making

After a series of big-budget releases, ARQ (pronounced ‘Arc’) is a refreshing change of pace. It’s a quieter character piece with only five primary characters and one location. It was the first, and so far, only film by director Tony Elliott. Primarily known for his work on writing episodes of the television series Orphan Black and his own series Trickster, Elliot wrote this script on spec. The strength of this screenplay was what helped secure his job on Orphan Black. ARQ was not the first direct-to-Netflix film, that being Beasts of No Nation in October 2015, but it was the first sci-fi film to be produced and released directly through the streaming service. It paved the way for dozens of other smaller, esoteric sci-fi films to get made and seen in a market where they might not have been available in theaters.

The film stars Robbie Amell and Rachel Taylor, two genre actors who may be familiar to audiences. Amell, the cousin of actor Stephen Amell (Arrow, Heels), had his breakout in The Duff (2015) and has appeared in a mix of film and television roles. Viewers may know him from playing Fred in the 2009 and 2010 made-for-TV Scooby Doo films, or from his sci-fi and superhero roles in The Tomorrow People, The Flash (as Firestorm), or his most recent series, Upload. Earlier in 2016, he appeared in a short film called Code 8. This superhero/sci-fi film would be expanded to a feature-length movie in 2019 and would also be released directly to Netflix. Taylor is an Australian actress who got her start in lower-budget horror and sci-fi films, has a moderate role in Transformers. She had more prominent roles in the TV shows 666 Park Avenue and Crisis, as well as the Marvel Netflix superhero shows, primarily Jessica Jones.

Genre-fication

Of the myriad of time travel films available to watch, only a small portion of them are time loop films. These are more than just simple time travelling to a future or past destination. They are films that contain characters living the same sequence of events over and over again. ARQ creates a unique version of this subgenre with solid logic and a minimum of technobabble. Some classic examples of the time loop paradox include Groundhog Day, Predestination, Edge of Tomorrow, and Source Code. All present the events in distinct ways. Groundhog Day is not really a sci-fi film, and presents the protagonist reliving the same day over and over again until he achieves enlightenment and respect for others. Predestination is not the classic time loop premise with the character reliving the same day. In this film, the character’s life is a complex Möbius strip that has no beginning and no end. The premise of Edge of Tomorrow treats the protagonist’s adventure like a video game, as each death resets the events to the last “save point.” Source Code differentiates itself by using the time loops as elements of a branching reality of alternate dimensions.

ARQ takes the genre to the next level by creating a loop within a loop. It begins quickly, showing that there’s a time loop occurring whenever Ren dies. Nothing unheard of, so far. There’s the added confusion, for the characters and audience, about what is causing this paradox. Once the reason is discovered, the action moves towards stopping the progression until another problem is discovered. Nine collected loops, which allow the protagonist to grow and evolve as they discover the nature of the paradox, are contained within one set. At the conclusion of the set, the events reset to a base state at the beginning of loop one, seemingly erasing everything to date. Clues, such as the petrified grass around the perimeter of the house, indicate that Ren and Hannah have potentially been trapped in this loop for tens of thousands of iterations, if not longer. The time-travel sets are similar to the failsafe elements of the film Primer, where the characters bring time machines inside the time machines they’re already using, allowing them to have a way to “jump out” of the smaller time travel loops into a larger moment. The end of the film, which features the full reset, has Hannah awakening first instead of Ren. The reasoning is left open to interpretation. It may mean that the new set is going to be different from the previous one, but whether this set allows for an escape, or if it’s just another set in a series of endless sets, is for the audience to decide.

Societal Commentary

The main context of ARQ, outside of trying to figure out what is going on, is the themes of idealism versus pessimism. It seems that Ren, who used to work for Torus, has stolen the ARQ (“stolen”? The providence is unclear) and would rather destroy it than allow Torus or the Bloc to retain it. He believes that the device is too powerful for a corporation to have, even one that is apparently fighting the good fight. Hannah, on the other hand, yearns for the device to be gifted to the Bloc in their fight against injustice and corporations. She argues that the rebels are doing the right thing, and it would help them immeasurably. This is also before they realize the extent of the time bubble. Ren’s argument is that power corrupts, as seen in the excessive means Torus will go to in trying to retrieve the ARQ. Hannah wants to use whatever tool is at her disposal to resist Torus. In the end, Ren concedes that giving her (and the other rebels) the ARQ may be the best thing to do, but mostly due to his love for her.

As is sometimes the case, the character names in sci-fi films add layers of additional meaning or emphasis to the story. Renton is a Scottish or Old English name, but the more familiar form of his name, Ren, is the same as a fundamental concept of Confucianism. It refers to “humaneness, benevolence, or perfect virtue, emphasizing kindness, empathy, and moral conduct in relationships to foster a harmonious society.” These are many of the character traits for Ren in the film. He chooses not to hurt people more than needed and shows kindness and empathy towards Hannah as she recounts her captivity in Torus’s custody. Hannah’s name is a palindrome, a word read the same forwards and backwards. It appears this name was chosen because of the time loop aspect in the film. Other loop-related words include the name of the corporation Ren worked for, Torus (a circular donut-like loop), the code name for Sonny is Oroborus (a loop of a snake eating its own tail), and he contacts “Mobius Common” (an infinite loop with only one side).

The Science in The Fiction

ARQ is an interesting choice to name the film, as it appears to be a name (or acronym) but is not instantly recognisable. It says nothing about the type of film audiences are set to watch, except that it might imply the sci-fi genre. In the film, the ARQ device is defined as the “Arcing Recursive Quine,” which is also an apparent nonsense word. But these words do indicate some idea connected to the perpetual motion device that Ren believes he has. The “arcing” portion probably relates to the powering of the device. We do see the arcing electrical component that kills Cuz and later Ren and Sonny, emitting from the device. “Recursive” indicates the type of implementation. In programming, a recursive program or script is one that calls back on itself while executing, creating a repeatable subroutine. The word “quine” is unique. Like the recursive program, it means “a computer program that prints its own source code as output.” It’s in essence a self-defining program, sometimes also called an Ouroboros program. These words help define the activity of the ARQ as seen in the film, creating some believable backstory to the device.

Each morning, when Ren awakens, he starts a single loop. These loops last for only three hours, fourteen minutes, and 15 seconds, repeating the first five digits of Pi (3.14150), indicating that the loop is cyclical (or like a circle) in nature. These loops stack up into a set of nine recursions, of which the last errors (possibly due to the fact that Ren used the ARQ to shave half the face off Sonny by forcing his head against the spinning lathe). Each set is then, apparently, repeated again and again, for all of eternity. The device also has elements of a perpetual motion machine included in it. As the day wears on, the time seems to move faster and faster as the device works against the entropy of the universe, a breaking of the natural law. If it were such a device, there would be no way of actually stopping it. No device listed as a perpetual motion machine can actually be one, since there is always the loss of energy to the system (as either heat or energy). The paradoxical nature of the device is one of the most interesting aspects of the film.

The Final Frontier

Since 2016, Netflix has made (or acquired) hundreds of other original films to show on its service. Science-fiction films have fared very well in this space. Some of the more interesting ones that have appeared over the last nine years include: Mute (a thematic sequel to Duncan Jones’ Moon), Don’t Look Up (a black comedy about the end of the world), The Adam Project (a Ryan Reynolds time travel flick), They Cloned Tyrone (a social parable with John Boyega and Jaime Foxx), and The Electric State (a big budget film by The Russo Brothers, with Millie Bobbi Brown and Chris Pratt). Robbie Amell would return in Code 8 and its sequel in 2019 and 2024 as two more examples of the genre.

Streaming has been a blessing and a curse for genre films. It has replaced the made-for-TV low-quality, low-budget films, often creating middling quality entertainment (as seen in the sci-fi and horror genres). But it has also allowed thoughtful, niche films to be produced that would never have been made for a theatrical release. It allows competent, independent, and sometimes well-known directors to produce films that might be considered more arthouse fare, without the meddling of a studio trying to homogenize the overall film. ARQ has an independent feel to it and doesn’t get bogged down in large set pieces or dramatic action moments. It has a relatively simple story, with a unique twist at the end, that gets in and does what it does, without repeating itself. Even though it repeats itself.

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