Determinism is a micro-budget thriller pitting an immigrant college student against the harsh realities of life and crime. To start off, Determinism has decent cinematography and camera movements that make scenes enjoyable and interesting to watch but the acting and poor audio in this film brings it down. The script here is more than likely something that looked better on paper than it did on film. The dialog is really sub-par, one scene in particular that kills me is a scene in a pool hall between our two lead characters. They're playing pool and talking in a teenage angst tone, it makes the audience wonder whether or not these are college students or not. The names of the characters are hard to keep track of even after each of them gets their own intro via a poorly constructed knockoff version of Facebook profiles that all say pretty much the same thing about themselves. The point of a film is to have contrasting characters that your leads can benefit off of. The film itself doesn't create that, it puts the audience in one bad scene after another with rich college kids trying to play drug dealers on a sleepy college campus. It turns out to be laughable. Despite these amateur mistakes, there is a storyline to be had here, it is just never touched upon in any remotely artistic way possible. Overall, Determinism is a micro-budget indie thriller that had the right intentions going into it but it still fails to bring anything remotely new or interesting to the table. It suffers from poorly written dialog, miscast actors and misguided direction. If you want to check this film out, it is on Netflix streaming or you can rent it on Amazon or iTunes.
