Zero Contact

A strange film. Shame Mr Hopkins put hsi good name to this "film".

Save yourself the time and the mental taxation by trying to follow what is going on.

A movie made during the Covid pandemic by first time director Rick Dugdale. If he had not secured the services of two time Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins, I doubt I would have been watching it.

Hopkins plays mysterious megalomaniac Finley Hart. He has died but he left his final project unfinished. 'The Quantinuum Initiative.'

This project was a source of controversy which led to a family feud within his company and left him ousted.

Now a group of people have been summoned for a video chat where they need to enter a secret code.

Easier said than done as they are being killed off by an intruder. One person in the video chat is Hart's estranged son who is suddenly contacted by a familiar face.

Although the makers claim that the movie was shot in multiple countries. It was in effect shot on smartphones in living rooms or offices or someone's backyard. There is a glimpse of the Burj Khalifa from one participant's window.

This is a zoom movie with the action taking place on computer screens. The plot is silly as all manners of excuses are summoned up not to punch in the codes as the killer looms nearby.

Hopkins pops up here and there with some musings about life, even playing the piano at one point. He manages to deliver some charisma that the rest of the movie is lacking.

A movie made with "Zero Contact" between the actors. The first (and hopefully last) Covid19-movie. This is not a movie, this is a replay of saved internet zoom sessions with so called actors which do their trick before their laptop camera (or something). It gets annoying within 10 minutes. One starts to ask "What am I viewing?" Then at some point I called it a day, waste of time to watch. An experiment gone bad (i'm referring to the movie, not the story which is basically near absent). To summarize: please skip this one, not worth any attention.

Starts off with a long, boring philosophical soliloquy by Anthony Hopkins. Once that tedium is over the movie begins and gains a little traction with 5 people being summoned to a critical conference call, each taking it from their home. We learn that they are being asked to sign off on finalizing a highly secret and scary futuristic machine. With that little bit of interesting dilemma, the movie showed promise. But it goes downhill in nearly every respect. Featuring Anthony Hopkins, I figured it had to be good. Five loosely connected individuals all of whom had a close relationship with a tech genius (Hopkins) who recently died. Quickly we learn that they are brought together to provide the go-ahead of a cutting edge device that can lead to teleportation. The project poses risks to the continued survival of the Earth. But it's not clear if turning it on fully or not will be the trigger for a cataclysmic doomsday. Meanwhile there are strange happenings during the call and we suspect there is a 6th menacing participant. The whole movie occurs as part of a few one-on-one video calls and the majority of the movie takes place on a video conference and the audience gets views of covert texting or calling discretely between participants on the video . This novel style is the only "edge" of interest. The movie never really pulls together, and the cutting edge secret project is barely discussed. It does wrap up, but it makes little sense. Not only does the main conference call gets old fast, but the side communications often add no value whatsoever. The sets are idiotic. Even though each person was among the closest business associate with the dead top 5 tech billionaire, they all appear (except for the son that moved into the billionaire home) to have homes that are nice but not "high end." It's as if while the billionaire makes a $100+ million a year,, his closest righthands make a few hundred thousand.a year. Not likely!

I did find the concept interesting, and I felt that the acting was reasonably good. Sadly, the things I hate on every Zoom, FaceTime, Teams, or other virtual meeting existed here. If I had been able to mute certain participants at certain times, I may have made it through the movie, but the quiet clacking drove me nuts. I had to tap out.

The rest of the elements brought on by the pandemic existed as well. The isolation, the loss of "safety in numbers," the inability to respond to emergencies because you're all in very different locations, and the constant intrusion into our lives of cameras were all highlighted in the film.