Palm Springs (Max Barbakow, 2020)
Added 2020-11-10 19:38:27 +0000 UTC
Diverting enough, Palm Springs is little more than a concept, and a borrowed one at that. To be fair, it's a bit different from Groundhog Day, in the sense that here there's a b.s. Hawkingesque explanation for the time loop, and it isn't some sort of punishment for being an unpleasant person. This makes Palm Springs more "contemporary," I suppose, and not just because popular physics is besotted with multiverses and time anomalies. The predicament in which Nyles (Andy Samberg) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti) find themselves cannot be undone by "good works," and so the para-Catholic structure of Groundhog Day is replaced with a sort of evangelical Calvinism. For Nyles, nothing matters because he is going to be "born again," and although he gives lip service to morality, he knows that since damnation and grace are exactly the same, nihilism has no real consequences. The only imperative is the avoidance of pain. Sarah's intervention -- comprehend the science and create an equal and opposite reaction -- is, I suppose, Barbakow's rebuke to evangelical self-satisfaction.
