"Comet will have you deliberating over its themes, the combination of love and sci-fi and simply whether you like it or not. And sometimes a film that’s worth deliberating over is a film worth watching"

In most stories we hear, in whatever format they may be in, these tales tend to involve love. By 2015 you would have expected the material of the ‘love story’ to have been stretched thin of originality and grown old and overused in theme. Sam Esmail has, however, taken the ‘love story’ and melded it with disorientating themes of science fiction and the importance and fragility of time.

Comet tells the story of two individuals -- one played by Justin Long and the other by Emmy Rossum. They meet and fall in love at a meteor shower after exchanging a few quips, as they stare at each other in silence and (literally) run off together into the night. The film then portrays the course of their six year relationship in time fractals that need to be pieced together like some sort indie-romance mosaic.

The depiction of the characters by both Long and Rossum is successfully portrayed, as they built up a believable chemistry and play their roles with great flare. The characters seem relatable, as I imagine many viewers could identify with the volatility of their relationship and to characteristics of Dell and Kimberly. Both also hold great comedic value, with conversations fuelled by an annoying amount of cynicism and wit.

However, whilst the script has its positive elements, there seems to be many injections of pretention running throughout. At the beginning, it appears intentional, almost as a way of poking fun at the hipster culture that we are all too familiar with, but as the film progresses, the pretention appears to be embedded in the film itself. It works almost as a way for the characters to one-up each other in intelligence that’s followed by a stream of clichéd cultural references: Dali, Freud, M.C Escher etc.

It all becomes slightly grating and leans towards the superficiality that can sometimes be the downfall of an indie film. Aside from the sci-fi element, the character plot is formulaic, with the relationship between the pessimistic, emotionally inhibited man and the subtly sexy woman who is a conflicting combination of stable and unhinged. We’ve seen it in 500 Days of Summer and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; both films that hold resemblances to Comet.

The plot flits uncomfortably from fragment to fragment, in a non-chronological order, perhaps to defy the outcome of ‘time based art’. Amongst the myriad of stoner talks and philosophising, there are some jewels in the script that are poignant, especially the discussion about time. This moment highlights the control time has, not just over our day-to-day movements, but over our emotions and how our existence relies on time. This scene brought structure, to what looks like an intentionally structure-less narrative as it explores how difficult it would be to make sense of the world without time.

Comet will have you deliberating over its themes, the combination of love and sci-fi and simply whether you like it or not. And sometimes a film that’s worth deliberating over is a film worth watching.