At exactly 22:10, an interestingly dressed man bursts into a diner somewhere in Los Angeles: under his plastic raincoat, from which various pipes and hoses protrude, you can see circuit boards wrapped in bundles of wires, sensors, and microcontrollers. This is roughly how users of the international computer network "FIDOnet" imagined a hacker in the mid-nineties.

Nevertheless, something tells us (and the diner's patrons) that he's not quite a hacker. Perhaps the bracelet with a timer on his wrist. Possibly also a detonator in his hand.

The man swiftly relieves the public of their cell phones and announces that he is not a suicide terrorist, but a time traveler from the future. In the future, as usual, things are not great: some artificial intelligence has gone rogue and finally oppressed humanity. The man's task is to assemble a team from the people at the tables to save the world. By the way, he has tried this 117 times already, and none of the combinations of guests have worked out as needed. If it doesn't work this time, he'll press the "detonator" button (actually a time machine), return to 22:10, and try again.

Such a mix of "Groundhog Day" and "The Terminator." But with one important difference - if in films like "Groundhog Day," "Edge of Tomorrow," "Source Code," "Palm Springs," "The Gun Day," and so on (yes, I've watched them all, I love this genre) the plot revolves around the hero's progression in his endless "live-die-repeat" cycle, here the events unfold within a single cycle. And since screen time needs to be filled, it's filled with the backstories of the characters in the current team assembly.

The idea is good, the execution questionable. All the flashbacks here are barely tolerable Luddite satire in the vein of not-so-successful episodes of "Black Mirror." Social networks zombify children. Cloning is a so-so idea. Video games replace reality for people. That is, literally a screen adaptation of the meme "Old man (in this case, director Gore Verbinski) yells at cloud." Okay, boomer.

Although both these segments and the film as a whole are largely carried by humor and self-irony. "Humanity has made mistakes before, take Hitler for example. Or Segways." The parents' conversation about cloning is something supernatural; you feel both amused, scared, and cringey at the same time.

By the way, this formula successfully extends to the entire film. Funny, a little scary, sometimes (more often than you'd like) cringey. However, it definitely deserves a watch. "The Terminator" was about the fear of machines. Now we have a new fear - perhaps the problem is not the machines themselves, but who they learn from. So, all that's left for us is to live in the damned world we ourselves created.

#watched_a_movie