

It’s an actorly choice that may have made sense in rehearsal but detracts mightily from the story. A case in point is Gillan’s impersonal performance-she uses the same halting, unemotional speech patterns that she does as the alien Nebula in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In shying away from conventions, it forgets to replace them with something the viewer can use. It’s okay for a film to have modest aims, but Dual just feels unfinished. Similarly, Trent’s ominous offer to have Sarah pay for her classes with a service that is “mutually beneficial” hints at a feminist underpinning to its dystopian themes, but instead Stearns pays it off in a delightfully innocent way. If you squint, you can see yourself at six playing with a lightsaber. The training sequences in particular feel like something a kid would have dreamed up Trent and Sarah map out a duel in slow-motion with fake handmade weapons. There are no themes explored and no ideas that resonate, only a vague sense of childlike play and imagination that provides the film’s few moments of delight. There is no catharsis-you need emotionally engaging characters for that. I kept expecting something resembling a point to emerge, but Dual turns away from the hard pleasures of cinema. It’s not entirely clear how this prepares her for battle like much in Dual, it’s novel and charming but not particularly impactful. In one of the film’s best scenes, he shows her corpse photos and asks her to guess what they died from. She begins working with low-rent combat trainer Trent ( Aaron Paul), an expert in these duels who teaches her everything from weapons training to violence desensitization.

Her boyfriend is always off on business trips, and she spends her waking hours drinking, eating junk food, and watching porn-an avatar for modern loneliness. Before her diagnosis, she lived a plain and uneventful life.

In Dual, everyone is dispassionate, but especially Sarah.

Without exposition, Stearns paints a terrifying portrait of our future in which emotional closeness is a thing of the past. It’s not just life-and-death decisions that are handled matter-of-factly when her mother ( Maija Paunio) and boyfriend ( Beulah Koale) shockingly choose to keep the clone in their lives, effectively leaving Sarah in total isolation, they do so with no arguments or histrionics. When Sarah receives the news of her illness, she doesn’t cry, and when she is informed of her remission, there’s no rejoicing. I’d like to schedule a consultation,” she says on the phone. They all talk plainly and directly, without affectation or even basic manners. You notice it first in their speaking styles. Instead, its dystopia is relayed through its characters. But writer-director Riley Stearns ( The Art of Self-Defense) isn’t interested in showing off with excessive world-building or big action set pieces. Technically, Dual is dystopian sci-fi, as it’s set in a world of advanced technology coupled with an oppressive justice system.
#Best alien isolation trainer movie
Here is a movie you have not seen before. It’s a lot of information but not too much. We learn all of this in the first few scenes, as we watch Sarah ( Karen Gillan) go through the process, from her initial diagnosis to the scheduling of the duel. But when one such patient goes into remission, her double refuses to be “decommissioned.” In such rare cases, the state mandates a duel to the death, with the winner receiving the prize of continuing to live as the original person. It’s set in a future in which terminally ill humans can purchase clones to replace themselves after death. Dual is a strange movie about a strange world.
