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Reviews
Paradox (2010)
Great Concept, Very Poorly Executed
The concept drew me in since pre-production. Mixing our scientific world with an otherwise-identical magical world is such an amazing idea, I felt it could not possibly go wrong. And yet, it did. Horribly wrong.
To begin with: HOW can the writers of such a great concept come up with such cheesiness? Throughout the movie, there was some seriously groan-worthy dialogue, and by the end I was almost suicidal from the overload of cheese. Even in the beginning, Helen's statement "I only have a Master's in Necromancy from Harvard" was probably the worst way possible to set up the similarities and differences between this magical world and our own. And Detective Nault watching CSI once in our world and suddenly cracking the case in his using CSI techniques? Seriously, what the hell were these writers on? On top of that, many things just seemed out of place and continuity-wise just didn't make sense. For example, they spend so much time leading up to a sex scene between Sean and Lenore, but that scene never happens. Also, Churchill notes that our world has too much iron, which inhibits magical energy, yet Lenore has no trouble bringing a stone minotaur to life with a single lipstick aleph. And then, what really annoyed me: Lenore and and Sean barely know each other, especially if we just take the scenes we've seen as their entire relationship, yet that doesn't stop the editors from adding a montage of them as if they've known each other for years.
Lastly, a concept of universe-swapping should have more...well, universe-swapping. They spend only 10 minutes of the hour-and-a-half film in the other universe, and besides the aforementioned ridiculous CSI thing, there was little point to the trip anyway.
Overall, if a better writer and production team decide to reboot this and execute it much better, I'm on board. But as it stands, no. No, no, no. This was terrible.