Triangle is an okay attempt of a time-/purgatory-loop mystery story. It shares a lot of similarities with Time Crimes, but ultimately goes more into the direction of Stay. Camera work and direction are quite good and the cast does an ok job. The effects can be bit cheap at times (the bad CGI of the storm and the approaching Ghost Ship), but that's neglectable.
The whole time loop interaction is done well at first, but ultimately the whole story construct turns out to be inconsistent in the end. The movie can't decide what kind of inner logic it wants to follow.
The most obvious interpretation is that the protagonist Jess has mistreated and killed her autistic Son (and herself?) by accident and is now trapped in a purgatory-loop for eternity (like Sisyphus from ancient Greek mythology, who is mentioned aboard the ghost ship that is named after his father Aeolus, and who is punished for cheating death by having to roll a stone up a hill only to watch it roll down over and over again). This is the interpretation I would deem most likely, but there are a number of contradictions to this in the movie.
Two variations of that interpretation would be, that Jess is in a coma (after the car accident) and this is all a dream, or that she just died, but her soul can't accept that and is dreaming up this endless loop until she can make peace with the death of her son and herself and move on to afterlife.
Another possibility would be, that she is actually in some kind of time-loop, caused by the Bermuda triangle (hence the movie title). The ghost ship Aeolus is a cruise ship from the 1930s. But this seems unlikely, and therefore the title may be disappointingly misleading for some viewers.
A very funny interpretation I found in an online comment, that really made me laugh: The whole loop is a scheme of sea gulls who want to take revenge on Jess for killing one of them with the car and also want countless bodies to pile up on the Aeolon on which they can feed.^^
Now let's get to the inconsistencies:
As you can see, this movie really gets you thinking. It's still mostly enjoyable to watch and I would recommend this movie to everyone who loves these kinds of stories. But it isn't as clever as it believes itself to be and can't decide on a consistent inner logic.
The whole time loop interaction is done well at first, but ultimately the whole story construct turns out to be inconsistent in the end. The movie can't decide what kind of inner logic it wants to follow.
The most obvious interpretation is that the protagonist Jess has mistreated and killed her autistic Son (and herself?) by accident and is now trapped in a purgatory-loop for eternity (like Sisyphus from ancient Greek mythology, who is mentioned aboard the ghost ship that is named after his father Aeolus, and who is punished for cheating death by having to roll a stone up a hill only to watch it roll down over and over again). This is the interpretation I would deem most likely, but there are a number of contradictions to this in the movie.
Two variations of that interpretation would be, that Jess is in a coma (after the car accident) and this is all a dream, or that she just died, but her soul can't accept that and is dreaming up this endless loop until she can make peace with the death of her son and herself and move on to afterlife.
Another possibility would be, that she is actually in some kind of time-loop, caused by the Bermuda triangle (hence the movie title). The ghost ship Aeolus is a cruise ship from the 1930s. But this seems unlikely, and therefore the title may be disappointingly misleading for some viewers.
A very funny interpretation I found in an online comment, that really made me laugh: The whole loop is a scheme of sea gulls who want to take revenge on Jess for killing one of them with the car and also want countless bodies to pile up on the Aeolon on which they can feed.^^
Now let's get to the inconsistencies:
- At the end of this incarnation of Jess's loop that we follow through the movie, she has killed her abusive former self and later her son in a car accident. The taxi driver seems to be death/Charon, who offers her to pass over to an afterlife, but she (always) seems to decide to try the loop again, to save her son. But what happened before the very first loop? If the real/original abusive Jess killed herself and her son in that car accident, what sense does the whole boat trip make, since she never experienced that? If only her son died and she went on the trip, how then does she end up in purgatory (the Loop-Jesses on the ship never actually die or kill each other)?
- Why does Jess lose her memory when completing and resetting the overarching loop, and just keeps a vague déjà vu, while after the loop resets on the Aeolon she can remember everything?
- What continues to exist and what disappears with each reset of the loops is very inconsistent as well: the 100s of notes, necklaces, bodies of her killed friends and bodies of the sea gulls before the car accident keep piling up. At the same time though, there seem to be only 3-4 parallel Jesses at work on the Aeolon and only one Jess around her house. Shouldn't there be exactly the same number of Jesses as there are bodies and objects? It would make more sense if the objects would reset with each loop.
- The Aeolon: The first reset of the sub-loop aboard the ship starts with a hanging gramophone record, that seems synched with the looping/stuttering happenings aboard the ship at that moment. Also the clock of Jess is synced with that of the dining hall, but different from that of her friend Greg. In the first loops the food in the dining hall is fresh, later its suddenly rotten. How does this all add up?
- The behavior of Jess: Why is Jess hiding all the time instead of talking to her friends or the other Jesses? Where does the notion that killing everybody will reset the timeline originally come from? Why does she just accept that and goes on a killing spree?
- At one time she actually tries to change something and stops the hooded Jess from shooting the couple. That alternate hooded Jess now takes the couple to Room 237 (nice Shining reference btw. and it's also the address of Jess's house) and stabs the guy. His wife escapes only to end up dying on a pile of bodies of former iterations of herself. The problem here: The Jess we follow, never becomes that alternate hooded Jess that she stops, so where does that Jess come from and what happens to her? She also stops the first Jess from killing the guy with the headwound. What happened to him in this alternate loop?
As you can see, this movie really gets you thinking. It's still mostly enjoyable to watch and I would recommend this movie to everyone who loves these kinds of stories. But it isn't as clever as it believes itself to be and can't decide on a consistent inner logic.