Mike McCahill 

Comet review – phoney-baloney sci-fi indie romcom

One-dimensional LA guy meets kooky one-dimensional gal during a meteor shower, enabling a parallel-time relationship in this laborious, futile film
  
  

Emmy Rossum and Justin Long in Comet
Gabby, self-conscious dialogue … Emmy Rossum and Justin Long in Comet. Photograph: Allstar/IFC Films

A sense of laborious, futile strain comes off this phoney-baloney indie, which looks and sounds very much like an attempt to fashion a more amenable (and thereby saleable) version of Shane Carruth’s puzzle pictures. Nerdy LA guy (Justin Long) meets kooky Deschanel type (Emmy Rossum) amid a meteor shower that cues cutaways to this relationship’s progression across parallel universes; out of this rip in the space-time continuum, there tumbles a lot of gabbily self-conscious dialogue, and characters who – wherever they are, whatever they’re doing – remain stubbornly monodimensional. Ninety minutes in a branch of Comet would throw up greater insight into the human condition.

 

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