(Lisa recently discovered that she only has about 8 hours of space left on her DVR!  It turns out that she’s been recording movies from July and she just hasn’t gotten around to watching and reviewing them yet.  So, once again, Lisa is cleaning out her DVR!  She is going to try to watch and review 52 movies by Wednesday, November 30th!  Will she make it?  Keep checking the site to find out!)

I recorded 400 Days off of the SyFy channel on November 6th.  Apparently, it got a very brief theatrical run earlier in the year.  Yeah, I don’t remember it either…

400 Days stars Dane Cook as an astronaut!?  Oh my God, that sounds like a formula for intergalactic, kinda-edgy-but-not-really wackiness!  Oh, and this film features Dane and three other astronauts locked in a simulator for 400 Days!?  Wow, I bet Dane will be driving them crazy with all sorts of wacky frat boy antics!

Well, no, not quite.  400 Days is actually an extremely serious film, one that doesn’t seem to have much use for what the rest of us would call humor.  In anticipation of future exploration of space, NASA arranges for four astronauts to be put into an underground bunker for 400 days.  The idea is that they’ll be able to study the effects of complete isolation and confinement but, naturally, things soon start to get weird.

For instance, Dvorack (that would be Dane Cook’s role) is this alpha male who is kind of a jerk and he’s always throwing his weight around and giving orders and looking down on his more scientifically inclined colleagues.  At one point, Dvorack stares at himself in a mirror and imagines his face falling apart.  AGCK!

And then there’s Bug (Ben Feldman), who is an emotionally unstable scientist who is still struggling to deal with being separated from his son.  (His son may be dead.  There’s a scene in a hospital but I’m not sure if it was a flashback or a hallucination or what.)  Bug is soon locking himself away in his room and drawing a maze on the wall.  Maybe he’s mad because everyone keeps calling him Bug.  It’s not a flattering nickname.

And then there’s Captain Cooper (Brandon Routh) and Dr. McTier (Caity Lotz).  Cooper and McTier used to go out but then they broke up two weeks before the start of the experiment.  Wow, that sounds like a formula for awkward relationship comedy!  Just wait until Dane Cook starts flirting with McTier and snarkily challenging Cooper’s authority…

Oh wait — sorry.  This is a serious movie.   A very serious movie.

https://twitter.com/ItsMeKarenMarie/status/795099528160575488

Anyway, after about two weeks in the bunker, the four astronauts hear a loud explosion above them.  Has something happened on the outside!?  Or is it just a part of the experiment?

And then, 300+ days later, an emaciated man emerges from an air vent!  Finally convinced that something has happened on the outside, the four astronauts leave the bunker and discover that the Earth is a now a dark and windy place that is covered with dust.  There’s a dilapidated town nearby.  It’s apparently run by a mysterious man named Zell (Tom Cavanagh as the most unlikely war lord since Hugh Grant showed up in Cloud Atlas).

But again — is this real or is this just a part of the experiment?

It’s an intriguing question but I’m going to warn you not to expect an answer.  While I don’t want to spoil the film for anyone, I do feel like I have an obligation to let you know that this film ends on a note of very deliberate ambiguity.  It’s the exact type of ending that tends to get on people’s nerves.  As I watched 400 Days off of my DVR, I did a twitter search to find out what some of my friends thought about this film when it originally aired.

https://twitter.com/ggfletcher/status/795099413098229761

With all that in mind, I will now cautiously admit that I didn’t hate 400 Days.  While I thought the execution left a lot to be desired, I kind of liked the idea behind the film.  The problem with the film’s ending was not that it was ambiguous as much as it hadn’t really earned the right to be ambiguous.  If you’re going to go with an open ending, you have to provide enough clues and details that the audience can still have an opinion about what actually happened after the end credits rolled.  As oppose to something like Inception or Upstream Color, 400 Days didn’t really didn’t build up to its enigmatic conclusion.  Unearned ambiguity just feels like narrative laziness.

That said, I liked the design of the bunker and, as I said before, I liked the idea of watching these four characters trying to figure out what’s real and what’s a hallucination.  Dane Cook did okay with his role, though ultimately he was still just Dane Cook trying to be serious.  However, Brandon Routh and Caity Lotz did well, despite both being saddled with rather underdeveloped roles.

400 Days wasn’t that terrible…