A Life You Could Have Lived • Dark Matter Film Review

"Are you happy with your life?" If someone asked me that question and then offered me a whole new world where I have everything I wanted and never had, it would be a tempting offer, really. But as the film series Dark Matter portrayed, it may not be exactly what I imagine it to be. And man, I sure missed watching shows about alternate realities.

Pause for a minute and think... Imagine living out one of your childhood ambitions you probably long forgot about by now. The one where I wanted to be a pilot and then an astronaut at some point, for example, that I gave up on when I first heard some news about a plane crash—I'd have studied aerospace engineering or something and would someday land on Mars. I'd have made even more different choices than I did in reality and be living an entirely alternate life. Such is what Dark Matter is about.

A man is abducted into an alternate version of his life. Amid the mind-bending landscape of lives he could've lived, he embarks on a harrowing journey to get back to his true family and save them from a most terrifying foe: himself. _{~ Google}

Let's talk about the story a bit. You see, this really isn't a new idea. Hardly are there purely original ideas, but what matters, especially in this film, is the delivery. What stood out for me was how everything was built on the principle of superposition, a physics phenomenon. I was naturally drawn to it, as these scifi concepts excite me. Interestingly, though, there wasn't that much "science jargon" and technicalities in the show, and the best part of it all were the thrills and drama.

The first few scenes weren't that exciting because I had already known from a spoiler what was going on. Thereafter, though, things began to ramp up a bit as it got wilder. The film very well explored "what could have been." And I thought it was fascinating, especially from Jay's point of view, the main character.

Multiple realities. Right. I don't remember many of them there were in the film, but they were the most novel thing in the film for me, as many of the experiences in them were just surreal. There was one utopia version that I would have liked to live in myself.

Through the film, as nice as it mostly felt, something was a bit off to me. Who I expected to be a major villain in the film—if not the main one—had almost no significance for most of it. I like to think that there would have been more tension if that had not been the case. But it was alright regardless, you know.

Something I'd like to mention were the subtle connections to similar films. There were at least two instances. If you haven't seen It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Three Body Problem (2024), I'll tell you for free that they also had something like alternate realities in their stories. Since the connections to this film weren't obvious, I'll say to you that a cinema had It's a Wonderful as it's Now Showing, and then there was a massive version (like a statue) of the silver VR headsets they wore in Three Body Problem.

I indulge you to enjoy my film reviews on It's a Wonderful Life and Three Body Problem and see if you have some more films to check out—if you haven't already seen them, of course.

Oh, and I have to talk about the film's intro. I couldn't leave that out. But I think you'd really understand and perhaps appreciate it more when you see it yourself. It was very well done, to say the least. The somewhat eerie yet intruiging music plus the stop-motion video deserves applause.

If I could pick one thing from the film, it's the lesson that we create the life we live by the choices we make, and that you sometimes don't fully realize the value of what you've until you lose it. If you've gotten this far already and this film sounds like something you'd like, then do indulge yourself in the binge-worthy series. There's only one season for now, by the way.

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_{Images in this post are from the film}