In the Shadow of the Moon (2019)
Directed by Jim Mickle
In 1988, Philadelphia police officer Thomas "Locke" Lockhart, hungry to become a detective, begins tracking a serial killer whose crimes defy scientific explanation. When the killer mysteriously resurfaces nine years later, Locke's obsession with finding the truth threatens to destroy his career, his family, and possibly his sanity.
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5 films that influenced In the Shadow of the Moon
What critics say influenced In the Shadow of the Moon
The film mixes the procedural crime elements of David Fincher’s Zodiac with a time-travel conceit that nearly mirrors James Cameron’s The Terminator , all in a much lower-tech, ground- level way.
It mixes the procedural crime elements of David Fincher’s Zodiac with a time-travel story that follows the outlines of James Cameron’s The Terminator , and leaves us with tormented characters trying to survive and say something profound under the spell of the blood moon.
But when all that ambition is in service of a banal, ill-advised twist, I can’t appreciate it, no matter how much I want to love a Terminator / Zodiac mashup.
After the film’s Fantastic Fest premiere, director Jim Mickle said he wanted it to do for Philadelphia what David Fincher’s Zodiac did for San Francisco.
Merging a procedural about an obsession with a single case like “Zodiac” with sci-fi elements is a clever idea for a B-movie but “In the Shadow of the Moon” isn’t fun enough to qualify as that.
But Mickle and the film's screenwriters hold back the inevitable reveal for so long, aiming for a Zodiac -like scope and asking the viewer to be invested in Lockhart's personal journey, that you'll likely start to lose interest down the stretch.
In its best moments, In the Shadow of the Moon does occasionally bring to mind the genre-splicing work of Okja director Bong Joon-Ho, particularly his 2003 crime procedural Memories of Murder .
The film by director Jim Mickle (of the TV show Hap and Leonard and the fairly good thriller Cold in July, with Michael C. Hall and Sam Shepard, RIP) and writers Gregory Weidman and Geoffrey Tock (who worked on the TV show version of Bradley Cooper’s Limitless and the amazingly good-bad CBS show Zoo, about animals going wild!) begins in 2024, when we see the aftermath of a gigantic explosion in downtown Philadelphia.
In the Shadow of the Moon es una pelicula que funciona, pero no con las expectativas que se pronosticaban.El guión está firmado por Gregory Weidman y Geoffrey Tock, ambos procedentes del campo de las series de televisión (trabajaron juntos en “Limitless” y “Zoo”).
He carries In the Shadow of the Moon capably, even when the narrative leaps forward years at a time and buries him under an insane hobo beard and Mickey Rourke-in- Barfly grease-mop.
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It’s sort of like the exploding-head scenes in David Cronenberg’s “Scanners” without the serious wow factor.