ZarinoWatches
Lifetime Total
5+
IMDb Member
17 years
Reviews
LOLA (2022)
Blair Witch meets Primer meets Iron Sky
In late-1930s England, two sisters invent a machine that can pick up radio and TV broadcasts from the future. After using the machine-"LOLA"-to make money from horse races, they turn it towards Britain's war effort, with disastrous consequences.
While it's impressive how much the creators managed to do with a limited budget (and under COVID lockdown conditions!), the film does still suffer as a result. No amount of After Effects keyframing can make the altered archive footage look convincing, and despite a lot of effort being put into how the black and white footage looks, the obvious visual mismatch between "new" archive footage and "original" still dragged me out of the moment. We hit a low point when they started photoshopping Adolf Hitler into various scenes in the final act. Surely there must have been a better way to tell that part of the story, without painting yourself into a corner that is so hard to pull off convincingly on such a small budget?
The film suffers, too, from the same problem that many "found footage" films face - how to justify why the footage was filmed the way it was filmed, at the time, by people who didn't expect it to be found. As always with this genre of film, you have to suspend your disbelief a bit, I guess, but again, I was drawn out of the action more than a few times, when I found myself asking "who is meant to be holding the camera right now?" (eg: the sequence near the end, with Tom apparently walking, alone, down a corridor) or "why are they filming this?" If you set yourself up with this conceit, you have to follow it through. LOLA tries, but ultimately, I think, fails.
More frustrating, though, was the pacing. It was a brave decision to have so much of the development and backstory of the "LOLA" machine occupy only the first 5 minutes of the film. But that hypercompression at the start leaves us with a lumpy, bumpy ride over the rest of the runtime. The wine-soaked hanging out in the house, the tedious romantic scenes around a campfire, the "resistance" headquarters, it all just felt a bit aimless, and I must admit, I found myself browsing reviews and the film's Wikipedia page more than a few times.
(Compare with, say, Primer, another super low-budget indie time travel flick, which really takes its time telling the story of the invention, and the inventors - an approach that suits the low budget well, because you can focus on the small stuff, rather than suddenly having to fill 60 minutes of your film with a whole alternate universe.)
Ultimately, LOLA feels like a smart, 15-minute short, stretched out to 80 minutes. I'd love to see that short. I bet it would be awesome.
While it's impressive how much the creators managed to do with a limited budget (and under COVID lockdown conditions!), the film does still suffer as a result. No amount of After Effects keyframing can make the altered archive footage look convincing, and despite a lot of effort being put into how the black and white footage looks, the obvious visual mismatch between "new" archive footage and "original" still dragged me out of the moment. We hit a low point when they started photoshopping Adolf Hitler into various scenes in the final act. Surely there must have been a better way to tell that part of the story, without painting yourself into a corner that is so hard to pull off convincingly on such a small budget?
The film suffers, too, from the same problem that many "found footage" films face - how to justify why the footage was filmed the way it was filmed, at the time, by people who didn't expect it to be found. As always with this genre of film, you have to suspend your disbelief a bit, I guess, but again, I was drawn out of the action more than a few times, when I found myself asking "who is meant to be holding the camera right now?" (eg: the sequence near the end, with Tom apparently walking, alone, down a corridor) or "why are they filming this?" If you set yourself up with this conceit, you have to follow it through. LOLA tries, but ultimately, I think, fails.
More frustrating, though, was the pacing. It was a brave decision to have so much of the development and backstory of the "LOLA" machine occupy only the first 5 minutes of the film. But that hypercompression at the start leaves us with a lumpy, bumpy ride over the rest of the runtime. The wine-soaked hanging out in the house, the tedious romantic scenes around a campfire, the "resistance" headquarters, it all just felt a bit aimless, and I must admit, I found myself browsing reviews and the film's Wikipedia page more than a few times.
(Compare with, say, Primer, another super low-budget indie time travel flick, which really takes its time telling the story of the invention, and the inventors - an approach that suits the low budget well, because you can focus on the small stuff, rather than suddenly having to fill 60 minutes of your film with a whole alternate universe.)
Ultimately, LOLA feels like a smart, 15-minute short, stretched out to 80 minutes. I'd love to see that short. I bet it would be awesome.