This movie was a breath of fresh air compared to the usual Hollywood/Netflix commercial films, especially for something that's pushed on Amazon Prime.
I really believe the bad average review is caused by the fact that people expected this to be something it's not because of bad distribution and marketing choices.
In fact, Press Play is an anomaly on such streaming platform as Prime Video to begin. Why? Because it has much more in common with indie movies such as Red Rocket or Call be by your name than what you'd expect to see there!
In essence, it's the story of two normal teenagers falling in love with each other; one of them die in a tragic accident and the other try to keep on living. We've heard this story 1000 times.
Where this gets interesting is how the film excites our sense of wonder and romance through the very clever use of magic, taking a supposedly standard item, a cassette player, and turning it into a time machine.
It's therefore not much a sci-fi movie as it is a fantastic movie (as in soft-fantasy, not hard fantasy with dragons and wizards), so I don't even know why it says "sci-fi" in the résumé in the first place.
No, this movie doesn't use it's budget to explore crazy quantum theories;
No, a lot of things in this movie don't "make sense" (and that's okay, it's wrongly classified as a sci-fi movie anyway!);
No, this movie isn't going to fulfill your expectations if you expect time travel to other eras or laser shooting aliens or whatever "hard sci-fi" thing you might think this is going to be.
But what this movie does, it being more human than most. I've read someone who said that the love story was "unmemorable" - I couldn't disagree more.
Characters don't have to be famous, special or idolized for a story to be great. I loved this movie because it's relatable. I loved it because the budget was spent on a perfect cast, gorgeous locations and set design, and just the right amount of VFX, which happens to be very little.
Even the crash scene isn't shown, simply suggested - and it works! It's doing so much with so little :
a little cassette player with the mention "auto-rewind" on it (very clever double-entendre considering it's time-machine function in the movie!), a wall of lost and found tapes in a small record shop, some summer love vibes, some hidden symbols in a wall-painting becoming clearer as the film advance;
whatever budget this had, they did the right choices and told the best story they could.
The photography direction is absolutely gorgeous as well, with beautiful, bright colour schemes, and a beautiful break from the usual bleak images we see all the time.
We got used to insanely fast-paced scenes with crazy drone sequences and VFX every 2 minutes and dark storylines, so much so that we forgot about the importance of slowing down and watching such movie.
We need more movies like this.
The marketing for this movie is a sin, and I truly believe it would've done so much better had it been marketed to the proper audience, because this is not a sci-fi movie, it's a Big Fish 2.0, NOT a "millennial back to the future"...!
Oh and one last thing : please refrain from telling everyone how you hate the soundtrack. While the songs might not be relevant to you personally, it's not about how good they are but the kind of feelings they evoke (which obviously is subjective anyway). So there's a definite generational gap thing going with the music where this is going to appeal to younger audience.
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