Mark Reviews Movies: BLACK OPS

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 11, 2020

By now, we pretty much know that time travel is impossible, if only because no one has ever gotten it "right" in fiction. Black Ops, in which a specialized team from the UK military is haunted by a phantom from a disastrous mission and tries to fix their errors, doesn't get the gimmick right, either, but it doesn't have to. Here, time travel is presented as a nightmare of figuring out what the right thing is but constantly being unable to do it.

This is a rather bleak premise, although it's easier to take because there's also some cleverness accompanying the moral and existential misery. It's also, though, bogged down by Tom Paton's screenplay, in which the gears are both visible and misaligned, and direction, which leans so heavily into a grim aesthetic that the confused and repetitive characteristics of the movie's action are magnified.

On a mission somewhere in a war-torn Eastern European country (where everything is tinted an overwhelming bluish gray), the special ops force has to obtain some documents from a camp and kill anyone there. The team is made up of mostly and transparently disposable characters, waiting to be killed off in order to increase the stakes for the few on whom Paton focuses.

The most important two, perhaps, are Stanton (Shayne Ward), the team leader, and Clarke (Samantha Schnitzler), who executes a civilian prisoner (Julia Szamalek) on Stanton's order and threat. The prisoner offers some enigmatic final words: "Don't go down."

When the team returns to headquarters, the elevator isn't working, so they're forced to take a long flight of stairs. The stairs keep going, and after a while of walking, the team realizes they're stuck. Suddenly, the building starts shaking. Red lights flash, and a deafening alarm echoes in the stairwell.

One of the more expendable members of the team decides to go downstairs to check on the power. Moments later, there's a bloodcurdling yell. The curious soldier staggers up the stairs to warn his comrades and falls dead.

In case it isn't clear, the ghost of the prisoner is waiting for the team below. If anyone descends the stairs or fails to ascend after the noisy warning, the ghost kills the straggler. As the flights below become inaccessible due to darkness and the specter, the team has to keep walking upwards, despite exhaustion and blistering feet.

That's the movie's first gimmick, and it's about as predictable and tedious as it sounds. The team keeps climbing. Someone decides he or she has had enough. The next victim heads downstairs, and the ghost pops into frame to attack. Just as the scenes in the unnamed country are seen through a drably monochromatic filter, the stairwell is a dimly lit locale of concrete-colored uniformity. Paton's use of the space is as restricted as the location itself, and it certainly doesn't help that the filmmaker seems to be re-using the same sections of stairwell and even the same shots (especially the ones of the ghost looking up the stairs with supernatural malice).

Thankfully, Paton realizes that there's only so much that can be done with this setup. That's when we get the real bulk of the story, which has the team finding a doorway that leads them back to the scene of their deadly mission and back in time to the start of the operation. The ghost story, as it turns out, is just an extravagant plot device to ensure that the characters keep returning to the past.

Eventually, Clarke determines that the surviving squad should try to stop her past self from killing the prisoner. Whether this new premise is genuinely inventive or the haunted stairwell story just lulls us into appreciating anything different, this development certainly gives the movie a swift kick of sudden momentum. The team has to figure out how to affect the past without the notice, injuring, or killing of their former selves, and there's a sometimes-exciting sense of discovery in the team's process of trial and error—seeing how their interference changes events, until they run out of time and have to start over again.

Paton's screenplay doesn't focus on the mechanics of time travel (The potential complications and paradoxes are played off as a joke, as one team member, played by Toby Osmond, can only use his favorite movie about time travel as a reference—a movie another important teammate, played by Bentley Kalu, either hasn't seen or can't remember). As the team members argue about what to do—as well as what they should have done—and the torturous nature of their predicament (Another soldier, played by Sophie Austin, experienced actual torture on a flight of stairs when she was captured during a mission), the movie, through dialogue and the plot itself, presents something more along the lines of a morality tale.

It works better in theory than in practice, though. Beyond the obviousness of the screenplay's mechanics and the repetition of the two main plots, the characters of Black Ops are too flimsy and dispensable for their moral and existential crises to have much of an impact.

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