If "slick" was all you needed to give a movie a high rating, FREQUENCIES would be right up there with the characters in the film who have the highest frequency numbers, because it is that -- as slick as KY Jelly. It has a clean, beautifully photographed look, attractive actors and an engaging love story that is initially quite involving, drawing us into the story very early on -- seems like an interesting, even quirky story unfolding....initially.
It opens with the easily understood and familiar premise, a kind of caste system which seems intrinsically unfair and which thwarts a lover from reaching his beloved. In this version of unfair, unrequited love, there is a caste system based on of all things, some sort of frequency in their atomic structure of each individual makeup which is unalterable and which permanently relegates each to a specific level of "luck" or fate and lot in life, much like our present day SAT scores. And they are bound to it to the grave. What becomes immediately of emotional interest to the viewer is that this indelible frequency number (which right off the bat begs credulity of the highest order) not only marks their level of fate, but also predetermines who they can love (or not). Not an original cinematic concept by any means and we have seen it used as the foundation for love-stories in a myriad of other films, except here it becomes just too silly a device to be believable; their atomic frequency prevent them from even going near each other let alone touching or loving each other. The "science" behind this situation is just never explained so it remains glaringly bad science to the point that at times it's laughable.
OK, let's live with that hard-to-swallow "frequency out of sync" device...it's only a means to move the meat of the love story and the conflict therein forward. But that's only the beginning of the nonsense as the director/write then begins injecting more and more absurd arguments about irrelevant concepts like fate and predetermination and free will and irony(?!), all supposedly controlled by a "Manual" that we are told, without any plausible explanation, pops up throughout the centuries -- a kind of DaVinchi Code, only it's about patterns and fate. It's represented by three hieroglyphic looking symbols that appear here and there, again without explanation, and also you see them crudely paint on the backs of their cellphones. Oh, and yes, the discovery of how to control the "side effects" of frequency mismatch is made by the lead male lover who happens to be a mathematical, druggie/genius (even though he's vibrating at the LOWEST frequency, i.e. bottoming out on the SATs) -- HE figures out that WORDS -- yes, just speaking words out loud, stops the bad side effects when two people of divergent frequencies dare to try to interact. But wait...what about those musical notes. Ooops, more on that later.
Come to find out, if you take certain drugs -- lots of them...like mixing whole prescription bottles of them together, you can then speak certain words that a cellphone app will spit out which will quash the bad side-effects when individuals with incorrectly matched frequencies play hanky-panky with each other. Yah, that's right....it's the WORDS you speak that stop forks and knives from flying about when the lovers touch, but low and behold, another unbelievable discovery....it's MUSIC that will squash the flying utensils and vibrating doors and steam rising from the ground as well as cell app words. Will wonders never cease? In this movie, evidently not soon enough.
The "science" here is absurd; the philosophical conundrums of free will vs. predetermination vs. patterns vs. irony (irony?...really?!) are all over the map; THEN the mean military arm of the government jumps in just to make things interesting (and less coherent) because now humanity as we know it is threatened if the control words are spoken out loud. All the scientists now have to do is figure out how to restore frequencies so that the evil caste system is back in place and we are all really just machines anyway...or are we? Yah...it is just as idiotic as it sounds. Not a shred of any plausible science or philosophy or physics while all the incessant mumbo-jumbo discussions that the characters spout on these "deep" (read pretentious) topics sound as infantile as those commercials for Cheese-Its where the 5 year old kids give their explanations of how the cheese gets into the crackers. None of this means a hill of beans to whatever is emotionally engaging of the plot -- the love story and the social ethics of a society with such an unfair way of predetermining citizens' lot or why any of this is happening. Instead the sci-fi simply consists of dialog that sounds like the screenwriters hadn't the foggiest handle on ANY of these topics. Nor do we care an iota about any of it as presented.
While as a whole, this may have started off as a good attempt at a story that we COULD HAVE gotten emotional invested in, but one-third the way thru it they seem to have seriously lost their way and had no idea where they wanted to take the film. And that is sad because the film had great potential, but when you need to come in to save your splintered, unraveling, unresolved last reel with all this mess still flopping in the wind and you to have to bring in MOZART to tie up lose ends as well as turning one of your very minor supporting characters into an omniscient Star Trek-like "Q" as the denouement to the meandering, indecipherable last 20 minutes, well, you just wind up with a major disappointment.
It opens with the easily understood and familiar premise, a kind of caste system which seems intrinsically unfair and which thwarts a lover from reaching his beloved. In this version of unfair, unrequited love, there is a caste system based on of all things, some sort of frequency in their atomic structure of each individual makeup which is unalterable and which permanently relegates each to a specific level of "luck" or fate and lot in life, much like our present day SAT scores. And they are bound to it to the grave. What becomes immediately of emotional interest to the viewer is that this indelible frequency number (which right off the bat begs credulity of the highest order) not only marks their level of fate, but also predetermines who they can love (or not). Not an original cinematic concept by any means and we have seen it used as the foundation for love-stories in a myriad of other films, except here it becomes just too silly a device to be believable; their atomic frequency prevent them from even going near each other let alone touching or loving each other. The "science" behind this situation is just never explained so it remains glaringly bad science to the point that at times it's laughable.
OK, let's live with that hard-to-swallow "frequency out of sync" device...it's only a means to move the meat of the love story and the conflict therein forward. But that's only the beginning of the nonsense as the director/write then begins injecting more and more absurd arguments about irrelevant concepts like fate and predetermination and free will and irony(?!), all supposedly controlled by a "Manual" that we are told, without any plausible explanation, pops up throughout the centuries -- a kind of DaVinchi Code, only it's about patterns and fate. It's represented by three hieroglyphic looking symbols that appear here and there, again without explanation, and also you see them crudely paint on the backs of their cellphones. Oh, and yes, the discovery of how to control the "side effects" of frequency mismatch is made by the lead male lover who happens to be a mathematical, druggie/genius (even though he's vibrating at the LOWEST frequency, i.e. bottoming out on the SATs) -- HE figures out that WORDS -- yes, just speaking words out loud, stops the bad side effects when two people of divergent frequencies dare to try to interact. But wait...what about those musical notes. Ooops, more on that later.
Come to find out, if you take certain drugs -- lots of them...like mixing whole prescription bottles of them together, you can then speak certain words that a cellphone app will spit out which will quash the bad side-effects when individuals with incorrectly matched frequencies play hanky-panky with each other. Yah, that's right....it's the WORDS you speak that stop forks and knives from flying about when the lovers touch, but low and behold, another unbelievable discovery....it's MUSIC that will squash the flying utensils and vibrating doors and steam rising from the ground as well as cell app words. Will wonders never cease? In this movie, evidently not soon enough.
The "science" here is absurd; the philosophical conundrums of free will vs. predetermination vs. patterns vs. irony (irony?...really?!) are all over the map; THEN the mean military arm of the government jumps in just to make things interesting (and less coherent) because now humanity as we know it is threatened if the control words are spoken out loud. All the scientists now have to do is figure out how to restore frequencies so that the evil caste system is back in place and we are all really just machines anyway...or are we? Yah...it is just as idiotic as it sounds. Not a shred of any plausible science or philosophy or physics while all the incessant mumbo-jumbo discussions that the characters spout on these "deep" (read pretentious) topics sound as infantile as those commercials for Cheese-Its where the 5 year old kids give their explanations of how the cheese gets into the crackers. None of this means a hill of beans to whatever is emotionally engaging of the plot -- the love story and the social ethics of a society with such an unfair way of predetermining citizens' lot or why any of this is happening. Instead the sci-fi simply consists of dialog that sounds like the screenwriters hadn't the foggiest handle on ANY of these topics. Nor do we care an iota about any of it as presented.
While as a whole, this may have started off as a good attempt at a story that we COULD HAVE gotten emotional invested in, but one-third the way thru it they seem to have seriously lost their way and had no idea where they wanted to take the film. And that is sad because the film had great potential, but when you need to come in to save your splintered, unraveling, unresolved last reel with all this mess still flopping in the wind and you to have to bring in MOZART to tie up lose ends as well as turning one of your very minor supporting characters into an omniscient Star Trek-like "Q" as the denouement to the meandering, indecipherable last 20 minutes, well, you just wind up with a major disappointment.