My Review of "Spontaneous"

Spontaneous is a pandemic movie that came out in 2020. It was actually released on October of 2020 so this makes me believe the idea and execution of the movie happened before the worldwide pandemic. The themes of this movie are strangely pertinent to what had happened to all of us in the last year and a half.

The movie starts off like your average teen romantic comedy movie. Mara, the main character, narrates the story. Five minutes into the movie one of the kids in her class blows up spontaneously. The whole thing is a bit of a shock and I then shift my focus of this movie. At this moment I start thinking it might actually be a mystery that they have to solve.

Alas, it is still a romantic comedy but a little on the messy side because there's so much content that they wanted to jam into this movie. There is an element of the kids suffering mysteriously from this spontaneous combustion. Obviously the government is going to step in and try to solve this mysterious problem.

They had a few nice nuanced touches to the movie for example the kids are no longer permitted to drive cars. It's going to be a danger to everyone if they explode while they're driving around the city. There's a fear in some of the citizens to even interact with these kids for fear of contracting the disease. The movie even goes so far as to give the kids somewhat realistic attitudes towards the disease.

Some of the kids are extremely scared to blowing up whereas Mara is indifferent and has no empathy for the situation. She jokes around during some inappropriate moments and seems to show no fear at all. However you kind of see where the movie is going when she meets a boy, Dylan, that she takes interest in.

There's this huge lethal pandemic in the movie and somehow she has no worry in the world even though it's isolated to her class only. The predictability sort of helps with the tension of the story at times. This movie plays with our expectations as we can see any one of them blowing up at any time. As Mara and Dylan develop their relationship we don't want to see either of them blow up however you know something bad is going to happen to either one or both of them.

I wished they had put a little more emphasis on Mara's friendship with her childhood best friend Tess. They established that they're best friends but don't really interact with each other that much. Their friendship kind of takes a backseat to Mara and Dylan's relationship. The tension of her best friend's combustion wasn't really there because she didn't spend that much time with her in the story.

Despite the fact they spent most of their time developing Mara and Dylan's relationship it still kind of had a lull in the middle of the movie. I'm not exactly sure why but I kind of droned off around then. We get it, the two of them have established their relationship with one another. Maybe go onto something different? I'm not sure, but the pacing seemed a little off that I got a little bored.

I know that they couldn't have possibly have predicted the pandemic when they made this movie. It wasn't a story about a pandemic. They were more so talking about how anything can happen in life and you have to take advantage of the time you have now. We see this in some of the kids reflecting on life after their friends have suddenly passed away.

Overall, it was still a fun and creative idea. It's odd that someone would have thought of this idea before the pandemic. What's even more odd is that this movie has a message that is pretty relevant today. Unfortunately the pacing issues kind of got to me so I have to give this movie a 6 out of 10. It's not terribly bad but it's not something I would recommend others to immediately check out.