Netflixable? Another stab at “Interactive” Cinema — “Choose Love,” or don’t

Is “Choose Love” “inane,” “insipid” or merely an “innocuous” attempt to make the cinematic romantic comedy a viewer’s choice “will they or won’t they” experience?

It’s “interactive cinema,” you know. So click on one of the selection of choices that pop up every few minutes. And if you don’t like what transpires after that, or are curious about how the other options might have played out, hit the “Do Over” prompt.

As for how this comes off as a story worth telling and watching, somebody has to make that call so it might as well be me. And in the spirit of the character who says “No backsies!” in the movie, I’ll opt for the last choice — “innocuous.”

It’s an interesting movie to watch in a technical sense, seeing where the edit points for different timelines can be inserted and allowed play out. But the range of choices, like the characters, is “bland” to “blander.”

And being able to pick and choose the narrative direction removes all stakes from the story and renders the entire experience kind of pointless. Then again, maybe that’s just me.

Our perky, 30ish heroine, Cami Conway (Laura Marano of “The Royal Treatment” and “The War with Grandpa”) is an L.A. recording engineer facing big choices in life.

Her career seems stalled, trapped engineering jingles, voice-overs for commercials and the like. And her pleasant, handsome finish-each-other’s-sentences beau of three years, lawyer Paul (Scott Michael Foster), is about to pop the question.

The noncommittal psychic/tarot card reader (Jacque Drew) shuffles the cards, tells her “Destiny is a myth” and that “YOU will have to decide,” and Cami follows those instructions to the letter.

Californians, am I right?

Those choices grow more difficult because she stumbles into the “save the planet” boyfriend “who got away” Jack (Jordi Webber), and then meets Brit pop mop-top Rex (Avan Jogia) at work, and they set off sparks, professionally and personally.

What oh what should Cami do? I mean, she’s looking right at the camera and asking? What should WE have her do?

There have been a lot of attempts at creating interactive cinema — movies in which viewers, or a polled consensus of viewers, get to “decide” which way the story goes — over the years. The best of them captured something of a theme park ride experience, at least as far as which character wins, who loses, who ends up with whom, who lives or who dies narrative goes.

Netflix is the first streamer to do this with a movie every viewer can customize to one’s own preferences

But with video games providing an ever more immersive, cinematic real-time-decision experience, I frankly don’t see the point.

The very nature of cinema is something just as primal as “living” a story and making your own choices within it. “Tell me a story” puts the burden on the storyteller and invites something fundamental into the equation — the element of SURPRISE.

All involved have tackled a string of technical challenges and made them “work.” But to what end?

So when one reaches the open-ended conclusion to the particular inane interactive effort that instructs us to “Choose Love,” the three choices we’re faced with don’t seem like enough.

“Back to Start,” “Back to Dream,” an earlier time-line changing edit-point” and “Back to Protest,” another edit point, should have a fourth option.

“Give my back my 90 minutes.”

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Laura Marano, Avan Jogia, Scott Michael Foster, Jordi Webber, Benjamin Hoetjes, Megan Smart and Jacque Drew

Credits: Directed by Stuart McDonald, scripted by Josann McGibbon. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:17 plus additional time for all the “choices” you make and unmake.

About Roger Moore

Movie Critic, formerly with McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Orlando Sentinel, published in Spin Magazine, The World and now published here, Orlando Magazine, Autoweek Magazine
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