Rating of
2.5/4
"In The Shadow Of The Moon" by Yojimbo
Yojimbo - wrote on 02/02/20
A Philadelphia street cop encounters what appears to be the victims of a serial killer, but when the assumed dead perpetrator reappears and starts killing again exactly nine years later he comes to believe that there is much more to the case.
Another Netflix funded project, In The Shadow Of The Moon begins with pretensions to being a Seven style serial killer movie but soon morphs into a time paradox story that shares concepts with Twelve Monkeys and Looper. I hasten to add that this is not a spoiler – the opening scene makes this clear, which was rather an odd choice in my opinion. I suspect that the story would have been far better served by keeping the audience guessing, at least for a while. Once it settles into its new persona as trippy sci-fi, it becomes a reasonably enjoyable hop, skip and jump through time as an increasingly dysfunctional and obsessive Boyd Holbrook desperately tracks the assassin over a span of 27 years. Anyone who has seen Steven Moffat’s tenure as writer-producer of BBCTV’s Doctor Who will find the underlying concept rather familiar but the cast are watchable, the production value fine and it makes for a competent if rather derivative sci-fi potboiler.
One for fans of The X-Files, still pining for a fix of supernatural crime detection.
