Multiverses are so hot right now. The idea of a limitless number of parallel dimensions, spinning off from every decision everyone makes, is a household idea and has been at the centre of several movies, such as Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, the animated Spider-Verse films and Everything Everywhere All at Once, and television shows like Loki, Rick and Morty and Devs. Apple TV+’s Dark Matter is the latest entry using this trendy narrative device.
Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton) is a middle-aged college physics professor. He isn’t particularly successful, but he does have a loving family. His wife, Daniela (Jennifer Connelly), an artist turned gallery curator whom he met as a student, and their son Charlie (Oakes Fegley). He has a good life, but in some ways, he feels unfulfilled — a point hammered home when he goes to a bar to help celebrate his best friend Ryan (Jimmi Simpson) winning a prestigious science prize. Ryan is awash in a sea of money and fame that could have potentially been Jason’s if he — a legitimately brilliant physicist who gave it all up when Daniela became pregnant with Charlie — had made some different choices when he was young.
On the way home from this party, Jason is abducted by a masked man and taken to an abandoned warehouse and injected with a drug. When he wakes up, Jason finds himself in a lab surrounded by people he recognizes from his past who treat him like they’re close friends. In this alternative universe, Daniela isn’t his wife and Charlie was never born. As he struggles to grapple with what is happening, a second Jason — let’s call him Jason 2 — arrives at his house and prepares to settle into family life.
In this reality, Jason 2 is a rockstar physicist who is so lonely that he built a box that would let someone who enters it travel to alternate universes, just so he could seek out a life in which his biggest regret had a different outcome.
Link: https://exclaim.ca/film/article/dark-matter-apple-tv-series-review
‘Dark Matter’ Is a Dimension of the Multiverse That Looks Kinda Like All the Other Ones | Exclaim!
