And if I go way into it, into 4D space, it explodes into a whole different direction." During their final talk, Steve cuts off Dennis right before he finishes his sentence, and the last word he says to him is "always." In a dimension of infinite possibilities, Steve's thread of time loops back on itself and connects when he sits down on the boulder and begins to carve. It's like you move up to the present, and everything expands into anything, literally, in all directions. In an interview with, Aaron Moorhead explained the deeper meaning to "ALLWAYS" when you look at it as two words, all ways: "The movie also had a lot to do with infinite possibilities. Like, for example, discovering a street drug that can temporarily transport you back in time. But in life, all that crazy shit that happens before you die, there's always infinite possibilities." "We're seeing the exceptional ones." It's a morbidly beautiful way of saying the inevitable is still somewhat unpredictable: "In death, the wild cards of fate are the exceptional ones. "The tiniest percentage is sudden death," he says. Dennis starts recounting the last conversation he had with his daughter before she vanished, waxing poetic about their job, explaining that most deaths occur in a bed with varying degrees of difficulty. Not to mention that Steve is grappling with his terminal brain cancer diagnosis. If you think back to the conversation that Steve and Dennis had, while Steve was waiting for the Synchronic to take effect, they talk about the nature of death-something they, given that they're first responder EMTs, are intimately familiar with. And then, in the world of the film, Steve had to write it that way, with that same misspelling, because, from his perspective, it had always been written on the rock that way. Something misspelled in an interesting way will stick in your mind ( Pet Sematary, anyone?), especially if it's something in a movie that a viewer needs to remember for future reference. But why "ALLWAYS"? And why the weird misspelling? For one thing, it makes the word more noticeable. When Steve sees the boulder in the past, the surface is unmarked, and he realizes that he must have been the one to carve the word in the first place. Steve takes the drug, sits on the rock while he has his final conversation with Dennis, and then journeys back into a war zone, finds Brianna, and gives her the rest of the drug, sending her back to the present and taking her place. Steve figures out that Brianna (Ally Ioannides) wandered off to her favorite spot, the boulder overlooking the river with the word "ALLWAYS" carved into it by an unknown hand, and that's where she must have popped back in time. When you use Synchronic, you can't journey too far away from the point at which the drug sent you back in time, or you'll miss the window to return to the present. When Steve (Anthony Mackie) decides to use the last of the synthetic drug he picked up at sites where people have disappeared to find the daughter of his best friend Dennis (Jamie Dornan), he knows it's probably a one-way trip. Because the past, in this interpretation of time, is fixed, it can't be changed, and everything must happen in a certain order-a feeling of inevitability that Synchronic plays around with in its final moments. In Synchronic, thanks to a mysterious drug that sends whoever ingests it back to any point in the past, time starts to look more like a meandering river with streams looping back on itself, a static plane that someone could easily move backwards and forwards along, as long as they had the means to do it. Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead's trippy time travel movie Synchronic, now finally available to stream on Netflix, unspools the way we think about time as a linear force, a single straight line on which the present travels in only one direction.
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