By Joseph L. Garcia, Senior Reporter
Movie Review
Rekonek
Directed by Jade Castro
Produced by Reality MM Studios
MTRCB Rating: PG
PLANES DROPPING OUT of the sky, families becoming insolvent, fires breaking out everywhere; the world coming undone. These are our predictions as to what would happen should the internet ever go away globally in a flash: and yet Rekonek thinks this 21st century apocalypse could be a comforting scenario. The film thinks that the collapse of the digital world simply means going back to analog and spending time with your feelings. Not only do we think that notion is naive, this film doesn’t even execute the (wrong) vision well.
The internet around the world fizzles out right in the middle of the Christmas season (in a country purported to spend Christmas for three months, that could mean anything). An internet couple played by Angel Guardian and Kokoy de Santos has their spark sputter along with the data signal; the vlogging family Crowder (played by the real life Villarroel-Legaspi acting family: dad Zoren, mom Carmina, grown-up twins Mavy and Cassy) have to find new things to do. In the case of Mr. De Santos and Ms. Guardian, I had to look their names up and match their faces: a fate reserved for many members of the cast. However, the cast is sufficiently stacked in star power: Gloria Diaz plays a feminine Scrooge, Gerald Anderson and Charlie Dizon play a couple whose breakup is interrupted by the internet shutdown, Bela Padilla and Andrea Brillantes play OFWs (overseas Filipino workers) of differing economic statuses, in the same boat (at one point quite literally), both stranded in Thailand and trying to make it home.
The film is composed of several interconnected story arcs, a plot device also seen in the beloved Christmas movie Love Actually. However, the vignettes these characters appear in within Rekonek are badly paced. Scenes ended and moved to the next arc before I could make an emotional connection, making this feel like an overlong doomscroll. The timelines are messed up: what is a day in one arc is a number of days in another, making the story hard to track.
The actors don’t help much either. I zoned out in the scenes with the young and new actors. Ms. Diaz played this like a Sunday lunch, and Mr. Anderson did the same (though we wished Ms. Dizon’s character was fleshed out more; we’ve seen her brilliance somewhere else). Mr. Legaspi and his wife play archetypes like in their commercials, though we have to say that their twins have a twinkling of some acting skill in them: unfortunately, it only comes out when the twins are acting next to each other, and no one else. We have some affection for Alexa Miro’s Paula arc (an online scammer who has to start from scratch), but only because we love a good tart-with-a-heart tale. The only person on set who looked like she did her homework was Ms. Padilla, who, incidentally, looked like the only one who actually saw the internet outage as the crisis that it was.
Whatever lessons this film may have had are lost to me in the ending (family? friendship? Don’t open unfamiliar links?), which only reminded me that I DO need the internet. So, I guess skip the movie, unplug your Wi-Fi router, and spend time with your family instead.
