Everyone has failed projects, and this one is mine.

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Video games are a great passion of mine and while playing, I began asking the question: how would the respawn system work in a realistic setting? In some video games, if you die or fail a level, you will respawn and try again with no other consequences. In others, like competitive shooters, you will die and while waiting to respawn, the match will continue without you for a period of time.

 

We have seen interpretations of the former in film such as Edge of Tomorrow (2014) where when Tom Cruise dies, he "respawns" but by resetting time - essentially time travel. We have yet to see the latter, where the world moves on while the protagonist is waiting to "respawn". Furthermore, we don't see as much of the psychological confusion and trauma someone would realistically go through.

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This was the core for Möbius Squad - how does dying and being "brought back" affect someone psychologically and their perspective of the world around them?

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I thought about the human brain like a computer - it will continue to write memories to its drive until you pull the power cord. After plugging it back in and starting it up, memories will begin to write again but with a major gap in between the last (the period of it being offline). It is ok to do this every once and a while, but what happens when it happens again and again and again? That's when memories and drives begin to corrupt. Thus, human memories would get mixed up leading to hallucinations, amnesia, schizophrenia. After a certain point, these soldiers just become mindless shooting piles of meat - in a sense, they've died without truly dying.

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Unfortunately, most of my time with this film was spent fleshing out the world and science of Nunite (new-night), the substance capable of bringing humans back from death. I wanted it to feel realistic, both biologically and as a possible future if we were to find something similar. A large worry was this would all dissolve into techno babble and negatively impact the psychological distress of the characters.

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Möbius Squad aims to show two super soldiers at the end of their ropes, stuck in an endless looping war. With only dreams of returning to Earth and normality, they have little to keep them going. Tiger breaks after coming to the realization that his daughter, who has been on Earth, has grown up and died in the time he has been at war. Unable to bear this loss and with literally nothing else to live for, Eden suggests he end his suffering. Once he does, he still comes back, even after thinking a headshot was truly fatal.

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Overall, the story and world are too cramped within 13 minutes. This is a feature film idea that needs feature film time to setup and breathe. With only showing one "life" of these soldiers, the viewer has to trust me when saying they have the ability to die and come back. This additionally makes the ending more confusing. So much is simply told to save time, it leaves the viewer lost.

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To write, produce and direct such an ambitious and complex film during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic was not a good idea, but there are positives from it:

I found the weight of the small details in film are only positive when sitting atop an already well established core character story.

I now know how to produce and direct within incredibly tight restrictions for cast and crew safety.

Time is a precious commodity; every word on the page must prove its worth to be there and every choice on set should be constructive and meaningful.

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I have since been reworking the core ideas of Möbius Squad in a longer form. I still think the idea of a death-defying substance with huge psychological repercussions can make for a great baseline of an interesting story. The biggest part is finding the characters who stand to lose the most under those conditions.

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You are your biggest critic which is why I am the first to define Möbius Squad as my failure. Though this is only in my doing. My cast and crew were amazingly talented, creative, supportive and a joy to work with.