Time-travel. Of all the various things that cinema has to offer, its play on temporal motifs by using the illusion of real-time action and changing it via editing to disestablish real-time movement from continuitous, straightforward action is one of the greatest gifts it brings art. What we have here is a relatively simple concept that nevertheless gets rare play in cinema, a sort of quantum possibilities narrative that usually requires a device (Primer) but only rarely is done just for the dramatic effect (Sliding Doors). A couple meets on the Brooklyn Bridge (Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins, playing characters named Kate and Bobby, counterrespectively) on the 4th of July. They cannot decide whether to go to a barbecue chez Kate's family, or spend the evening tout le doux. So they break off, running in two different directions, and live entirely different lives over the next 24 hours. Green-clad couple Kate and Bobby meet up in a car and go to the barbecue. Yellow-clad K&B grab a taximeter cab and are on their way downtown. Green are going to find that their dinner is met with family politics, secrets revealed, uncomfortable situations, and melodrama. Yellow are going to find themselves immersed in a lottery conspiracy that will threaten their very lives. The two stories are cross-cut together and developments in the one affect the understanding of motivations and choices in the other, while those things that speckle daily lives such as cellphones, computers, and trains stand as rough bridging points between the two stories.

Very fun, as well as I'm wondering if Siegel and McGehee read themselves some Mark Z. Danielewsky before or while writing this script (the yellow and green flip-side of character development preexists in Danielewsky's Only Revolutions, a book where the same story is told from two different perspectives of a couple, and, like this movie, contains a revolving narrative that brings the characters back to the starting point). The careful attention to maintaining the color coding of the story lines (including splashes of yellow at times when things in the green story get threatening, or splashes of green at times when the yellow story gets safer), is pulled off really well. From there, however, the narrative is a little unbalanced, though in some ways that allow me to appreciate the risk the filmmakers are taking.

See, we are in fact having to relate emotionally to the subtle dramatic narrative arc of one story while simultaneously engaging in the pulse-pounding suspense of the other. That means for the larger part of the movie, I and I feel many other audiences get impatient with the more subtle, delicate moments in the family because they're so eager to see what will happen next in the race for their lives. Ultimately this unbalance is fractured further by the end, where the endings of both arcs reveal the ultimate difference between such modes of storytelling, as the open ending serves the dramatic side very well in terms of conflict resolution, but the open ending of the thriller side just makes it feel like the filmmakers had to end it for lack of a better idea. Which, unfortunately, may have been the case. The meeting of polarities at the end with the characters coming to the same conclusion feels more forced than it should.

This is unfortunate considering that the whole movie (called "Uncertainty", after all) is about the difficulty of making choices. So when it feels like the filmmakers themselves had a difficult time choosing how to end their movie, it sort of breaks apart the whole point of the movie in the first place. However, this is also a situation in which I do not believe I would have come up with a better ending myself. The methods in which the two stories inform each other is too important to risk losing by having the characters end up in vastly different places. The ultimate decision the characters have to make as regards their relationship still HAS TO be made in both narrative arcs, so we can't as well have the characters end up the worst or the better for having made an otherwise insignificant decision as regards their day. If this movie struggles, it mostly has to do with the fact that it contains such strongly contrasting and hard to cut between genres as the romantic drama versus the suspense thriller.

Nevertheless, the most exciting and fun thing about watching the movie is watching how the characters, incapable of being definitive and strong when surrounded by the pressures of family, are completely forced to make minute-by-minute decisions that they are required to commit to while running through the streets trying not to get killed.

So yes, this movie is not perfect. But as Gordon-Levitt says, "If the story is good, I'm in. It's that simple." This movie is pretty awesome when taken on its own merit.

--PolarisDiB

I put this film because I got a crush on Lynn Collins and think Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a good budding star. I got my money's worth from their performances, in fact I think Collins is more than just looks, but the plot deflating in the family driven sense and the Manhattan sequence advances the tension which constantly stalls for the family sequence. Confused... yeah I was too. I looked up the film's synopsis and it made more sense.

Think of it like this, the 2010 season of Lost. Two story lines inter-cutting based on a slight change in life. I'm not wild about this film, but it deserves attention for the performances from the leads and for being original, which is a rarity nowadays.

This film is good. But its different, i watched it with some friends, nobody liked it, other than me. but im kind of an oddball like that. It has two lateral plots, involving the same two leads. I thought using the colors green and yellow to differentiate was original and effective. Joseph Gordon Levitt is great in the lead and shows his range here, while Lynn Collins isn't bad either, but sure is beautiful. I had previously seen her in True Blood and was impressed, but here she takes her acting to a even higher level and leaves you entangled in her character's emotions. I thought this film has a very unique concept, and uses suitable cinematography which wouldn't work in any story, but sure does here. Overall an underrated gem from 09 that only has 329 votes on IMDb... wow...