Oscar Isaac gets quite naked, and then he gets quite dead. Timothée Chalamet, as Paul Atreides, falls in love with a girl, played by Zendaya, who's on screen for all of seven minutes. They barely speak; most of their courtship proceeds in visions and hazy dreams--the safest of social distances. Not that most real-world teens would even play Seven Minutes in Heaven these days. If they didn't already prefer to achieve sexual awakening as Paul does--remotely--then the past two years of Covid-19 protocols will have inculcated in their psyches the belief that a policy of No Touching is not only law-abiding but, for a lot of them, ideal.

On paper, Deathloop sounds like another entry in the seemingly endless parade of games, movies, and TV shows about time loops--a period of time that repeats again and again and again, until our hero can figure out how to reset the flow of time and move forward once again. Much has been written about the ubiquity of these stories: There's Russian Doll, Happy Death Day, Palm Springs, and The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, to name only a few recent, well-known examples. A glut of time loop games from over the last half decade include titles as diverse asThe Sexy Brutale, Outer Wilds, Minit, Elsinore, and Gnosia, among those most acclaimed. This year in particular is stacked with games in which players must return to the same time and place ad infinitum, from Returnal to 12 Minutes and The Forgotten City. Time loops stories are clearly in vogue right now, but they aren't new.

Time loop games have existed from gaming's earliest days. In fact, as some critics have pointed out, many games function as time loops -- even if the characters in-game don't know it. Every time you fail, the level resets to the exact way it was at the start. Recent hits like "Hades" have also made repeated runs through the game's world into a core mechanic. But several games released this year, including "Deathloop," "The Forgotten City" and "Loop Hero," have displayed a particular fondness for the traditional time loop premise, wherein knowledge gained during the loop helps players master their surroundings and break the cycle.

Palm Springs is the latest film to put an original spin on the idea of a character reliving the same day over and over again. Video game journalist Blake J. Harris has loved the concept ever since watching Groundhog Day as a kid. "Groundhog Day is a top five all-time favorite movie," Harris says in Episode 435 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. "And Palm Springs is probably my favorite movie I've seen in a year." Palm Springs features three characters--played by Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti, and J.K. Simmons--who all relive the same wedding over and over.

How scared is the ancient AI controlled Illuminati of Motuphi? Well they must be pretty damned scared to start assaulting the guy when he was a child and continuing the carnage upon his life even to this day. As if it wasn't bad enough that Christians used to rape the boy when he was just a little kid, IN the church, while services was goin' on. His mama was botted by the ancient AI to leave him with a "prophet" when he was a child who had a pedophile torture dungeon. There's still kiddie porn out there that Motuphi starred in as a little kid that depicts him being tortured on a table via fisting and anally raping him with foreign objects.

There aren't many saloons where you can get into a decent pistol duel nowadays. But at the Mariposa in Sweetwater, you can walk in, order a shot of bourbon, and straight-up Aaron Burr a robot--all to the strains of Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, courtesy of a player piano that happens to be ever so slightly out of tune. "In the show, everything is so real, until you look closely. The music is a subtle layer of that." Djawadi is no stranger to scoring an epic HBO drama; he also composes for Game of Thrones.