Infinite (2021)

Antoine Fuqua's Infinite arrived in 2021 with the quiet dignity of a film that skipped theaters entirely, deposited onto Paramount+ after a pandemic shuffle and a critical drubbing that included three Golden Raspberry nominations. It concerns Evan McCauley, a man who forges katanas he was never taught to forge and remembers lives he never lived, until a secret order of reincarnationists informs him that his schizophrenia diagnosis was merely a clerical error. The adaptation of D. Eric Maikranz's self-published novel moves through its mythology with the enthusiasm of a tax audit. Reviewers compared it to The Matrix and the Bourne films. They were being generous.

For a production assembled in the 2020s, the cultural inventory is modest. The ensemble is multiethnic without announcing itself as such: Chiwetel Ejiofor menaces capably as Bathurst, Sophie Cookson's Nora fights and dies well, and Liz Carr appears in support. These read as casting decisions, not a mission statement. Nora's competence and her sacrificial end suggest a baseline respect for a female co-lead, though the screenplay never argues the point, and the villain's race carries no thematic weight whatsoever. Evan's diagnosis is the nearest thing to a social text here, and the film treats it as a misdiagnosis to be corrected by supernatural revelation. That is a position, delivered without comment.

Where the film declines to lecture, it declines thoroughly. The Nihilists want to end all life on Earth, a goal with no environmental subtext and no grievance against capital; the conflict is metaphysical, good against void. No queer characters, no body-positivity messaging, no revisionist claims about real history, and no romance with the audience's conscience. The exposition about Infinites, Believers and the Egg arrives in functional chunks and then stops, like a waiter who takes the order and leaves. What remains is a chase. It is a harmless, incoherent, largely apolitical chase, and the culture war will survive without it.