‘The Life of Chuck’ May Change the Way You Look at Movies and Yourself

This review of The Life of Chuck, the new film by Mike Flanagan based on a novella by Stephen King, starts in 1994. I was only 14 years old, still educating myself in the world of movies, when I found myself sitting down to see this new one everyone was talking about called Pulp Fiction. As it got toward the end, however, I found myself incredibly confused. Wasn’t John Travolta’s character dead? How was he back? I may have only been a kid, but I knew I’d watched him die, and now he was alive again. It wasn’t until a little later when my formative teenage brain realized director Quentin Tarantino was telling his story out of order that I began to understand. That was something I had yet to encounter in burgeoning film fandom, and it helped turn Pulp Fiction into one of my favorite films ever. I mention this in a review of The Life of Chuck because the first time I saw it, I had a similar reaction. The Life of Chuck is very purposefully told backwards, and when characters from the third ... Read full article.