Levels is a big idea / low budget sci-fi film that plays in familiar sandboxes while trying to elevate them with high-falutin’ tech philosophy. And that’s a sentence that says nothing about a plot that’s hard to synopsize without spoiling.

It’s about a guy in the near future who falls in love with a mysterious woman who is shot to death out of the blue. Depressed and ready to off himself, his reality begins to shift and he finds out she may not be dead.

It’s not this film’s fault that any movie dealing with shifting realities is compared to better films like Inception or The Matrix. These are iconic but they aren’t first out the gate in science fiction so not fair Levels, but it’s got to live in the shadow of better movies. Not to mention a certain Futurama episode.

The film doesn’t do itself any favors by feeling so try-hard with its big idea. It’s so proud of its Big Ideas that it over-explains itself using big tech buzzwords bordering on technobabble. I didn’t take notes… the ideas work, the buzzy details probably don’t really make sense.

Most of the film is dialog and concepts and some low budget CGI. When it tries for action scenes, you can tell their expertise is in buzzwords and technobabble. But most of the scenes – action or chatty – have a universal sludge factor… it needs more zip and energy.

Levels is full of good, familiar, pop tech philosophy. It’s a mash of good ideas done just a little too mediocre. But I like its attempts to bring in these philosophies. It’s worth watching if you are great big geek who wants a shifting reality storyline.

Score: 71