I'm not going to pretend I knew all of what was happening in this film. I may or may not have looked up a diagram of events just to get a better idea. Time travel is confusing.A pair of engineers are working on side projects in a garage, trying to come up with the Next Best Thing. While working on something completely unrelated, they accidentally invent a functional time machine. It is limited to the past and only about 22 hours at that, but the possibilities are endless. Abe (David Sullivan) decides to secretly build a person-sized version. When he tells Aaron (Shane Carruth), the two men struggle to reconcile their fears and ambitions.
This feels like probably the most realistic version of the creation of a time machine: two people who are smarter than is good for them dicking around and changing the world completely by accident. That part I get. The director, Shane Carruth, deliberately chose to keep the very high-level technical jargon intact instead of dumbing it down for us Morlocks. A stylistic choice that I don't necessarily agree with, but I respect it. Critics heaped praise on this movie, which I can kind of see but it makes me wonder if all the rave reviews were due to people feeling so smart when they finally figured out what was happening. Maybe that makes me dumb. I don't know. Time manipulation isn't really my area. It didn't help me that the whole film looks like it was shot on a camcorder. It is ultra-low budget, which people keep saying like it's a good thing. I get that it adds to the realism. I just don't think it's necessary.
I found the movie fascinating but I struggled with the execution. If you're hard-core into causality and time travel and paradox theory, you might enjoy this more than I did. I would caution other lightweights like me, though. This is not the film for dabblers.
No comments:
Post a Comment