BEFORE: Yeah, I've got a few - what exactly happens if you go back in time and (either accidentally or on purpose) kill your own grandfather? Is there any way to fix that without (ugh) sleeping with your own grandmother? If everyone's telling the truth about what they'd do with a time machine, how come Hitler still exists? (Movie idea: Hitler's Mom, portrayed as a real bad-ass, fending off time travelers trying to kill her infant son Adolf...) Is it because everyone is lying, and what they'd really do is go back and tell themselves not to get married, or not drink so much at the office Christmas party, or get that unfortunate haircut?
If you go back in time and try to fix things, but end up screwing things up worse, how do you fix that? Do you travel back to right before you first time-traveled, and convince yourself not to change things? And if you time-travel back and give the inventor the inspiration (or the schematics) to invent the time machine, then who ultimately invented it? These are the things that keep me up nights...
Linking from last night's film, Nancy Allen was also in "1941" with Dan Aykroyd, who was also in "Yogi Bear" with Anna Faris (last heard in "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs").
THE PLOT: While drinking at their local pub, three social outcasts attempt to navigate a time-travel conundrum.
AFTER: The kicker here is, a couple of nerds and their slightly cooler friend find that a pub's bathroom functions like a time machine, due to a "time leak" - so every time they step out of the 'loo, they end up somewhere else. Sorry, I mean someWHEN else. Fortunately, the nerds know what to do, thanks to their comprehensive knowledge of sci-fi. Sorry, I mean speculative fiction.
The movie takes a couple of storytelling shortcuts, so the target audience is really people like the characters, namely sci-fi nerds. Sorry, I mean "imagineers". People who know that when you see the same character twice in a split-screen, one clearly is a time traveler, and its very important that the one who isn't the time-traveler doesn't notice the other version of him. Why? Because the scene played out before, and the older one doesn't have a memory of seeing his older self the first time, so if the younger one sees the older him, he'll create a paradox. If you saw "Back to the Future" and wondered how Marty McFly could arrive back in the parking lot 10 minutes before he first left, and why he had to hide and wait for the younger him to leave before he enters the scene, then this film may not be for you.
There's a lot of hiding and waiting in this film, once the 3 friends realize what's going on, they have to hide in closets and bathroom stalls so they don't encounter themselves, and we end up seeing the same scenes over and over again, from different points of view. If you saw "Primer" and wondered why the characters had to be very careful about when they left the time machine/storage unit, then this film may not be for you.
But if you saw "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" and liked the bits about how Bill and Ted would someday be famous, and that future society would (somehow) be based on their music and their principles, well, there's bits of this film that are like that too. We are led to believe that the actions of these three men are very important (somehow) and that in at least one possible future, their ideas play an important role.
Those same storytelling shortcuts that make this film amusing and enjoyable, however, also have a down side, especially if you're hoping to make some sense of it all. We never really find out the "big idea" that the characters have, probably because it's like the glowing suitcase in "Pulp Fiction" - any way that the film defines it is going to be a letdown, compared to your own imagination about what it COULD be. Still, that's a plothole that never gets filled in.
Turning a men's room into a time machine is also a short-cut, probably a cost-effective one at that. No need to build a prop time-machine with dials and lights and spinny things, or even convert a DeLorean. Just build a men's room set and you're good to go. Still, it's a bit of a cheat.
There are also bits that remind me of "Clerks", the way a bunch of friends who are too school for cool (wait a minute - no, actually that is right) rag on sci-fi films they don't like, falling JUST short of acknowledging that they themselves are characters in a film. So there you go, this film is like "Back to the Future" meets "Primer" meets "Bill & Ted" meets "Pulp Fiction" meets "Clerks", only not quite as awesome as that combination sounds on paper.
Also starring Chris O'Dowd (last seen in "Gulliver's Travels"), Marc Wootton, Dean Lennox Kelly, and Meredith MacNeill.
RATING: 6 out of 10 packets of crisps
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