Time After Time: adapted by Nicholas Meyer from the story by Karl Alexander and Steve Hayes; directed by Nicholas Meyer; starring Malcolm McDowell (H.G. Wells), Mary Steenburgen (Amy), and David Warner (Stevenson) (1979): It's 1893. After a 5-year absence, Jack the Ripper has returned. And only H.G. Wells can stop him!
In this charming, clever time-travel story, writer H.G. Wells is a scientist as well as a writer. And he's built a time machine. And Jack the Ripper steals the time machine to escape the police. Once the machine returns to Wells' basement on automatic pilot, Wells follows Jack the Ripper to the future. So it's now 1979. And we're in San Francisco.
Malcolm McDowell makes the most of one of his rare heroic roles, playing Holmes as alternately bewildered by the future and fascinated by it -- though with that fascination comes a mounting level of disgust at the violent world of 1979. Admittedly, in the real world, Victorian London was far more violent than 1970's San Francisco. But we'll leave that alone. In the real world, Wells didn't build a time machine, either.
Mary Steenburgen is charming in only her second major screen role, playing a bank employee who falls for Wells, as he does for her. David Warner completes the trio of actors who take up most of the screen time. He's Jack the Ripper, who in his 'normal' life was a physician and chess-playing friend of H.G. Wells.
Nicholas Meyer adapts and directs the movie. He's most famous for writing and directing Star Treks II and VI, and sharing screen-writing duties on Trek IV. Some of his interests, including Sherlock Holmes (he also wrote two well-regarded Holmes novels), show up in this film. As well, a paradoxical bit involving eye-glasses shows up both here and in Trek IV.
Time After Time is a fun, fairly tight movie with a nice mix of comedy and suspense. Warner makes a good antagonist, especially as he towers over Wells (McDowell and Steenburgen are both 5'8", Warner 6'2"). The 'fish out of water' bits that involve Holmes are hardy comedy perennials, especially a trip to McDonald's and a climactic bit of business that forces Wells to drive a car. Thank heaven it's an automatic. Recommended.
Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel: written by Jamie Mathieson; directed by Gareth Carrivick; starring Chris O'Dowd (Ray), Marc Wootton (Toby), Dean Lennox Kelly (Pete), and Anna Faris (Cassie) (2008): Amiable, British, low-budget, and sly nod to both geeks and pubs. Three somewhat aimless 20-something British pals get into a discussion about time travel. Then time travel starts busting out all over the place because there's a time distortion located in the men's washroom at their local pub.
O'Dowd is his almost always lovable self as the leader of the trio, while Marc Wootton as the aspiring science-fiction writer of the group and Dean Lennox Kelly as the friend who hates science fiction are also sympathetic and funny. It's low-key in that British way that makes things funnier. Anna Faris shows up as a sort of cross between a Time Cop and a Time Bureaucrat. It may be a comedy, but the time travelling makes as much or more sense than most 'serious' movies involving time travel. Recommended.
Draft Day: written by Scott Rothman and Rajiv Joseph; directed by Ivan Reitman; starring Kevin Costner (Sonny Weaver Jr.), Jennifer Garner (Ali), Chadwick Boseman (Vontae Mack), Frank Langella (Anthony Molina), and Denis Leary (Coach Penn) (2014): Surprisingly enjoyable sports movie about... the NFL draft! It takes place in an alternate universe where the Cleveland Browns, while still hapless, nonetheless recently had a legendary coach. Kevin Costner is fine in the sports scenes and out of place in the romantic scenes with Jennifer Garner -- the relationship, along with several other plot points, really seem to suggest that Costner's character is a good 15 years younger than Costner himself at 60. Lightly recommended.
Edge of Tomorrow: adapted by Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth, and John-Henry Butterworth from the novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka; directed by Doug Liman; starring Tom Cruise (Cage), Emily Blunt (Rita), Brendan Gleeson (General Brigham), and Bill Paxton (Farell) (2014): Solid science-fiction action movie plagued only by its terrible title, a title so vague that the studio altered it for video release to Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow. The title of the original novel/manga, All You Need Is Kill, is better than both. Tom Cruise does nice work here as a cowardly creep turned into a hero by the circumstances of the movie, and Emily Blunt ably supports him as a tough super-soldier.
Aliens have invaded Earth. Do you really need to know more? They're visually impressive aliens, too -- fast-moving, mercurial blobs that look about what I'd expect a Shoggoth on Crack would look like. They've trashed Europe. And a near-future version of D-Day is about to go horribly wrong. Thank Heavens for Tom Cruise!
It's not a perfect movie. The ending doesn't quite logic out, or is missing some brief explanation that would make it make sense. And as Roger Ebert might have pointed out, it's another in a long line of movies about The Impregnable Fortress Impregnated. Oh, well. Recommended.
Looper: written and directed by Rian Johnson; starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Joe), Bruce Willis (Old Joe), Emily Blunt (Sara), Paul Dano (Seth), Jeff Daniels (Abe), and Pierce Gagnon (Cid) (2012): Rian Johnson's Brick was an idiosyncratic gem, a high-school drama played like a hard-boiled film noir, complete with 1940's inflected dialogue and Joseph Gordon-Levitt in his first defining dramatic role after years on Third Rock from the Sun. Johnson and Gordon-Levitt re-team here for another genre-buster. Looper is at least nominally science fiction, but it's also a Western. And another crackerjack film noir.
The major influences for Looper seem to be Shane and that terrific modern noir of the early 1990's, After Dark, My Sweet (though that film was based on a Jim Thompson novel from the 1950's). Then throw in time travel and, um, telekinesis -- more specifically, Jerome Bixby's Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life." This is nothing if not a mash-up.
Organized crime in the 2070's sends its targets back to to the 2040's to be killed by a 'Looper.' Why? Something about bodies being difficult to get rid of in the 2070's. Frankly, this is the shakiest part of the premise. Some of the other problems with this use of time travel could be explained by the disintegration of organized government, which would explain why there aren't Time Cops running around the 2040's. But then, who's discovering the bodies in the 2070's?
We'll give them this as a starting point. The rest of the movie is pretty smart, with nice background details that sketch in the decaying America of the 2040's without throwing it in one's face. There's also an automated flying crop-duster that made me smile -- it looks like the country cousin of the Imperial Probe Droid from The Empire Strikes Back.
But having seen Brick before seeing Looper also helps explain certain things, as Looper is equally stylized and non-mimetic, if not anti-mimetic: for one, the stuff with Blunderbusses and Gats seems more like a commentary on movie gunmen than a realistic categorizing of weaponry. Because these guys are all carrying big guns with which they're only intermittently able to hit something other than their own feet.
The movie plays out with some deft twists, turns, and at least one major reset button. Time travel is a tricky thing. Bruce Willis, as Joseph Gordon-Levitt's future self, is tough and ruthless; Joseph Gordon-Levitt pulls off the difficult feat of playing a monster who develops a soul. He's developed into a fine actor. Pierce Gagnon does some fine child acting, and Emily Blunt pulls off an American accent. Time folds in upon itself. The rules the movie sets out for time travel make a sort of sense right up to the climax, at which point...well, you'll see. Recommended.
Source Code; written by Ben Ripley; directed by Duncan Jones; starring Jake Gyllenhaal (Colter), Michelle Monaghan (Christina), Vera Farmiga (Goodwin), and Jeffrey Wright (Dr. Rutledge) (2011): Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie, whose birth name was David Jones) directed the excellent science-fiction character study Moon, starring Sam Rockwell. Here, he gives us a science-fiction thriller based mostly on the revelation of character under pressure.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays an American soldier whose mind can be dropped into someone else's mind for the purposes of finding out the details of an imminent terrorist threat. A commuter train has already been destroyed as a prelude to some greater catastrophe, and it's into the last eight minutes of that commuter train's existence that Gyllenhaal will be repeatedly plunged, replacing the mind of a schoolteacher killed in the blast.
Jones and screenwriter Ben Ripley wisely keep the explanation of how this process works to a minimum because either the explanation will make no sense, or it would take ten minutes of Basil Exposition to explain it. They even make the lack of explanation a minor plot point -- Gyllenhaal's character gets thwarted repeatedly by the scientist in charge of the project, who basically touches on a couple of points (parabolic calculus! quantum mechanics!) in a way that seems almost a parody of the Architect's ramblings in The Matrix Reloaded.
In any case, Gyllenhaal can be repeatedly sent into "the Source Code", the project's term for a weird mesh of time travel and mind-swapping. We're told repeatedly that the past can't actually be altered and that only information can be gathered to help the present. But is this true? And why can't Gyllenhaal's character remember how he came to join the project?
The obvious genre antecedents for Source Code are Groundhog Day and the Star Trek: TNG episode "Cause and Effect", with a little 12 Monkeys thrown in. Jones keeps the movie moving at a brisk clip, with the reiterations changing enough each time so that the movie becomes neither repetitive nor boring. Gyllenhaal is solid as the baffled soldier, Michelle is perky as a train passenger/love interest, and Jeffrey Wright and Vera Farmiga do nice work as the scientist and Captain running the project (dubbed 'Beleaguered Castle', a solitaire reference that plays out in the movie and also seems to allude to the importance of cards to the classic brainwashing thriller The Manchurian Candidate). Highly recommended.
