Really Surprised!

Please don't spend money on this.

one of my absolute favorites!

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

I'm usually a sucker for science fiction, and time travel in particular, but this movie was underwhelming. The characters are severely under-developed and uninteresting. One of the main characters is so empty that at one point the protagonist suggests that she might not be real, and she has no response.The time-travel elements of the movie are similarly devoid of interest, and the supposed plot is elementary. I think most of the effort on this movie went into period sets, costumes and haircuts. It certainly doesn't show up in the writing, acting, or directing.

Science fiction is a finicky thing. Depending on your approach and your tastes and background, this flick can either be 1 to 10. I encourage the reader to read the reviews as a form of entertainment in itself, I would also ask the reader to refrain from critiquing this movie as if it had a limitless budget and was hell bent on employing the best special effects possible. In other words, a Hollywood movie. Sadly, too many of our young are trapped there. It has been my experience that the best SciFi allows you to use your imagination. You read SciFi and imagine great things that Hollywood couldn't begin to portray. "The Time Machine", 1960, must be one of the greatest movies in this subject. It has roots in H.G.Wells' 1895 "The Time Machine" novel. Interesting point, the character in the movie shares a similar name with the author of the book. The acting may not be the best, the special effects not out of this world and the script could use more "airing". Your imagination, however, takes over and fills in the blanks to make it a very interesting movie to this date. If the script and story line can allow your imagination to flourish, then at the end of the movie you find yourself thinking. Although the movie ended.... you're still going.It's nice to see special effects to replace your imagination every now and then but I find it's best when it is left to the imagination. This is why most stories that try to make the transition from book to movie fail. On acting.... you may have an idea how a soldier would reacted when facing a platoon of the enemy on his own. We can draw from our limited experience. But has anyone ever met an alien? How does one act when stepping into a time machine? How does one act when they fall in love with someone who wishes to step into a time machine. You can have a whole movie on that alone. Acting in this instance should allow some leeway for the viewer to fill in with their imagination. On the other hand, acting may be what saves the scene such as the end scene to Casablanca with a fake aircraft with little people or La Marseillaise scene sung in defiance to the Germans. In this movie, although the genre was SciFi, the secondary theme was love. Another, loss. Yet another, jealousy. This requires fine acting, not supper acting, and I think it was done adequately well. Not great but well. To tell you the truth, my heart broke for one of the characters. Lets use our imagination on one angle of the movie.... sound. If you wish to employ frequencies in your experiment and need a fundamental series of frequencies, the piano is an interesting choice. And it's calibrated to some standard. Believe it or not, there are a few established standards in piano calibration and tuning. The piano can be a scientific instrument in every sense of the word. So it wasn't a screwball idea to use a piano. But a piano is also musical. It has Rhythm and beats and bars. Now, imagine an infinite number of future threads to an event. In a song, we may have four beats to a bar. Every four beats you repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Almost as if it is infinite. It generates a Rhythm that explores a theme, or event. Changing notes in one bar with just four beats (4/4 for example) could change the entire theme of the song. Mapping out the future of Victoria's event in the well and navigating it successfully with a sound signature (so may beats to a bar) is an interesting connection to the piano. We can now layer other life experiences to music, such as falling in love, as was the case when they danced through the time map to music, expanding the parallelism to a theme or song. Interesting? How about dancing to music when the old man removed their masks in the beginning of the movie? How about our young hero dancing with the blindfold on in front of the well after removing the welded well cap at the start? In my experience, I have found that the best attributes to enjoying good SciFi is the person's ability to imagine. Overload the person with special effects and at the end of the movie the person may experience relief (and to beat the crowd out of the theater) instead of thought provocative mesmorization as your view the credits. Enjoy this movie and see what happens to you at the end.

Despite the low budget, the cinematography and the score are simply sumptuous. It is certainly enjoyable to watch, even if, in the final analysis, it lacks substance. There is a scene early on, a garden party by the side of a river, where the ribbons in Victoria's hair stand out with shocking luminosity. Combined with the orchestration, it certainly looks a bigger budget film than it is.But it doesn't feel that way. It feels constrained - perhaps by the cost of the props, of the settings, and of the time and resources available. The production company is known as "Sculptures of Dazzling Complexity" - but the story is all too simplistic, and while setting it in Cambridge between the wars allows that simplicity some breathing space, it still lacks the depth of true emotion that might be expected of a simpler time and place. The characters, for me, fail to live up to the film's title - they are rather too 2D. The adults have no more substance than the excellent child actors. Walking in to a Cambridge Physics lecture and asking the (under?) graduates there "Who likes Physics?" is a rather obvious example, but more fundamentally, I fail to feel the driving force behind Stephen's obsession, and I want - NEED to see a more fundamental tension between Conrad and Stephen, even if this is not overt.You might suppose that I might be snobbish about the "Time Machine" itself, but it has a certain charm, reminiscent of something by HG Wells, and being appropriate for something very much the production of a mad professor in a shed at the end of the garden. Yes, there is an element of early Dr Who about an image of biplane's appearing in the smoke filled jar of the device, and yes - it's a pianola, and yes, the gateway DOES rather look like a hula hoop (thus beating the Hudsucker Proxy to the invention!) but hey, it's fun, at least! But the are holes in the plot that are far from fun, and which a bigger, better resourced film might have avoided. Such as what was Robert's motivation for travelling back in time? How long was Victoria in the well, if she had time to scratch out a message? Why the dinner party and ball - did they have some costumes they simply had to use? And if Conrad went first, how did he avoid Robert's fate? Did Stephen and Conrad together waltz their way through the labyrinth between worlds? And quite WHAT is Victoria saying when she says farewell to the Professor? And then there is the multi-verse approach. I don't object to this particularly, but it weakens the film to set it NOT in our version. And for the differences to be so trivial and farcical as calling an apple an orange? Better to leave the whole "99% sure" theory unproven, I'd suggest! So, a brave effort, and not by any means unworthy, but if you want a time-travel Sci-Fi film that actually challenges the viewer to keep up, I'd watch Primer instead.

This review - and the comment - was written at Cambridge Film Festival (15 to 25 September 2011), where the film had its UK premiere* Contains spoilers *Although it is received wisdom that 'I can't be in two places at once (or at the same time, in a variant)', not only is that usually just an excuse, but it is affected by developments in cloning.All that apart, the immense popularity of Dimensions, now (after screenings in Screens 2 and then 1) shown again, meant that I could go through the wormhole of watching again: the phrase does not sound favourable, but it is not intended unfavourably, as I was viewing twice to see what happened to something that I thought fine the first time.Why was it fine? It is an extremely intelligent film that uses the concept and theory of time-travel to say something about what I described in my blog as longing. I still think that it is longing, not just obsession – one can be obsessed about something (e.g. Jackie Chan cutting my head off) that (without being psychoanalytical), on the face of it (pun intended!), one does not long for, and long for something that does not obsess one.I said longing for something that one cannot have or that may not do one any good. In this film, that turns out not to be true on either count, and also involves a paradox. The events are separated by fifteen years, but, in some respects, the characters seem unchanged, seem stuck in some childish ways (as we all probably are – now who wants to play the psychology card, after all!), seem full of what I want to call longing. (I call it longing not only because I can't use the German word Sehnsucht, and, because of the connotations, I don't want to use yearning.) I asked a question about that at the premiere – the younger actors had had a chance to speak to their counterparts (and vice versa). What I find myself thinking, this time around, is that there is a generational as well as a dimensional character to all that we see, a temporal distortion that, as much as Alice's worlds reinterpret the present from which she enters Wonderland or the other Looking-Glass House, ripples (a key word in the script) as water, particles or time do with their differing wave-fronts. Which is why Ant Neely's brother's house on the river at Cambridge is such a benefit to and feature of this film.This Cambridge-driven film – Ernest Rutherford split the atom here in 1917, which was then done under both his direction and controlled conditions in 1932 - buzzes with that innovation, but buzzes in the direction of feelings, and Olivia Llewellyn's acting beautifully embodies the spirit of a bright and clear academic mind, seeking to help Henry-Lloyd-Hughes (as Stephen) achieve his brilliant aims.* * * * *To say a little more, enough to tease (as the film often does), about mirror-images, there is a scene that shows Stephen and his friend Victoria after they have tumbled to the ground in a sort of chase of and with themselves.As with something that happens later, which may (as Stephen's cousin Conrad first claims, and later appears unsure about it) - or may not - have been an accident, and which literally ties in with this moment, there is an embodiment of a skein, of the film's title's 'tangle of threads' (or the potential for it). It's a game, but there's bondage, the shackling that Joyce McKinney asserts was a sort of chosen cure, a sort of healing, in Tabloid, and with it there's the breathlessness associated with the other activity, there's the arbitrary rule-making that the game has to be played one way (counter-clockwise), an approach that can form rigid habits and stronger disciplines, not always for one's - or anyone else's - good in life (as with Stephen's father's former friend Richard?).So the mirror-image, of the game being played clockwise, can be imagined - as can any other action involving Victoria and Stephen - happening, but it offends against the street being declared to be one way. (Not too far off from thinking again of Rutherford, of thinking how the characters in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen revolve, dance, around each other like particles in a simple atom...) And the transposed image, the left / right flip? Set aside whether the falling down together, linked, was (as with Conrad's accident) deliberate - although it had to seem so, or not ambiguously so, for us: when we see Stephen and Victoria on the ground, from the waist up, side by side, they are, first of all, in that order, left to right. The picture (taken by the cinematographer, but not one that otherwise existed for Stephen to see (directly)), when he calls it to mind later, becomes Victoria and Stephen, she now on the left. (It is nearly summoned again, but we do not actually see it, are just so reminded of it that, as a ghost of a view, we could almost swear that its image is on our retina at that point, because we know it - or think that we know it - by then.) So these are the hints of Alice, these are the suggestions that, in a world as like ours as the one that she first sees in Looking-Glass House, things may be subtly different, actually harmful: as The Annotated Alice observes, with Martin Gardner talking about left- and right-handed molecules (which are identical but for being mirror-images of each other), milk would not be safe for Alice or her cat to drink in the world beyond the looking-glass. Matter and anti-matter? It goes on...Where would we be without the imagination of Ant Neely (the film's writer) or of Lewis Carroll? The poorer for it, I think.