Out of Time

This is a very low budget film, especially the first ten minutes or so. As such I was prepared to nap my way through it but surprisingly it really picks up about twenty minutes in. From then on it's a perfectly good little movie that I quite enjoyed. There's no reason for the negative reviews. If anything it's a bit above average for its budget and genre.

It features people you've never heard of before and never will again giving cringeworthy performances that wouldn't put a village amateur dramatic society to shame. However, even though the writing is laughably bad and everyone appears to be reading their lines for the first time it is strangely watchable and more than a little likeable. It's amazing what you can create with $100, a camera and a few hours to spare.

This is not a big budget sci-fi production and if you can get past the cheesy time travel effect at the movie's begining and hang on though some rough dialog until the two lead characters meet and begin interacting for a bit you might be pleasently surprised as well. Their relationship is the movie and it's not like you won't notice the rough edges, that's completely impossible, but at some point you will stop caring and just enjoy these two to a satisfying ending.

I enjoyed this film and -- despite a few people claiming it's terrible -- I found nothing really awful in it. Effects were about what you'd expect from the original Star Trek series. However, it's not a special effects film. All-in-all, they were in keeping with what was happening in the film.

The film has a distinct low-budget feel, but as it progressed I noticed that the camera angles and scene staging gave the impression that the director knew what he was doing. I looked up his previous efforts and found that he had directed a few well-reviewed shorts as well as having his hand in the film business in a variety of roles.

A few people pointed out that the dialog seemed wooden. I agree. I think the script could have used another re-write to smooth things out a bit. However, I was grateful that the film was devoid of the usual pile of idiots who are blind to the obvious. In other words, the types of characters that have to do certain things to move plot points: 1) see alien/strange behavior yet ignore it 2) do something nobody sane would do ("I'm going to give the terrorists what they want. Surely they will let us go then") 3) panics needlessly. I suppose that list could grow longer. Fortunately for my sanity, our time traveler at least tried to keep that to himself knowing the incredulity he'd face. And the incredulous tended to wise up when they saw the evidence.

It's not a completely original story; it starts out almost exactly like The Hidden (1987), only with three bad body-hopping aliens pursued by one time-traveler posing as an FBI agent, along with a reluctant local cop who has to be convinced these are aliens, instead of one bad body-hopping alien pursued by one good body-hopped alien posing as an FBI agent, also along with a reluctant local cop who has to be convinced, etc. (Also note that the FBI agent here is named "Cooper," which was Kyle MacLachlan's character's name in "Twin Peaks"; MacLachlan played the FBI agent in The Hidden.) Also, the idea of a time-traveling good-guy and/or cop from the past chasing one or more bad guys into the future was used in the movie Time After Time (1979), among others, and more recently in the TV series Continuum (2012-15), and probably a few others whose titles I can't remember.

That said, it's a good movie, considering the low budget. The supporting cast could be better, but the two main characters are well-acted enough. The special effects and dialogue are probably the biggest weaknesses, and there are plenty of cliches involved, but overall it's worth seeing, and maybe even fun in spots.