Ok, first of all, all the positive reviews with a high score are made from bot accounts, since all of those fake users have only one review (of the film) and those are mostly overwhelmingly positive. I'm not judging anyone, but this is not a good practice to promote a film.
Second, the production quality is way under the level of a 2020 production. I understand the budgetary limitations, but it seems like they spent their budget on the wrong things. It doesn't look good, the color correction is messy, dubbing is also not a good thing for a film in 2020. The CGI is fine, but the film could've done without it. It wasn't a good idea to boost your film's look by spending money on that. Especially since they re-use those a couple of times (using the same CGI sequences backwards).
This is followed by the third and the most important point, which is - inexperience of the creators. It shows in every aspect, the writing, the structure of the film, all the basic aspects of filmmaking.
The inspirations were very clear and the ideas of Stephen King (homages to characters from IT and more), classic time travel sci-fi elements (Time Machine), Lovecraftian unspeakable horror are all present, but all of these are undermined by point #3.
Instead of being a 2hr slow film with lots of tearjerking and not particularly interesting dialogue, this could've been a mini-series (yes, I understand the budgetary limits). There was no need to reverse the story, especially in a confusing way they did it (again, stemming from point #3). If you want your audience to understand what is going on, you have to give basic locations, dates, establishing shots.
The acting was also very uneven, kid actors were surprisingly fine, but some of the more mature performances were horrendous. The overacting of the actor who played Nate Beaumont was a mental pain. His overexaggerated facial expressions were a real pain to watch.
Again, if the story would move from the start to finish the evolution of the characters would be easier to understand, again, the film that also inspired this - Contact (1997) managed that. There are many good films that handle jumps in time much better, like Starship Troopers. It would've been interesting to see what these kids will grow into, and how everything will fall into place. But in this film, they made a mess of it, and due to low production quality (they didn't even have the ability to apply old-age make-up) it doesn't work.
The story is rushed through even though this is a 2hr film, they give lots of unnecessary details, it feels very cheap (but again, because they just didn't have enough experience to cut corners where possible and save money for the more important parts).
It clearly wasn't the worst film I have ever seen, and the ideas are there, but the ideas they had were obviously beyond their grasp in many aspects, not only due to limited resources. So low budget is not an excuse, I've seen better acted and more immersive Russian detective series, with a budget of 10 grand.
Many renowned directors started with cheap films and they only became big because they were able to make good films with only their enthusiasm and creativity.
So I would like to wish the creators to get back to these ideas a couple of years from now, re-think, re-write and try to make a bigger and better film out of this. James Cameron would never be able to create a big-budget masterpiece of Terminator 2 if he would not demonstrate his creative genius while making a lesser in scale but still good Terminator.
And please, drop these practices of botting your scores, it diminishes the credibility of your work.
