Paradox

I've seen worse. Let's start with the music. Very soap opera reminiscent and a tad too loud. The lighting seemed fine, but the sound was odd. During the scenes where the actors were speaking in a normal volume, it was good. During the scenes where the characters were in a panic (and the actors were way over the top), the sound was somehow...hollow. I can't explain it. It was almost as if they knew the sound quality wasn't great, so they bumped up the volume on the music.

The premise, of course, is always fun. You could spend hours pondering the time travel paradox through your mind to no avail. The screenplay itself wasn't bad. I can only assume that the direction given the actors was to be intentionally over the top. Less is more in film, they know that. These are experienced actors. Was Michael Hurst simply catering to the B film fans?

Then again, Michael Hurst is providing work to actors that need to keep working. He's also likely having fun shooting, making a little money and building his own resume. I love Scifi...quality Scifi. If you enjoyed Ex Machina, Europa Report, Predestination, Snowpiercer, Automata, et cetera, then you will not find this to be worth your time. It could have been quite good had they slowed down and allowed for quality acting to come through. It felt like they rushed through to save money and were quite satisfied with just another B movie. It's a shame.

I was tricked into giving this one some time by the first 2 reviews in the list. They lied. While the story synopsis implies there might be an interesting sci fi setup floating about, the first 10 mins of terrible acting, stale scenes and exposition make you not care about waiting to find out. The first scene was like an 80s kids drama of 'acting'. All fake urgency and 'drama'. The next scene with 2 cops in a car giving us the run down on the central group of scientists they were watching dragged on for what seemed like hours. I'm not sure it ever stopped. The 'scientists' were giving it their best 'teen 80s delinquent' impersonations which made me wonder if this movie was a tongue in cheek nod to those crappy movies of that period, (like we need more of them?), but that thought soon left my mind as I wished it to be over as soon as possible, but that wasn't going to happen till the full 90 minutes of excruciating was over. This is not worth your time. It's not clever, it's not funny, it's just boring, and badly done at that.

If you stick with it it gets better the longer it runs. So it's easy to stick with it :) The time stuff don't worry about it, and who can ever work that out anyway. It's an interesting film obviously a lower budget but that doesn't stop a good story. And this has a good story. Well a very passable story. As I said in the tittle I think it's a good movie, not incredible but a lot better than many other movies of this budget. Worth a watch. It's actually a bit of a thriller really. A who done it who is the killer type of thing. In the end you find out everything and it's rewarding.

This flick is clearly not for everyone. If you need a fix of mindless entertainment, keep looking. If you want to try meeting the challenge of following multiple time loops that fold over on themselves, you'll be right at home.

Best viewing might result if you separate the movie into categories of Acting and Premise. Yes, the acting is uninspired, and the half dozen or so characters are largely under developed. They display a liberal helping of the nerd quality that goes with a small team (somehow) building a time travel machine unnoticed. But, their judgment ratchets back to plain ordinary or worse as they deal with mounting problems.

IMO, the premise and writing are where this story shines. There have been a lot of sci-fi tales that toy with time travel and multiple (or alternate) time lines. The easiest to understand and follow is the classic reboot, where events don't quite match a previous story, but story progression is relatively linear. Even when there is some interaction or movement of characters between parallel time lines, it's still relatively easy to keep up.

"Paradox" is the other flavor of time travel. In this case, the timeline includes not one, but multiple loops between the present and one hour into the future. Characters try coming to grips with concepts such as destiny, and whether they can alter the fates that seem to await all of them. At the heart is the question whether one can go into the past to change an event responsible for a current undesirable situation, and, of course, what happens if you meet yourself (or can you?). There is even an honorable mention of "Schrödinger's cat." The fact that a writer kept this all sorted out is worth the watch.

So to repeat: if you don't want to think, move along. If you want a challenge, press "Play."

Clearly this is made on a relative small budget for straight to TV\DVD release, which maybe some should consider if scoring based on films with ten to a hundred times the budget with visuals to match.

So I try to review based more on acting and story. The first 15 minutes or so of acting in fairness did seen rather poor but certainly picked up during the film.

Sadly the time machine itself seemed very unrealistic and I was left feeling they could have put far more effort into that than they did with what seemed like nothing more than a bit of stage rigging that you often see in pop-up form in shopping centers etc when they have "celebrity" appearances etc. However I tried to not let that bother me to much and just try to enjoy what was clearly a budget film. Soundtrack was decent enough and certainly helped with the atmosphere for the film quite a lot so top marks on that.

The story itself was certainly above average for these budget films and no real pointless angles or daft endings even if a very slight twist in the end. Sure, if you over analyze the script and scenes you will find plot holes to complain about quite easily. But it's not supposed to be or claiming to be a factually or theoretically correct on the script front. If your willing to just sit and watch the film without over analyzing or judging it to much based on budget it's quite an enjoyable film to fill 90 minutes.