Time Wars

I generally like to watch any movies that have elements of time travel in them in any way. Even some of the low-budget time-travel b-movies out there can be enjoyable.

However this movie is totally let down by the voice acting/dubbing done. It appears the actors are mostly Russian and I imagine it was filmed in Russia too. The problem is, the actors do all speak in English but the voices we hear, very obviously, are not the actors on the screen. They seemingly had some random/generic American voice actors do ADR for the movie. Presumably because the Russian actors playing the parts had accents?

I feel like this odd choice ruined the film and really took me out of watching it. I would have rather had just heard the actors' real voices with their accents instead of this nonsense. Heck I would have even rathered they spoke in Russian and just had subtitles in English to what they did here.

Really odd production choice, I don't recall seeing another modern movie like this, and hope I don't come across another!

The whole movie has a stilted quality like anime or a video game cutscene. This could have been an interesting stylistic choice, but instead I'm pretty sure it's not intended. Much of it is due to the bad voice-over. It seems the movie was made for an English audience (the actors are mouthing English), but I think each actor's voice was redubbed. Poorly.

Then there's the cartoonishly stereotyped characters, and overused plot devices. It's not predictable so much as derivative.

Buoying all this up is some pretty decent production value. Sets and props are detailed and believable, cinematography and lighting are quite attractive. And Underneath it all is a fairly interesting story if you can get past the god-awful over-dubbing. And the god-awful MacGuffin name "quantanium".

Overall the movie seems to be pretty good in terms of story and production quality but for some reason they chose to dub it into English even though it appears as though most of the movie is already in English. The voice acting is cheesy and doesn't often match what the actor is actually doing on screen. Would be interesting to see it with its original audio tracks and maybe subtitles for non-english moments.

With due respect, enough with the 'give everything you don't like a 1-star rating' ... it does not do this movie justice. Did they even watch the movie? I've given my share of 1's ... this movie is FAR from that. OK, not a theater-level film, but it is closer to that than a 1!

So, credit where due. The first thing is the camera and scenery work: the crew obviously really knew what they were doing. Pretty good direction too; some of the shot setups were creative and kept the audience focused. The acting was spot on, to a cooky kind of script.

So it is a cooky story, but did not have any big holes. It is SciFi so a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is required, but nothing this movie doesn't handle very well. In fact if I were into the genre I would likely have rated this higher.

This one is well worth the time.

Granted, the film suffers from a lack of budget and the voice dubbing (at least the French version) is of mediocre quality (but you get used to that in the end). The script often lacks credibility (for example, when a character is hit from behind, and gets up without trying to find out who hit him...). The background to the story isn't entirely original, and some of the plot elements are hackneyed. OK, OK. But if you make the effort to follow the first 45 minutes (i.e. With your smartphone switched off - this isn't a Facebook-compatible flick), the film gradually gains in depth and interest grows exponentially. It's an atypical science fiction film, or rather a typically Eastern European one, in the vein of the Polish or Russian science fiction writers of the 50s and 60s. Cerebral writing tinged with poetry, lyricism and romanticism.

Despite all its faults, which I don't dispute, I had a much more enjoyable and satisfying time watching it than I did watching The Rise of Skywalker. Not difficult, you might say. True, but ...