The Time Shifters

We don't expect much from made-for-TV movies with a cast of unknowns. But actually, the Time Shifter is an engaging, well-acted science fiction piece that got me thinking.

Primarily, this is due to Casper Van Dien, who plays the starring role, which involves a lot of running around frantically, determined to explain what's going on to himself and others through various natural disasters.

Who should see this film:

-- Science fiction movie buffs

-- Action movie buffs comfortable with the science fiction genre and with nothing better to do

-- Time-travelers looking to waste a little time in-between stops

I'll give "The Time Shifters", which you can find in video rental, a 7 out of 10.

I'm a big fan of time travel movies even when they are lousy, but this is the plot to "Timeshifters" as I see it: a time-traveler from the future played by Julian Richings travels back in time to view the destruction of a nuclear plant. Distracting a reporter (Casper Van Dien), he causes the reporter to survive his would-be death altering the timeline to his future. The reporter's survival alters the outcomes of three more major disasters and results in yet another alternate future. Described from this angle, the movie would have been very boring, but instead told from Van Dien's character's point of view, we have a top notch action film with two MIB bounty hunters, shifting time-lines and a father reunited with his son. Van Dien is marvelous and convincing and Catherine Bell of "JAG" looks incredible (she's also a great actress). The "archive" photos of Richings at the Titanic, Hindenburg, and others disasters look very good as do the other special effects and plot twists. This is one movie I would want to see over and over!

Sometimes, you will find a little gem between all the cheap and poor B-movies that was aired all night on TV. "Thrill Seekers" is really one of this seldom gems and shows clearly, that you don't need a few 100-million dollars to made a good movie. The story makes it! And the story of the tourists from the future that traveling along the time-line to visit disasters of the past, is a very good plot. Our hero (living in our time) examines some old photos of disasters and make a very strange discovery... I will do not spoil the movie for you, but the many surprises and a lot of good twists (especially the last, and i mean the really very last :-) make it better than a lot of big Hollywood films that only works with massive action and CG-effects to cover a weak plot. Yes, you will probably find some logical errors in the film, but if you make a movie about time-travels, you can't avoid it, because nobody knows, what is really a logical error when time-travel warp the logic, or that, what we called logic, itself. So, what is going on when you go back in time and change the past... will you change the future, or some alternate futures in a multilevel universe? Who knows! And perhaps some visitors of the future are already among us... maybe it's a good idea to examine the photos of yesterdays disasters again and more exactly... I give it a 7 of 10. It is really worth to see it!

I was not expecting much of this movie, because it was obviously made for TV. The summary in the TV guide made it sound interesting, although it was not exactly clear what the movie was about. I'm glad I didn't give it a miss, because it really was worth watching. I think it took me about 20 minutes to understand exactly what was going on, and that Caspar Van Dien's character was not going to be the one doing the time travelling, but once I realised that, I really began to enjoy the movie. It's not often nowadays that I sit through an entire movie, and am glued to the screen, but I was with this one and it wasn't entirely predictable either. I like a movie that makes you think about the situations it portrays, and time travel is a fascinating topic. The acting probably wasn't perfect, but I've seen much worse, and I put this movie on the same level as "Deep Impact" - it has substance.

Zapping through the movie channels last evening, I came across: Next feature presentation: Thrill Seekers with Martin Sheen. I wonder if one could sue the channel for this kind of tendentious (but not factually wrong) publicity? Anyway, it made me decide to watch. Hardly any Martin Sheen, but entertaining for sure, and with surprisingly decent special effects for a TV movie. The plot is intelligent, and would be a good starting point to get people to discuss the paradoxes of time travel. Suppose you could go back and kill Hitler before he came to power, would you do it? But if you would, can you be certain nothing worse would happen? And how would it affect your own life? Would you still exist, even? (My parents met because of the war.) Or: if you go back to a time after you are born, can you meet yourself? All of this is hardly original, of course. SF writers in the golden age (which was sadly ended by Star Wars, shifting from intelligent writing to blockbuster special effects) frequently tackled the issue, for instance describing the butterfly effect: a firm organises time trips to the Jurassic, where thrill seeking (again!) hunters can kill a dinosaur a fraction of a moment before it would have died, thus not altering the time line. But one hunter stumbles and accidentally kills a butterfly. He gets back to his starting date, but the killed butterfly has changed the time line and this new line turns out to be the hunter's worst nightmare. Something similar happens in Thrill Seekers. But here the protagonist has the means to go back in time to change a future he has already experienced. This, of course, was already obvious from the moment they take the laptop from the disaster tourist. In fact, Merrick could have used that device to go back to before he boarded the plane and, using some kind of subterfuge, a bomb alarm for instance, avert the plane crash, and the subway crash, and the fire... But we wouldn't have had the same film then.

One question of logic though. If Merrick goes back into his original time line, the time guards would also be in there, but unaffected by what will happen later. In the film, they follow Merrick back from the future. The film does not explain this. But the question doesn't end there. If you go back to when you were 3 hours earlier, you would also not yet have any memories of what was going to happen those next 3 hours. Merrick and the time guards should not have had any knowledge of the disaster happening 3 hours in the future.

I also wonder how the title sequence relates to the film. I admit I wasn't paying a lot of attention, trying to figure out when Martin Sheen would be mentioned, but in retrospect I wonder if there wasn't any subtle message in the sequence?