Timecrimes

"Time is a storm in which we are all lost." William Carlos Williams

"Time flies around here," says Hector's (Karra Elejalde) girl friend before time gets warped maliciously when he goes back in a time machine for about an hour. The ironic statement could as well apply to this intelligent sci fi, Time Crimes, that actually tries to show what confusion will reign if we ever do time travel.

While this Spanish thriller is reminiscent of Memento's playing with time and memory and various other time travel fictions, it lacks psycho-philosophical depth (notwithstanding the Hitchcock relevance of the hero using binoculars to see a fetching lass). Even more, character exploration is secondary to the puzzle of time traveling. The film, concerned with the tricky interplay of cause and effect in the travel, could have given more to the ethical-humanistic implications of voyeurism and bending nature to our will.

Its atmosphere is creepy enough, a black and white effect from muted color, a semi-real world where appearance and reality collide, not unlike this time-bound life itself without the machine. Its heroine, a beautiful nude played by Barbara Goenaga, suggests those Freudian chambers of our hearts where desire and violence seem only a door opening or time change away.

In an age of "system restore," where we can set our computers back in time, altering the continuum to expunge viruses and such makes the premise of Timecrimes seem almost possible. The ramifications from our computer restore are usually saving time and money; from a time machine may come a chance to upset the balance of nature, to throw ourselves into a primitive state of lawlessness. At least that's how writer director Nacho Vigalondo sees it, and his film theorizes.

Nice to have a thoughtful movie these days.

Quite often, time-travelling films are too pompeous and full of complex moral dilemmas. This treasure has nothing of a sort. It is, finally, a story about "little man" in unusual circumstances of time travelling. A man, who isn't very bright, who isn't destined to save the world, who isn't parcticularly "good" or "bad". This - this is what I genuinely enjoyed whatching. There's no higher power behind all of this, nor great or malicious power - no, the hero is driven mostly by his own actions, worldview and lack of rationality. Because of that, more interesting things become when he starts falling into the bottomless pit of wrong choices, inevitable circumstances and despair. Hector is very much usual - and that's what makes the story so tense and interesting.

I love many time-travel movies, and this one seems very clever and tightly plotted at first, especially while you are watching it and figuring out how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together very nicely. But there is one big problem that others have already pointed out:

The things that he does mostly make no sense, and most of the movie is spent having him repeat these things that make no sense the next time he goes around the time loop, just so that the events in the first time happen the way he remembers them. And that's not clever.

I can do this easily by making up a simple example: Joe is sitting in his living room and sees a dead bird thrown through his window, he goes out to investigate, falls into a time-machine into the past, then when he sees himself in the living room, he kills a bird and throws it through the window so that he will go out to investigate. The End.

Not very satisfying is it?

There are elements that make this movie entertaining, especially the dark way that he solves the final problem and the fact that there are three versions of himself running around trying to make or stop things from happening, but otherwise, it's just an extended version of my story.

It's essentially a rewrite of Robert A. Heinlein's 1941 short story "By His Bootstraps".

The plot of recent Spanish hit "Time Crimes" is fairly simple:Hector accidentally gets into a time machine and travels back in time nearly an hour.Finding himself will be the first of a series of disasters of unforeseeable consequences.The feature length debut of Nacho Vigalondo is a pretty good science-fiction thriller with a sprinkle of horror thrown in.The time machine looks similarly to the contraptions used in 60's time travel sci-fi flicks.The central performance of Karra Elejalde is excellent and his character is sympathetic and believable.Although many of the twists and turns of the story can be guessed quite early on,they are in some ways all the more enjoyable for that and Vigalondo impressively combines thriller,horror,dark comedy and even slapstick elements without making things feel forced.A little bit of nudity provided by beautiful Barbara Goenaga certainly helps!