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This is a direct-to-video production with corresponding production values and acting. Well, the mayhem about the stadium looks almost as good as a big-budget disaster movie. Usually the subject of time travel offers infinite possibilities that are mostly mutilated by a weak script, but Thrill Seekers (yes, USA title or not, i get it on cable by that title) offers an intelligent story with plenty of intelligent twists - telling more would spoil the surprise. The atmosphere is also good, though the music has little merit in that : Tourists visiting disaster areas & war zones exist, sadly enough, but the emotionlessness that comes with it does not show until you have seen this. The best part is, it lives up to an expectation few time travel movies can develop to : in the end, the plot comes together. The sole major turn-off : Casper van Dien with a beard. He has this i-want-back-to-shark-attack look glued to his eyes.

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?

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!

This movie is, happily, not a waste of time. It is fairly intelligent, and for the most part manages not to get too lost in temporal theory. The premise lies with Tom Merrick (Casper Van Dien), a former award-winning reporter now working for a tabloid, discovering that the same person was present at the RMS Titanic sinking, the Hindenburg crash, and an electrical plant fire where Merrick nearly lost his life. As he investigates, he attracts the attention of some strange agents who might be time travellers.

While the movie is relatively fast paced and manages to steer clear of too many cliches, it is unfortunately marred by a couple of gaping plot holes. However, it is nice to know that Casper Van Dien can actually act, and he manages to do a decent job on this one.

So, the final verdict: not too bad SF, and fairly good entertainment for two hours. 3.5/5

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.