41

Full review on my blog max4movies: 41 is an independent science fiction movie about a student of philosophy, who discovers a trap door in a motel room that leads to the past. The premise is basic but interesting, and the movie is mostly well executed, with great cinematography and an atmospheric score. The performances are somewhat middling, but the main actor mostly does a decent job. The plot is overall thrilling and clever, however, the ending will throw some viewers off, due to a central plot hole. Still, the movie is efficiently made and demonstrates that science fiction can also deal with very down-to-earth issues.

Albeit a low cost production movie, the story is well played. Don't expect big expensive special effects or a new approach in quantum physics to time travel.

Just a simple, yet captivating story about a time traveller.

Movie starts off the usual way by presenting us the characters and then develops throughout the plot. So far so good, but in the middle of the movie things just kinda go slow, but then it picks up pace wonderfully until the end.

A most excellent and entertaining film, well written and scored. The dialogue was at times thought provoking and, to be honest, was more or less in line with my thoughts on time travel which is as good a reason as any to like it! Perhaps a better script might have ruined it, and special effects would not have suited the films nuances and quirks. I have never come across a bad Australian film and this, being no exception, is a better one than some other highly glossy and commercial ones. In many ways this reminds me of a typical British film shot with lots of love on a low budget - earthy and local, with no pretensions. Plot holes were easy to forgive given that there were few for the given budget, and that, apart from the police scenes, the acting was of a quality any director would be pleased with. I enjoyed it. I would have bought this!

Delving into this area of extremely low budget time travel sci-fi gets with it the inevitable comparison to 2004 film "Primer" which was a masterwork of excruciatingly hard sci-fi.

Here, the mechanisms are largely unimportant, even though there is an entire scene devoted to basically expo-dumping how it works in the form of hypotheticals and quizzing of a small group of four philosophers and scientists.

Some guy named Aidan is driving in his car with his ex-girlfriend when suddenly someone jumps in front of the car while he's driving at night and it crashes, killing her and hospitalizing him. He meets a seemingly loony old man in the hospital who tells him to go to a motel and go to room 41 and crawl in a hole in the bathroom floor. Earlier in the film, someone who looked exactly like him told him not to go to that motel. So naturally he goes in.

From there he learns that going through the hole and emerging brings him about 12 hours into the past. From there, he tries to change what happened with his ex-girlfriend and the like.

Where the film falters, for me at least, is that it seems to not be able to decide upon what type of "time travel paradox" to go with. The presence of himself earlier in the film and the revelation about the cause of the crash would seem to imply a predestination paradox where he is in a situation where time is fixed, and any attempt he makes to change the past has already been done.

But then at the same time, other mutually incompatible paradoxes are toyed with as well, including a "multiple universes branching off" and some others. Toying with many different ideas for time travel would be something interesting to see if done well; the problem is it is not done well here. In some cases we don't even know what is happening and the determining factor as to whether Aidan is able to change something in the past amounts to "Whatever the script feels like".

As well, it drags in several places, and takes an awful long time to get to a really intriguing "Wow" moment, by which time the film was essentially over with barely 10 minutes left. Whether or not the extra focus or attention to detail would've helped or hindered the film I probably wouldn't be able to say, but for what it is, it was a neat enough film.

This is an amateur film and parts of it are good, but for the most part it is still very amateur. Perhaps the best aspect is the directing and editing, which are probably good enough for mainstream film, but nothing amazing. The editing was well done, but again, fairly standard. Like any amateur film the acting ranges from reasonable to bad, but that's not exactly the directors fault given the limited budget.

By far the biggest problem is the script which at times is quite poor, most noticeably when attempting to pose deep, metaphysical questions. At times I could hear the voice of the director speaking through his actors, and this sounded inept. In amateur film the scripting and plot are perhaps the only things not really held back by a restricted budget, and unfortunately neither aspect was that good. The film failed to evolve a coherent sense of empathy for the main protagonist, it feigned emotion more than produced any and nothing ever really became that interesting or exciting. Some characters, most noticeably the cops, were little more than 2-bit cliché's, and there were quite a few moments which were unnecessary, melodramatic and time-wasting.

Having said that it's not unwatchable and as amateur film goes it's probably one of the better ones. But the director, in my opinion, is not ready to make feature length titles and needs to develop his abilities further, especially his screen-writing and scripting if he wants to write his own material. On the positive, however, I have seen Hollywood films that annoyed me far more and that's saying something.