41

Like some of the other reviewers, I came upon this film completely by accident. And like one other reviewer, I planned to watch about 10 minutes and watch the rest another time. But the movie pulled me in and stayed with me until the end.

It's a most unusual time-travel story. Although some of the concepts have been used before, this takes them in a different direction. It's a quiet, slow-paced movie, so if you're looking for quick action, you'll find it in short supply. But the atmosphere is as important as the plot progress and the dialog. It reminds me a little bit of David Gerrold's "The Man Who Folded Himself".

If you're looking to settle down and watch something out of the ordinary -- and you're willing to give it your attention and accept its pacing -- you'll find it very rewarding.

About half way through I was ready to call it a day and stop this movie. It wasn't bad, but it was moving along little too slowly.

I'm glad I finished watching this film, the last 25 minutes more than made up for any perceived slowness early on.

No spoilers, but, you will be glad you watched it.

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.

This film is pretty good makes you think makes you pay attention. I thought I would turn it on and watch it for a few minutes and end up turning it off; like I do eight out of 10 movies these days. I found myself not wanting to turn it off. It's good and has a great twist.