Aporia

All time travel stories require varying degrees of suspension of disbelief. The only fully self consistent plots involve "closed loop" stories, like Predestination, but those require us to give up on the concept of free will. Some are just incredibly stupid (Looper comes to mind). On the scale of things, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure isn't all that bad.

The good thing about this movie, is that it puts the really implausible stuff right at the beginning, and once it establishes the rules, it mostly sticks to them.

Two randos build a (sort of) time machine out of what looks like a Commodore 64 and a pile of literal junk (seriously, this movie gets a solid F for prop design). Rather than send people back in time, it has one and only one capability: it allows the users to kill a specific person in the past, as long as they can locate that person at a specific time, and of course this tees up a classic morality dilemma.

This changes the present and everyone in it, but because "yada yada yada quantum mechanics", anyone in the room with the machine will remember the original timeline - and NOT have any of the memories they should have in the new timeline. This is actually an issue for a lot of time travel movies, they generally just sweep under the rug rather than confronting it outright.

They start with a pretty clear case where killing a bad person in the past will save the life of a innocent person, but it won't be a spoiler to tell you that this has unintended consequences and that their attempts to set things right will just make things worse, or at least put them further and further from their original world.

So in the end, it's a mix of the butterfly effect, the multiverse, and the Trolley Problem. In spite of some of the other reviews, I found the acting and emotions pretty good. I think it would have made a good Twilight Zone or Black Mirror Episode, but stretching it to a full length movie got a little thin.

I didn't hate the ending, but a lot of people did.

The idea and twist on the conventional time travel genre was what interested me and ultimately kept me watching, but sadly, this film missed on a huge opportunity to capitalize on the concept. What follows is a meek, dull, repetitive - albeit though provoking story, that I felt was too aloof, riddled with plot holes, that asks too many unanswered questions.

The narrative kept spinning itself in circles but lacked finding more engaging material aside from the expected results. Plus I only found Greer's performance being the most nuanced, and not sure how or why Maadi was cast, as he was unconvincing, and I was constantly annoyed between trying to decipher his accent and seeing his backwards bowl short hairline-cut.

Additionally, the so called time machine wasn't convincing, and felt like an Inspector Gadget cartoon concoction put together from spare parts from a wrecking yard. So I'm not sure what film the critics saw that rated this so high, but I wasn't buying what the filmmaker was selling, and I surely didn't enjoy spending a slowly paced underwhelming 104 minutes to get such a lazy ending.

However, the concept is good.

What if you could kill somebody in the past

• whose action kills people and turns people miserable
• whose immoral action turns people miserable
• whose simple action turns people miserable
• who simply turns you miserable

Such quandaries hold the potential to produce a fantastic film.

But we don't see their past, and how it could affect the present; instead, a different present simply emerges. It made the director and writer's job much easier, as they lack original ideas

The dialogues are considerably basic, and the scenes are even more so. Standing at the open fridge, pondering what to take out... There are so many pointless moments to fill the film.

The actors struggle with the non-adapted dialogues and non-working connections.

It's all so superficial, simplistic, almost parodying.

Wasting my time made me upset and I interrupted watching after about 10 minutes, but then I read about the topic and decided to give it a go.

It is not given a second chance.

I have the impression that this film wouldn't have the same charm if it wasn't super indie like it is. The story is about someone who invents a time machine and I imagine if there was money, this prop would be terribly sophisticated, the soundtrack would be present from beginning to end (something that really irritates me in Hollywood cinema) and there would be an all-star cast.

So, we have a well-known actress and others a little less so, but they don't do a bad job. I watched the film from beginning to end without getting bored at all, the story is well told and there are moments of tension and mystery. I would like to not reveal anything that would spoil the experience for those who haven't seen the film yet, but I repeat that it's not bad at all and I don't think anyone will regret watching it. It's a relief to watch a film that doesn't need the usual Hollywood gimmicks.

I'll save you the time: it has no resolution. I hate non-endings, open endings or whatever it is called when writers/directors can't commit to an ending. Don't know what to write as an ending? Let's make it super cool and make the audience figure it out!!! Argh. I am very much annoyed by these "endings", so I wanted to warn you so that you can skip it or at least have realistic expectations.

Imagine the ending of "The Good Son" where you don't know which kid the mom decides to drop at the cliff scene. That they just cut to her pondering her choices (unknown to you) at the end. Lame, right? Anti-climatic.

Pros: I really enjoyed seeing Judy Greer as the main character because I love her acting, but other than that, meh.

I love time-travel stories and I'll suspend belief in whatever you tell me the workings of the machine/ mind time travel entail. I did like the premise of it and found it interesting but with no ending, all the build up comes to nothing :(