Chasseurs de frissons

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?

As time-traveling stories go, this one's better than average. The writers did a decent job trying to account for all the inevitable paradoxes, and the story itself is decently paced and involving.

Casper Van Dien plays Tom Merrick, an ex-TV-journalist trying to put his life back together after an accident cost his crew their lives and him his job. He goes to work as a reporter for a local tabloid, and while investigating disasters of the 20th century, he stumbles upon an incredible coincidence; pictures taken at 3 disasters several decades apart include what appears to be the same man. Catherine Bell plays Elizabeth Wintern, another worker at the tabloid who gets caught up in Merrick's quest to find out who this man is. Merrick and Wintern eventually learn that a company in the future is offering entertainment packages, allowing people to go back in time and witness history's greatest disasters... including some that haven't happened yet as far as Merrick and Wintern are concerned. Merrick takes it upon himself to stop these impending disasters, and finds himself pursued by both "temporal security agents" who are trying to keep their timeline intact, and by local police who think Merrick has planned these events himself.

Don't take my compliments at face value; the movie is far from perfect. There are several plot holes and gloss-overs. I found the writers' ideas on how time travel works to be inconsistent in places. Martin Sheen is completely wasted in his role, having all of maybe 5 minutes of screen time. Finally, in many places I began wondering who I should really root for. Merrick is supposed to be the hero of the movie, trying to keep these "future" disasters from occurring, but at the same time, I could sympathize with the people from the future trying to stop him, especially after I learned what Merrick's actions cause to the future population.

Pitfalls aside, this is an engaging, well-acted movie that will make you think about the morality of time travel. A very solid 6 out of 10.

We don't expect much from made-for-TV movies with a cast of unknowns. But actually, the Time Shifter is an engaging, well-acted science fiction piece that got me thinking.

Primarily, this is due to Casper Van Dien, who plays the starring role, which involves a lot of running around frantically, determined to explain what's going on to himself and others through various natural disasters.

Who should see this film:

-- Science fiction movie buffs

-- Action movie buffs comfortable with the science fiction genre and with nothing better to do

-- Time-travelers looking to waste a little time in-between stops

I'll give "The Time Shifters", which you can find in video rental, a 7 out of 10.

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.

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.