Shifter

Functional Sci Fi movies make sense internally and have a sense of cohesiveness. This one doesn't. At all. Because a young girl can assemble a clock, we are asked to accept the fact that she, as a young adult, can make a time machine from barnyard parts. No mention of HOW time travel or shifting is possible, what the method is, or how it was discovered, etc.

Then we shift into incredibly wooden acting and even worse dialog. Like a high school demo reel, if that.

Then it's on to fits of fast-forward (on my part) to see if there's anything worth watching.

And there isn't.

You have been warned.

This film seems to be getting some fairly brutal reviews, but I think it might be because this is an especially difficult film to review as and entire package because there are so many conflicting layers to it. Conceptually, you have an incredibly unique and inventive cautionary tale about time manipulation, but the narrative is repeatedly dragged down by too many bland, poorly conceived, and unrealistic characters, given to actors who can't make the poor dialogue and awkward scenes work very well. Then you have really solid visual and sound editing, with some very passable ultra low-budget special effects to keep the story going. Despite all the failings of this film, it's important to consider the budget they had to work with, and time of production; which was seemingly none in both cases.

For fans of unique scifi, especially inventive takes on time travel, I highly recommend giving this film a shot for it's overall concepts and production, but keep your expectations on performances and dialogue especially low to make your trudge through the film much easier.

This movie just jumped around too much, and I don't know why they thought it necessary for the character to throw up so.

As a fan of indie film I'll watch anything, But then you get burned like this. Good premise, but bad acting, bad directing and miserable writing. The director has an eye for cinematography but he can't direct an actor or tell an enjoyable story. Bad writing is the worst culprit. I watched the whole thing as a fan of the time travel genre, I didn't even get a descent paradox, just silly reasoning and lazy writing to get us to the special effects scenes. Also worst time machine ever

Shifter currently sits at a 3.6/10 on IMDb, which is unfair to all the good qualities of the film. With a rating like that, I was ready and expecting to see something really awful, poorly shot, and cheesy. Shifter is none of those things, and it's actually quite good. Overall,

Shifter is definitely not a bad film. It's well shot and has a creepy pace with a downer ending. The performances are quite good too, which is especially impressive considering these are mostly local unknown actors. It certainly feels bigger than it really is. However, it's just a bit too slow; i appreciated the slow pace and the quiet ambience of the film, but after a while it just gets boring. Shifter feels more like a short film that was unsuccessfully stretched to feature length than it does a film that feels natural at 90 minutes...not even 90 minutes at that.

I enjoyed enough of the film and it certainly utilized its microbudget extremely well. I'd like to see what this creative team could do with a larger budget, but the budget was clearly not an issue here. Most of my problems had to do with the writing, which costs no money to perfect.