Saw Fate, a film about time-travel. It follows a young attractive physicist who is trying to prevent his fiancé from dying via time-travel. I think it was trying to be like Primer, a low-budget but cerebral puzzle of a film, however the filmmakers didn't quite have the puzzle-making instincts and just made a really dumb movie instead.
Now, the film is not atrocious or like obviously incompetently made. It's not The Room, however it's not well thought-out and is kind of obvious all of the time. The most glaring example of this is the time travel mechanism itself. In time travel stories, they need some way to deal with the "grandfather paradox": what if I go back in time and shoot my own grandfather when he was young? Shouldn't I pop out of existence? But then wouldn't my grandfather remain un-shot? so, time travel movies pick one of two resolutions to this: either my grandfather is shot and events progress in a sort of parallel-universe where I was never born, however the "me" from the alternate universe where I was born continues to exist (and can sometimes even return to my home universe to see that my grandfather remains un-shot there,) or the film decides that there's only one universe and that although I may intend to go back in time to shoot my grandfather, I must have been prevented in some way because if I weren't then I wouldn't exist hence paradox.
Films that make the first choice are usually more unrealistic day-dreams about unintended consequences; that killing baby Hitler unleashes an even worse mega-Hitler. Films of the second type are usually more grounded films about accepting reality: you can't change the past, so better to spend your energy on the present. This film seems to lean towards the latter category, with the physicist's wise, avuncular, wheelchair-bound mentor frequently telling the physicist to move on and to accept Fate, but then this thing happens: the physicist goes back in time, is hit by a car, shows up in modern time with a limp and is told: "next time avoid the car, then you won't have been hit and will not have a limp." This puts the film in neither category: if the character can make himself be un-hit by a car, will he still remember it? If his brain does, why doesn't his bones? It seems like we really can prevent the fiance from being killed. Why then is the mentor being such a dick about it? This film is really about moving on from an un-winnable situation, but the mechanics of the film's time-travel don't support that world-view. Why would they do this?
I feel this is sort of a nerdy nit-pick, but this sort of half-baked thinking is endemic in the film. There's shadowy government agents who seem to be trying to prevent time-travel from happening, but why, no one knows. They also seem to be funding the physicist's time travel research however which is counter-intuitive and never really explained. The whole film is both very obvious and arbitrary. It's clear what we're meant to feel, but the facts of the film don't justify the emotional reaction.
Also: at one point the main character is mourning about his fiancé. He sadly looks at the coffee table to see Time magazine and Travel magazine serendipitously line up to form the words "Time Travel"! This doesn't support any point I'm making, it was just so dumb that I want to tell people about it.
This was not a good film. It was clumsy and inelegant and not entertainingly campy or strange. Watch it with friends and booze.
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