Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

This is not your typical sci-fi flick. There are no monsters, mutants or massive special effects. It is science (physics) + historical fiction. It is easy for lovers of sci-fi to get bogged down by details. Rather than quarrel with other reviewers about this, I would just say this is fiction, parallel universes are not currently fact; so one might be more open-minded if someone presents an alternate approach.1) To assume that scientists can't be illogical at times is perhaps short-sighted. Love is truly illogical and childhood love is even more so. They need not be an emotional wreck in order to be illogical about lost love or unfounded guilt. Brilliant scientists come in many forms.2) If you want to know Robert's motivation for traveling back in time, pay closer attention to the love stories.Be open to the story and as others have said, the cinematography and the score are excellent for a low budget movie.

I came upon this film by accident. I thought I'd chosen something else on Amazon Prime, but I must have clicked this movie by mistake. The music reeled me in first. Then the time frame reeled me in; I love re-creations of the 1920's. After that, the subject matter piqued my interest. For once there was a screenplay that was cleverly written, without robots, blood, gore and violence.(Well, there was a touch.)The music had a haunting quality that I loved. It was a smattering of classical pieces, especially by Fredrick Chopin, done in modern fashion, interspersed with the Gramophone effect. I then was wondering how they'd pull off the time travel, and that's where it gets interesting: The mechanism consisted of some steam-punk props, electrical gadgets and an old upright piano. The story line was more or less a romantic novel, but it didn't go too overboard. It's a picture that was a bit difficult to understand, yet very clever. Coming from a family whose father figure was an engineer, it made me think, and I'm still thinking about it. No special effects were necessary. I added my own imagination to it, and there you have it, a very entertaining movie-but you had to work your brain for it!Very refreshing indeed!

It's a Time Travel Story. And it's listed as Science Fiction, thereby.But Be Advised: It's NOT 'The Time Machine'. Nor is it your standard Hollywood Special Effects wagon-train.No Splashy special Effects. No Journeys to the end of Time. No Monsters. No Weird Paradoxes. No Dinosaurs either.It DOES has an element of Time Travel...but that's all. The rest of the Movie is a distillation of a very nice work of emotional Fiction. It's a Love story about Three Childhood friends in 1920's era England. Once you settle into the measured, dialogue driven pace of the story. I found it elegant, touching and memorable.Totally Girlfriend Friendly, BTW.

Despite the low budget, the cinematography and the score are simply sumptuous. It is certainly enjoyable to watch, even if, in the final analysis, it lacks substance. There is a scene early on, a garden party by the side of a river, where the ribbons in Victoria's hair stand out with shocking luminosity. Combined with the orchestration, it certainly looks a bigger budget film than it is.But it doesn't feel that way. It feels constrained - perhaps by the cost of the props, of the settings, and of the time and resources available. The production company is known as "Sculptures of Dazzling Complexity" - but the story is all too simplistic, and while setting it in Cambridge between the wars allows that simplicity some breathing space, it still lacks the depth of true emotion that might be expected of a simpler time and place. The characters, for me, fail to live up to the film's title - they are rather too 2D. The adults have no more substance than the excellent child actors. Walking in to a Cambridge Physics lecture and asking the (under?) graduates there "Who likes Physics?" is a rather obvious example, but more fundamentally, I fail to feel the driving force behind Stephen's obsession, and I want - NEED to see a more fundamental tension between Conrad and Stephen, even if this is not overt.You might suppose that I might be snobbish about the "Time Machine" itself, but it has a certain charm, reminiscent of something by HG Wells, and being appropriate for something very much the production of a mad professor in a shed at the end of the garden. Yes, there is an element of early Dr Who about an image of biplane's appearing in the smoke filled jar of the device, and yes - it's a pianola, and yes, the gateway DOES rather look like a hula hoop (thus beating the Hudsucker Proxy to the invention!) but hey, it's fun, at least! But the are holes in the plot that are far from fun, and which a bigger, better resourced film might have avoided. Such as what was Robert's motivation for travelling back in time? How long was Victoria in the well, if she had time to scratch out a message? Why the dinner party and ball - did they have some costumes they simply had to use? And if Conrad went first, how did he avoid Robert's fate? Did Stephen and Conrad together waltz their way through the labyrinth between worlds? And quite WHAT is Victoria saying when she says farewell to the Professor? And then there is the multi-verse approach. I don't object to this particularly, but it weakens the film to set it NOT in our version. And for the differences to be so trivial and farcical as calling an apple an orange? Better to leave the whole "99% sure" theory unproven, I'd suggest! So, a brave effort, and not by any means unworthy, but if you want a time-travel Sci-Fi film that actually challenges the viewer to keep up, I'd watch Primer instead.