1h 17min | Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller | 16 January 2004 (Sundance Film Festival)
Director & writer: Shane Carruth
Stars: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/
The film spends a lot of time on technical things, as though it's going to explain how time travel works. That is such a huge distraction, that _I_ lost WHAT they were doing.
The basic idea seems to be that these guys go BACK in time and use information they know about sports and stocks to make money. (I emphasize back because the discovery of time alteration was the ACCELERATION of fungus protein output, meaning a FORWARD movement in time. And all the cr@p about 1300 cycles, A-B and parabolas only obscured things further.)
But to execute these bets/trades, they have to sit in a hotel room for 6 hours, so they don't interact with their past selves or others they know. I didn't follow why 6 hours, and who cares.
The only value to the film is the idea of the corruption that occurs when you can start asserting control over past events: absolute power corrupts absolutely. But even that is not presented well. We get a sliver of a discussion of supposedly hypothetical with the wife, but she can't be bothered. Between the 2 time travelers, who actually start encountering real decisions, we don't get much meaningful talk about the ethics involved.
I watched this twice, listened to part of the director's commentary (and he was speaking as director, not much as the writer), and read some online stuff about the movie.
It's possible that I'm not enough of a connoisseur of time-travel stories to appreciate what's presented, but I don't feel this provides much that's worthy of discussion unless you generalize to "the ethics of time travel." I was at least hoping to be entertained. I got curious for a while, saw the wool over my eyes, and decided to move on.
Indie, dir. Carruth; 5
