Time Month - Mini Review: Time Traveller

OK, we’ve had a break from the cr*p, now back to the cr*p, this is Time Traveller, a movie that has a mere 8% rating on rotten tomatoes and has undergone several changes in name depending on where it’s distributed. Great signs there.

OK, so the plot starts with a deep-sea dive where a woman is out of oxygen for some reason and a man dives in without a tank to save her, he fails and ends up comatose, this incredibly awkwardly transitions about 18^th century India where the guy in the coma (Josh Harnett) plays a guy with an incredibly awful Scottish accent as a Captain for the East India trading company, attempting to expand its holdings against the will of Indian people.

They team up with a group of… rebels? To storm a palace and kill the King, taking the throne. Supporters need the Queen and her unborn child to rally the troops but she’s currently being escorted by Harnett’s Captain James Stewart as a prisoner of the East India Trading company. Stewart questions the morality of things and hijinks ensue.

There are several problems with this movie, the first of which is a lack of connection between the present-day stuff and the stuff in the 1700s, Harnett is the only common link outside a ring used for the incredibly forced ending of this movie which I’ll get to. It’s almost an hour into the movie when we return to the find the fate of Jay Fennel in the coma.

The second is the romance angle. They barely have any character building in this, this is partially down to how rushed the plot is and partly down to the sheer number of characters in this. There was a scene where I presume a tutor smacks a girl and tells her she’s coming to America with her and will soon be her step-mother. Who are these two? What was the situation leading up to this? I have no f*cking clue! What makes this even worse is that the actors are clearly trying, there is no real bad acting in this it’s just the script doesn’t build up chemistry between them because they barely interact in a way that isn’t about the mission.

Add to that the villains of the piece are the most stock, generic, uninteresting villains imaginable

One thing I can say is that I think it looks really nice, this movie had a $35 million budget and the screen shows a lot of lovely looking settings and great looking scenes, just wish the script had backed it up.

OK, so back to the ultimate insult. The ending. It flashes between events of the past where Captain Stewart ends up killing himself for some reason, I think, with the events of the present, where Laura, the wife of the braindead guy decides suddenly on a whim to go back to the dive site and retrieve a piece of wreckage from a colonial ship, come back, have a ring prised from the piece of wreckage and put it on his finger. It doesn’t work but then a woman who looks like the one from the flashback gives her another ring and putting them together heals him, somehow!

What were they thinking with this ending? They should’ve had the events of the past more thoroughly lead to the ultimate conclusion because this is nothing short of pure lazy writing

This movie looks nice and is well acted but the script is terrible, particularly in the final act

Rating 25/100