Celluloid Heroes

In the not-so-distant future, it seems that one of the last frontiers of travel has been broken. An enterprising (greedy) soul has discovered a scientist who has uncovered the secret to time travel, and he has developed a plan for marketing it to ultra-wealthy clients, bored with their mundane existence. There are two problems with this plan.

The first is that government, as they are likely to do, gets involved in regulating what he does. The second is that the potential for catastrophe is great. But being a greedy capitalist, Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley) proceeds anyway, and disaster seems the likely outcome. Unless, of course, the loner scientist who has his own noble goals for working for Hatton can save the world. What do you think will happen?

The whole project is helmed by a supercomputer that calculates things down to the millisecond, so that parties of time travelers can go back to the exact same moment and shoot down a dinosaur using frozen bullets. Presumably the frozen bullet means it dissolves and there is no evidence left - so a future expedition can't find a bullet in a tar pit or something. That makes sense, but it's about the only thing.

Though these hunting parties appear to hunt the same dinosaur time after time, there is no explanation for why they don't see the prior party. That seems like a huge problem, right from the start - but it gets worse towards the end (I'll save that tidbit for later).

To make matters worse, the massive expenditure of sending people back through time is used so that a guide, a recorder, some other people, and apparently only one or two actual tourists can go. That seems strange, but I can live with it. The guides, like the tourists, are bored, because they have seen the same scene play out time after time. They recite their spiel like a guide at Disney, instructing their tourists to stay on the path.

The path itself comes out of a gateway that looks like the Einstein-Rosen Bridge popularized by Sliders - except it has a path coming out of it that everyone has to walk on, so as not to disturb anything. Everyone is warned not to so much as squash a bug, because if they do, they will set in motion a series of events that could change the world. Heard of foreshadowing?

One day, a couple of ultra-rich, very bored guys pay double to get to the top of the six-year waiting list, and things go terribly wrong. First, the guns don't work. So the quick-thinking leader, Travis (Edward Burns) helps everyone scramble, and they all get out alive. But on the next tour, the dinosaur is still dead, and something is off. They just don't know what.

After investigating, it seems that someone the prior day brought back a little something with them, and their intrepid leader Charles Hatton had turned off the "biofilter", which prevented them from knowing about it. This is another problem I have, but I'll get to that later too. The search is on.

Travis eventually finds his way to the creator of the time machine, and she helps him deduce that something indeed went wrong, but before they can find it, they are hit with a "timequake", a ripple emanating from far in the past that sends changes all the way into the present. This is interesting in that it doesn't change everything all at once, but in waves. It means that the changes don't affect everything, like with Back to the Future, but there are distinct moments in time. That's not bad, and I could live with it.

It also gives them time to fix things, if they can do so before their world falls apart. So the search begins for whatever it was that came back with them. Naturally the focus is on themselves first, but that comes up empty. Then they have to find their two tourists, but as the quakes come in, the effects get worse, with evolution starting to catch up. Soon, the fauna of the city is taking over, and before you know it, these ape-lizard creatures are everywhere. Getting across town to find these guys won't be easy. Of course, they do it.

The answer is a butterfly. One of the guys stepped off the path and crushed a butterfly, which presumably would have fed something else, which would have done this or that. You get the picture.

I'm okay with this, and with the timequakes. Really. But I don't get how crushing a butterfly can have an immediate affect, a few seconds later (which is what they saw on their next trip). It should not have such an impact. If they killed the dinosaur in the wrong place, perhaps. But a butterfly? That would take too long. Strike one.

Then, I'm not sure what the biofilter would do. Sure, it would have told them earlier that they had a problem, but all that means is they would have been able to fix it earlier. It's not going to suddenly bring the butterfly back to life. Strike two.

The final issue that I have is that if they go back time after time and don't see each other, how is it that they can suddenly make another trip back, and make contact with that other party (which is how they go about fixing the problem)? I just don't get it. Strike three.

Of course they do, and everything is restored to how it was. Travis even makes a recording so that the world will know the dangers of what they are doing. It's as if the problem never happened. As bad as this sounds, I think that I like the treatment of time travel in the Back to the Future movies better. It just seems more real than this. The effects are a lot better too.

Rated PG-13 for sci-fi violence, partial nudity and language.

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