Tuesday, 20 November 2007

Timestalkers

An oldie, but a goodie.

........is a phrase I used to say when I played the wrong track on my radio show. OK, usually it was because I was too busy pretending to be Scotty standing in front of the transporter controls, but hey; these things happen.

However, this little gem was on last night. It's by no means perfect (a flawed gem, if you will), but it is my personal yardstick against which I measure films of this genre. That genre is the time-travel film.

I have a soft spot for time travel films in my heart, like Millennium (the one about abducting people who are going to die in plane crashes to re-populate the future), and I think there's a film out there to be made by crossing that idea with Titanic. Some films in this genre are of course rubbish. Timecop to name one. And some make no sense at all, like Donnie Darko*. Not forgetting the all time "How to make a time travel trilogy" box set: Back to the Future.
So much do I enjoy time travel, that I even wrote an article about its use in fiction for the BBC Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy micro site.

But Timestalkers is deceptively brilliant. Starring the criminally under-used William Devane as a man with a mystery to solve. You see he's got an authentic tin plated photo dated from 1886, and there's a mysterious man in the background. A man sporting three fifty-seven (.357) Magnum in his holster. A gun that won't be invented until 1980.

And that's how the film hooks you. Clearly either he's mistaken about the gun, or the photo is a fraud. But every test says it's genuine. And he's a gun expert specialising in the old west.

For a film with such a simple premise, the story uses time travel very cleverly. One person needs access to a top secret base, so he travels back to 1926, before the base was constructed. He steps across the boundary and returns to the present.

The special effects do look very dated today. The time-travel effect reproducible on any decent vision mixing board and the opening credits of the time vortex, which probably cost a fortune to make at the time, could be re-created today using the visualisation system in Winamp.

A hackneyed ending sign posted several miles off does drop the score slightly. However it's still a great time travel detective story.

Score: C- Dated badly, I'm afraid but the core story is still very enjoyable.

OB: People recorded history through song. Not many folks could write back then.
Nope...chances were if you could write your name, you'd make judge.

*Please don't write in to complain. I've had Donnie Darko explained to me by a few people and I always tell them the same thing: if someone has to explain a film to me, then I'm probably not its intended audience.

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