The movie starts very well: intriguing, to say the least. For a short while there it appeared as if this would be another winner for the Moorehead/Benson team.
Unfortunately, what follows is a script of diminishing returns. It just devolves, and into a drama, no less. Too much backstory about the two paramedics and the guy's dull family. Why do we need so many scenes and so much soap-opera detail - when we can jump into the fantasy sci-fi horror aspects of the premise? Were they catering for a wider audience - a female audience? So much boring relationship stuff.
After the first 15 or so minutes I gradually started losing interest, and by the halfway mark I was getting fidgety. After an hour I almost completely lost interest.
After the medic finally realizes that he has a drug that induces time-travel, what does he do? He tells his buddy, right? No. The cops? No. Does he tell ANYBODY? No. Instead of telling his friend about the fact he found a way to get his daughter back, he instead wastes our time - and the very limited supply of these magic pills - on a series of experiments. (The pill maker conveniently kills himself later. The way he and this guy meet is pretty ludicrous.)
Sure, these experiments are useful, but if the point is to look for Brianna (the colleague's lost-in-time daughter) then WHY not immediately head to the house where she disappeared and use the pills THERE instead? Isn't that the obvious thing to do? Sure it is. He predictably does this later, but it takes him too long to start, while wasting many pills.
But this script isn't that big on sense, or in a big rush. I'm not saying the story is utter nonsense, but I don't understand why the medic tells NOTHING to his friend: doesn't tell him he's mortally ill, doesn't tell him that he solved the mystery of the drug, doesn't tell him that he has a way to save his daughter. This lack of communication eventually grows tiresome, because it becomes a running joke. It is anyway a laughable, unconvincing plot-device used by bad writers, which is why it's disappointing that it was used here as well.
Some more problems. Apparently, the drug keeps you in a different era only 7 minutes. Yet so many Synchronic users managed to get killed (or even bitten by a snake) in that brief period?! Gimme a break... This movie would have us believe that practically every time you go back in time 500 or 5000 or 50000 years, totally randomly, the likelihood of getting killed or seriously hurt in the first 5 minutes is extremely high. Snakes, the weather, people... everyone and everything is out to get you, and at great speed. The hell? That's pretty far-fetched, almost a premise for a parody.
Still, I do very much like the line "One thing I've learned: the past sucks big-time!"
This line encapsulates everything that's wrong with the modern age i.e. A total lack of appreciation for how incredibly tough our ancestors had it compared to our fairly cozy existence. Yeah, a pet-peeve of mine. The medic needed to go back in time PHYSICALLY in order to realize this self-evident fact! Unfortunately, most people are this way, which is why we have so many whiners: spoiled losers who claim that "the poor have never been poorer". You have to be fairly clueless to actually believe that.
The stupid scene when he beams over to early 20th-century America really takes the cake. Not only was the medic foolish enough to bring along his incredibly dumb dog but there's also the film-makers being all-of-a-sudden so PC as to inject some of that incessant race-based stuff - which really annoyed me.
Can't we have ONE movie these days without race and/or gender issues being discussed in that typically preachy and utterly idiotic way? At this point I'd lost all interest. This was the final straw. It appears that Benson and Moorehead had made their first preparations to sell out to America's corporate Establishment, because why else play this predictable corny game of injecting C. M. into your movies? Does this plot require a race-based theme? No. Does the film have anything to gain in terms of excitement or intelligence by including this nonsense (or any other type of generic crap)? No. The only reason you place that kind of stuff these days - as a film-maker - is to cow-tow to the deranged elites who control the media and the entertainment industry. I've noticed this time and time again. This is why I am convinced that the next films Benson and Moorehead make will be awash with horrible nepotists, dumbed-down scripts, and just general devolution. I've noticed this often, as well: nowadays, if you don't play along with the ideology of Hollywood's elites, you don't get to play their game at all. If you dare promote right-wing ideas, you get blacklisted. And the worst part of all of this - liberal cinema-goers are perfectly OK with this New Way. They preach diversity and freedom but promote the exact opposite. "WE decide which free opinions you can have!"
When the medic finally decides to use the pills wisely - at the location of Brianna's disappearance as oppose to his flat - he experiences yet another asinine past episode, this time involving French-speaking voodoo cultists or some other nonsense. A totally confusing, messy, pointless scene.
Naturally, how would he find her when he doesn't even have a precise location of her disappearance? This failure was obvious and predictable well in advance, though apparently not to the medic who insisted on doing everything himself - without the help of his friend.
He finally tells him everything when he's down to just two pills. But by that point I anyway stopped caring, not for the script or Brianna. Because anybody dumb enough to pop random pills deserves whatever happens to them. I have zero tolerance for drug users, especially bored young idiots seeking thrills this way. So what if Brianna is lost? One clown less. We must pity the 19th century for having gained an idiot from our era, as if they din't have enough already!
Then there's that utterly daft scene at the Civil War battleground, with some random Confederate soldier, coming out of nowhere, just raring to kill a person despite all the bombs falling all over the place... just because... it serves the script. So dumb, having the medic go back to yet another dangerous point in time. Sure, the past was ugly and violent but not every single minute and place in it was this dangerous. If it were, humanity would have been killed off eons ago. As I mentioned: a premise more suitable for a comedy.
Don't you love that "poetic" ending though? Who couldn't predict that.
A few years after the movie's events, Brianna can remind her parents: "hey, guys, remember when my irresponsible dabbling in dangerous drugs resulted in that friend of yours disappearing forever? Wasn't that fun?"
Unfortunately, what follows is a script of diminishing returns. It just devolves, and into a drama, no less. Too much backstory about the two paramedics and the guy's dull family. Why do we need so many scenes and so much soap-opera detail - when we can jump into the fantasy sci-fi horror aspects of the premise? Were they catering for a wider audience - a female audience? So much boring relationship stuff.
After the first 15 or so minutes I gradually started losing interest, and by the halfway mark I was getting fidgety. After an hour I almost completely lost interest.
After the medic finally realizes that he has a drug that induces time-travel, what does he do? He tells his buddy, right? No. The cops? No. Does he tell ANYBODY? No. Instead of telling his friend about the fact he found a way to get his daughter back, he instead wastes our time - and the very limited supply of these magic pills - on a series of experiments. (The pill maker conveniently kills himself later. The way he and this guy meet is pretty ludicrous.)
Sure, these experiments are useful, but if the point is to look for Brianna (the colleague's lost-in-time daughter) then WHY not immediately head to the house where she disappeared and use the pills THERE instead? Isn't that the obvious thing to do? Sure it is. He predictably does this later, but it takes him too long to start, while wasting many pills.
But this script isn't that big on sense, or in a big rush. I'm not saying the story is utter nonsense, but I don't understand why the medic tells NOTHING to his friend: doesn't tell him he's mortally ill, doesn't tell him that he solved the mystery of the drug, doesn't tell him that he has a way to save his daughter. This lack of communication eventually grows tiresome, because it becomes a running joke. It is anyway a laughable, unconvincing plot-device used by bad writers, which is why it's disappointing that it was used here as well.
Some more problems. Apparently, the drug keeps you in a different era only 7 minutes. Yet so many Synchronic users managed to get killed (or even bitten by a snake) in that brief period?! Gimme a break... This movie would have us believe that practically every time you go back in time 500 or 5000 or 50000 years, totally randomly, the likelihood of getting killed or seriously hurt in the first 5 minutes is extremely high. Snakes, the weather, people... everyone and everything is out to get you, and at great speed. The hell? That's pretty far-fetched, almost a premise for a parody.
Still, I do very much like the line "One thing I've learned: the past sucks big-time!"
This line encapsulates everything that's wrong with the modern age i.e. A total lack of appreciation for how incredibly tough our ancestors had it compared to our fairly cozy existence. Yeah, a pet-peeve of mine. The medic needed to go back in time PHYSICALLY in order to realize this self-evident fact! Unfortunately, most people are this way, which is why we have so many whiners: spoiled losers who claim that "the poor have never been poorer". You have to be fairly clueless to actually believe that.
The stupid scene when he beams over to early 20th-century America really takes the cake. Not only was the medic foolish enough to bring along his incredibly dumb dog but there's also the film-makers being all-of-a-sudden so PC as to inject some of that incessant race-based stuff - which really annoyed me.
Can't we have ONE movie these days without race and/or gender issues being discussed in that typically preachy and utterly idiotic way? At this point I'd lost all interest. This was the final straw. It appears that Benson and Moorehead had made their first preparations to sell out to America's corporate Establishment, because why else play this predictable corny game of injecting C. M. into your movies? Does this plot require a race-based theme? No. Does the film have anything to gain in terms of excitement or intelligence by including this nonsense (or any other type of generic crap)? No. The only reason you place that kind of stuff these days - as a film-maker - is to cow-tow to the deranged elites who control the media and the entertainment industry. I've noticed this time and time again. This is why I am convinced that the next films Benson and Moorehead make will be awash with horrible nepotists, dumbed-down scripts, and just general devolution. I've noticed this often, as well: nowadays, if you don't play along with the ideology of Hollywood's elites, you don't get to play their game at all. If you dare promote right-wing ideas, you get blacklisted. And the worst part of all of this - liberal cinema-goers are perfectly OK with this New Way. They preach diversity and freedom but promote the exact opposite. "WE decide which free opinions you can have!"
When the medic finally decides to use the pills wisely - at the location of Brianna's disappearance as oppose to his flat - he experiences yet another asinine past episode, this time involving French-speaking voodoo cultists or some other nonsense. A totally confusing, messy, pointless scene.
Naturally, how would he find her when he doesn't even have a precise location of her disappearance? This failure was obvious and predictable well in advance, though apparently not to the medic who insisted on doing everything himself - without the help of his friend.
He finally tells him everything when he's down to just two pills. But by that point I anyway stopped caring, not for the script or Brianna. Because anybody dumb enough to pop random pills deserves whatever happens to them. I have zero tolerance for drug users, especially bored young idiots seeking thrills this way. So what if Brianna is lost? One clown less. We must pity the 19th century for having gained an idiot from our era, as if they din't have enough already!
Then there's that utterly daft scene at the Civil War battleground, with some random Confederate soldier, coming out of nowhere, just raring to kill a person despite all the bombs falling all over the place... just because... it serves the script. So dumb, having the medic go back to yet another dangerous point in time. Sure, the past was ugly and violent but not every single minute and place in it was this dangerous. If it were, humanity would have been killed off eons ago. As I mentioned: a premise more suitable for a comedy.
Don't you love that "poetic" ending though? Who couldn't predict that.
A few years after the movie's events, Brianna can remind her parents: "hey, guys, remember when my irresponsible dabbling in dangerous drugs resulted in that friend of yours disappearing forever? Wasn't that fun?"