I absolutely love the concept of time travel and feel it makes for some wonderful storytelling. In fact, of the short stories I’ve written, my favorite is Dreams Do Come True, which happens to be a clever (IMHO!) take on time travel/revenge.
I’ve heard it said never to write a time travel story, that so many people with incredible talent have taken on the subject that the likelihood of you doing something original and/or interesting with a time travel story is virtually nil.
I don’t agree though I can see the point. There have been an awful lot of time travel stories made and, as with all things, many of them are at best forgettable and at worst terrible.
But when they’re good…
Found in Time (2012) is a very low budget time travel film that, I take it from the closing credits, was made through crowdfunding. The low budget, for the most part, doesn’t hurt what we see with one major exception (I’ll get to that in a bit).
The plot of the film, in some ways, reminded me of the oddball structure of Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys, even as the central plot doesn’t come close to Gilliam’s apocalyptic urgency.
The film follows Chris (MacLeod Andrews) an oddball “psychic” vendor who lives in a weird pseudo-New York. He lives with Jina (Kelly Sullivan) a girlfriend he intends to propose to while working on a street corner next to RJ (Derek Morgan) and, eventually, Ayana (Mina Vesper Gokal).
Psychic vendors, we learn, are people who have a unique talent for figuring out what others need and giving it to them. RJ, for example, offers cups of coffee that he creates which help people with their current needs, whether it be humility or pep or strength, etc. Chris, on the other hand, collects oddball items, from small rubber balls to postcards to string to rocks to (significantly) nails and magically knows when people will need these items.
Chris, as it turns out, is also stuck out of time.
His world moves illogically and he may suddenly find himself a day into the future or past. Further, he eventually finds he can dictate the future based on his actions in the past.
As mentioned, he lives with Jina but, as we eventually find, she isn’t all she appears. The whole “stuck outside time” problem Chris has sometimes causes him great headaches and he controls this by using drugs. Jina insists he see a Psychiatrist specializing in people like him and, we find, she works in that field as well.
Is she with him because she genuinely loves him or is he a subject of her studies? And what happens when Chris discovers he’s about to commit a crime…can he alter his past to allow himself a brighter future?
As I mentioned before, Found In Time is a very low budget affair but the lack of special effects is unimportant. In fact, the one “effect” the movie does give us, a bizarre safety mask worn by the psychiatrists, is rather laughable and probably should have been discarded as it was truly unnecessary.
Instead, we’re given a film that features a bizarre yet recognizable New York setting and a society and characters that are intriguing enough to propel us through the film.
Is Found In Time a great work? I don’t think it quite reaches that point. The story is at times a bit confusing although after the viewer gets his/her bearing they should understand what’s going on but in the end what you’ve witnessed isn’t necessarily earth-shattering.
Still, Found In Time is an intriguing yet small film that dares to explore a well worn topic in a unique and interesting way. While it may not be a great film, it is good enough to give a try, especially if you’re looking for something different.