MovieChat Forums > Time Lapse (2015) Discussion > Worst 'time travel' movie ever?

Worst 'time travel' movie ever?

posted 8 years ago by Ozzer240001
28 replies | jump to latest

I watched this really expecting to enjoy it as I love the genre and had been told it was worth watching. Two hours later and I'm pretty sure my friend was talking about another movie....

Others have said the acting is bad, but I'm not too bothered with that....

What bothered me was how seemingly reasonably intelligent people - going by the way they spoke English - oddly the movie might actually work if they were made out to be hopeless simpletons, but they're not, they're 'college' types - could make such utterly mind-numbingly stupid decisions!!!!

How a writer with a budget to make a movie like this, and presumably an interest in time travel movies, could make something so frustratingly stupid is beyond me. It really is aimed at people with an IQ of about 70!!! If you are any more intelligent it will pain you to watch it.

To list just some of the problems....

1) The kids discover they can 'see into the future', and thus see the results of sports events. Hence they can bet on them and win huge amounts of money, and quit their day jobs... so far so good. Until the moron putting the bets on clearly puts huge bets on with a single bookmaker, and wins constantly, leading his bookmaker to come round to the house and.... okay I won't spoil it but argghhhhh. Let's just say they just need one Lotto win and they're done - instead they manage to screw it all up by messing around with dog racing, and a clearly ridiculous betting pattern....

10 minutes of careful thought about the best way to 'hide' a few winning bets across states and perhaps events - and the whole bookmaker issue is unnecessary...

2) So after the ludicrous cockup above - they then do things like leaving the storage room where they are storing dead bodies wide open, totally forgetting to shut the door (Finn, towards the end).... is their ANY explanation for why he did this??

3) They proceed to believe the pictures are telling a fixed future and that unless replicated *perfectly* will result in death. Even after the man they thought died this way was shown to have died by accident.... on hearing this they really can experiment with trying to change the future

4) The girl manipulates the pictures to get back at her absent minded boyfriend, which results in the death of him and their best friend... and her likely lengthy jail sentence...... for what?? so he could appreciate her more??? It literally makes ZERO sense!!!

5) Finally - Jasper goes on a drugs binge when with the smallest amount of common sense he and his friends can earn enough money to give them any life they could possibly want - why??? why not wait a few months to do all that....

I could go on - but I won't - basically the movie isn't abysmal - I mean the topic itself interested me, and I was curious to see if there was going to be a twist (there was, but sadly it made little sense).

For fans of time travel movies it's a must watch, but probably only to see how *not* to make a time travel movie.

Okay I've just realised this is more of a review than a post! So I'll finish with my question - is there a worse 'time travel' movie out there?

[–] ilon 8 years ago

This is not a time travel movie.

[–] mcp-69798 8 years ago

Yes it is. Information is sent back in time.

[–] Seth_Rogue_One 8 years ago

Not the worst but it wasn't that great Timecop: The Berlin Decision (2003) and The Final Destination (2009) were worse for instance

We crash into each other, just so we can feel something.

[–] prplayer 8 years ago

worst time travel, one of the worst i've ever seen

forget about B movie, this was a Z movie

the acting was so atrocious, acting as a human would be too much to ask for these people let alone acting a character

and the less said about the writing the better

so many movies, so little time

[–] toancly 8 years ago

It's the messed up motivations each of them has that makes me dislike the movie. The movie functions fine, but they're so messed up, it ruins it.

Betting guy only cares for money. Obvious.
Painter only cares about painting. Obvious.
Girl only cares for boyfriend? Not true. Delusional. She only cares for having a guy take notice of her. Hence the cheating. Hence the duplicity. Hence she kills her "bf". Not because she loves him, but because she wanted a guy to notice her, and he wasn't going to be it.

They each get what they want through the machine, but what they want is selfish.

[–] narva24 8 years ago

I suspect this film was strictly made for the pokemon go players.

[–] pizzadudes 8 years ago

People are saying the characters were meant to be dumb which excuses their irrational decisions. The problem with that though is it doesn't make for an intelligent movie as their idiocy was *beep* annoying. Quite a few times I was on the verge of turning it off or just fast forwarding scenes. I would have if I wasn't on the PC at the same time.

[–] linas-morkunas 8 years ago

like plenty of the posters already mentioned, all of the three main characters were idiotic in their own particular ways:

betting guy was a total moron for using a shady and clearly a criminal bookie to make all his winnings with (but he was a heavy drugs user as well, so his character was obviously written this way);

the painter guy was very oblivious to his surroundings and generally detached from the real world, hence him not being able to figure out what a crazy manipulative GF he's actually dating, which leads to our last character -

a mentally unstable psycho girl, who only cares for herself and has no remorse for her selfish actions which eventually lead to the deaths of her two best friends

all in all, this was more of a character drama than a real time travel movie. I enjoyed it for what it was, that's being the study of the flawed personalities, but let's not start digging deeper into the sci fi part of it...

[–] florinpodgoreanu 8 years ago

1. Using drugs doesn't mean you are an idiot, it means just that you are an addict. Drugs, tobacco, coffee, food in excess, these are addictions for lots of people, so you are saying people are idiots because of that?

2. People make lots of dumb decisions in their life, even very smart people. Why is that? Because people are not robots to think logically all the time, their decisions are driven also by emotions, feelings, subconscious thoughts. That doesn't mean they are idiots.

3. He's betting on dog races because that's what he saw in the picture. He can't control what the machine shows in its pictures, so he can't produce a picture with him showing the winning lottery numbers in order to bet on lottery. He regularly bets on dog races, so the picture shows him with the winning dogs' name. The picture shows your most likely near future life. You can't produce a picture with you being the president of the US because that's not your life.

4. At the end, looks like it's possible to produce a picture in order to modify the past (the girl's messages to herself), so they could have put a message with the winning lottery numbers. But at the very end, it turns out that the timeline is fixed, what the picture shows that's going to happen, and the girl only had the illusion that she changed the past. "Go with Finn in the car." She was going to go with Finn in the car anyway, but she thought she did that because of her message. "Kill Jasper." She would have killed Jasper anyway in order to save her boyfriend, not because of her message to herself. "Don't get caught at the window." That message is also useless because the picture shows the blood on the window, so what has happened remains unchanged.

[–] Torrible_2013 7 years ago

I agree with 1 and 2.

3. He's betting on dog races because that's what he saw in the picture. He can't control what the machine shows in its pictures, so he can't produce a picture with him showing the winning lottery numbers in order to bet on lottery. He regularly bets on dog races, so the picture shows him with the winning dogs' name. The picture shows your most likely near future life. You can't produce a picture with you being the president of the US because that's not your life.

I want to agree with you but I can't. Does he have 100% control over what he sees in the photos BEFORE he receives them? No. The photos show what he will eventually do. For instance, if at 7:59 pm, Japser thinks to himself, "I'd point to the ceiling tomorrow and I'll stick to this decision", one minute later, he could very well receive a photo of him doing exactly that. However, if he receives a different photo, it means for some reason presently unknown to him, he would change his mind tomorrow.

But having a plan should exert a strong influence on what the photos show. That's why they were constantly surprised by the photos when they don't plan for anything, but the photos show them exactly what they want to see (gambling results) when they do plan for it in advance.

4. At the end, looks like it's possible to produce a picture in order to modify the past (the girl's messages to herself), so they could have put a message with the winning lottery numbers. But at the very end, it turns out that the timeline is fixed, what the picture shows that's going to happen, and the girl only had the illusion that she changed the past. "Go with Finn in the car." She was going to go with Finn in the car anyway, but she thought she did that because of her message. "Kill Jasper." She would have killed Jasper anyway in order to save her boyfriend, not because of her message to herself. "Don't get caught at the window." That message is also useless because the picture shows the blood on the window, so what has happened remains unchanged.

There's a flaw in that reasoning. Presumably, those messages she gave to herself were put up the morning after the event so she would read it the morning before the event.

Why would she tell herself "go with Finn in the car" if she had already done it the night before? It only makes sense for her to give herself messages to change things, to do things she regretted not doing.

If the past can be changed, then the messages aren't useless. Having the blood on the window wouldn't matter because she could do exactly what was written on the note to change the event.

[–] kayen_chn 8 years ago

completely agree with you.
would also add:

1 - the girl throwing a future picture when a bad guy (bookmaker) is in the house!!! wtf is she thinking?

2 - the painting guy....imagine: you discovered a time travel machine, have lots of doubts, want money, have problems because of the brother and the bookmaker and he cares about "man...let me see the picture or i would not know what to draw". WTF....lots of nosense in this horrible movie.