Review: Timecrimes

Posted by dominie in Films, Reviews on December 3rd, 2008

We’ve got an early review for you. Timecrimes (official website), the feature directorial debut of Nacho Vigalondo, is the third film from Magnolia/Magnet Releasing’s Six Shooter Film Series. The movie arrives in limited theaters December 12th.

If you are expecting a high tech fast and furious time chase Jet Li fight a la The One or a more sophisticated H.G. Wells pursues Jack the Ripper in Time After Time… this is different.

Don’t get me wrong; different in a good way. In his feature long directorial debut, Nacho Vigalondo doesn’t waste any time on the technology, on the ‘why’ and the ‘how’; the only thing that matters is the people. What an average man would be if he discovered he is part of a twisted time-travel plot that he himself created. What the different ‘instances’ of him are doing at any given time. And how can he fix it? With low budget but high creativity, Vigalondo was able to create not only a believable story but also a compassionate character.

Hector, played by the confused but relentless Karra Eleyade, tries everything in order to bring his life back to some glimce of normalcy, but in doing so he needs to force the events to happen and rely on hope that the result is a positive outcome. The movie soon resignates like a Matrioshka doll, with the same events nested one into each other, forcing the protagonist towards unthinkable decisions and… of course… crimes. The mechanism is twisted and halfway through the story, the plot is artifically forced in order to have all the pieces fit together.

Timecrimes provides for an enjoyable rollercoster ride, however, something that cannot escape the expert eye of a Star Trek fan with an unsurpassed knowledge in temporal anomalies is this movie sheds no new light on the matter of time travel.

–Written by Simone Bartesaghi