film

Time Lapse (2014)

Finally, a time travel movie that succumbs to its paradoxes instead of creating them.

I caught this movie some time ago on Netflix, but evidently I didn’t pay attention or fell asleep or something, because I didn’t remember it being anything special. But I came back around to it, recognized that I’d watched it before, almost backed out, and then realized there was some cool stuff going on that I hadn’t caught the first time around.

Time Lapse is a lean and efficient little sci-fi thriller.  The budget is small, but it isn’t immediately apparent.  The script makes the most out of a small but solid cast and a central location that proves to be essential to the plot.  It isn’t concerned with special effects (no true time travel film should be…) and aims to give one of the more realistic “what if…” time travel scenarios I’ve seen in a long time, maybe ever.  Its subdued and mildly isolated exploration of the concept has drawn comparisons to the film Primer, a flick I covered several slices back.

You may also see this cover.

Time travel films, good ones anyway, are tough to get right.  I don’t blame the filmmakers, well, not too much at least.  The fact is – if time travel is possible – there are a lot of unanswered questions.  Various films try to explore these questions in any number of ways, some more satisfactory than others.  There is a lot of serious theoretical stuff about time travel that I’m not going to go into, but the fact is, even the more clever time travel depictions (12 Monkeys, Looper, the fifth season of Lost) tend to fall back on an infinite loop, i.e. an event in the future causes one to time travel into the past, and the actions of this person in the past lead directly to the time travel circumstances.  It can also be called a “closed loop” and it actually makes a good bit of sense along the way until you get to 2 things: causality and point of  origin.  Both are impossible to determine.

Imagine this: I grab my copy of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare” and use my time machine to travel back to a time period before Shakespeare had written any of his plays.  I walk up to him and say, “hey Will, this shit will make  your name echo through the ages – pretend like every bit of it is yours!”  So now he has all of his comedies, tragedies, histories, sonnets, and whatever else, and he passes them off as his own and history as we know it is written.  But five or six hundred years later, all that work is recompiled and published and I go out and buy that book.  The problem is that the event caused itself.  The cause of me ending up with the book is because Shakespeare wrote them.  But Shakespeare wrote them because I brought the book to him…but the only reason I was able to bring him a book was because he wrote them…but he only wrote them after I time traveled….see what’s happening here?  This whole body of work is essentially created from nothing….and scientists are pretty sure that however time travel might work, it certainly wouldn’t be like this.

Causal Loop: Two events both cause and are caused by each other.

Well, Time Lapse does something a little different.  Instead of the characters actually time traveling, they discover a camera across the way pointed into their apartment that takes a picture at 8pm every day…only what pops out (like an old Polaroid) is a picture of exactly what’s happening on the next day at 8pm!  The occupants of the apartment, a painter, his girlfriend, and his best friend, discover the inventor of the camera dead in the complex’s storage room, and attribute it to, “fuckin’ wit time.”  It doesn’t take long though before curiosity gets the better of them.  The trio quickly devises a ruse to make it appear as if the man is still alive and well so that they maintain access to the apartment with the camera (it’s a huge, immovable machine).

Things start off small and isolated with some interesting questions posited from the very beginning.  The three of them see the photo on several occasions and are unable to determine how they end up positioned as such the next night.  In a reversal of what we usually see in time travel movies, the pictures from the future ends up dictating what the friends do in in the present.  With the mantra “don’t fuck wit time” in their minds, they actually make it a point to recreate the scene, however bizarre it may seem.

OH MY GOD OUR NEIGHBOR IS A VOYEU…wait a minute…

What’s refreshing about Time Lapse is that the characters have meaningful dialog about what’s going on, doing their best to understand it a logical way (a quality shared by the aforementioned Primer) rather than just having a few insipid lines meant to fill the audience in.  They figure out the basics fairly quickly, such as when they see a picture when the friend’s bookie in it.  Not knowing why the bookie would visit  him, the friend calls and proceeds to have a nervous conversation with him.  This of course gets the bookie suspicious, prompting his eventual visit.  (That’s one of those infinite loops we talked about earlier since we can’t establish causality – the photo of the future caused the phone call – the phone call led to the visit – and so on.)

What would you do if you could see a day into the future?  Make money!  It’s not a very original exploitation of time travel, but it is a realistic one and one that pretty much anyone would have a difficult time passing on.  So the friends make some money, and aside from some weird pictures (such as the friend and the girlfriend inexplicably sharing a kiss), things go fairly well.

And as expected, Act II sees the scheme unravel.  First, there’s the bookie who grows even more suspicious when he realizes his client is no longer losing bets.  The main guy (I cannot remember their names for the life of me…) gets uncomfortable with his friend’s growing avarice trending towards full-on power-trip, and expresses his desire to quit looking at the pictures, or destroy the machine, or just taking their small fortune and running.  Eventually they see a very strange photo involving the friend and the girlfriend having sex, which pushes main guy over the edge.  Around the same time, an old colleague of the inventor shows up, informing the guys that the camera can go further than just a day into the future – at least two weeks based on a  photo he had sent her – but while familiar with the results, she knows nothing about how the device is constructed or configured.  She also espouses a very reasonable theory about how the inventor died based on the scene, suggesting that they needn’t worry about “fuckin’ wit time.”

Naturally this excites the main man, who really doesn’t want to recreate the next day’s scene.  Unfortunately for him, the friend has gone from shady and a little selfish to full-blown murderer, already directly responsible for the deaths of his bookie and the bookie’s enforcer.  And now he sees it fit to execute the woman as well since she’s given up all she knows.  Intent on recreating the scene, the friend incapacitates the main man.  With events rapidly spiraling out of control, the significance of the most recent pictures becomes increasingly important.

Long story short, main guy escapes, threatens to destroy the machine and in the process has the friend send the girlfriend over.  And BOOM – major twist.  The girl reveals that she secretly discovered that the camera takes not one, but two pictures each day, one at 8pm and one at 8am! Knowing this, the girlfriend has been manipulating events from the very beginning by sending messages back to herself.  This puts an entirely new spin on the movie, especially since the two of them begin discussing whether or not they can change their future.

After a little more action and another reveal from the girlfriend (a small thread culminating in the friend/girlfriend sex not being the photo for the next day), it becomes clear that they still have free will, and they still have choice, but whatever choice they make is the choice or part of the choices that lead to the scenario in the future photo.  I really enjoy how the filmmakers kept the future immutable; the end has a particular amazing twist that I won’t give away, but basically the girl also thinks that she has ability to change the present by passing messages to her past self.  (See, before now she’s only been receiving info from her future self, not trying to pass it back to her present self.)

A whole new world of possibilities unfolds (not to mention certain events make more sense) when we’re hit with this revelation.

The concept isn’t flashy or intricate, but I think that’s a big part of what makes it work.  Actually it’s really, really simple and sticks to one basic premise: the machine produces a photo of the future.  Period.  A lot of recent-ish time travel films that do attempt to integrate some valid theory into them have stuck the infallible notion that “the past is the past,” and that if Person A traveled back in time to Year X and spoke to their grandmother, they do not return to a present where their grandma has new memories, or worse yet, a butterfly effect-like version of the present where everything has been altered.  Instead, back when Year X “originally happened,” your grandmother spoke with Person A – and then years and years later she probably began to wonder why her grandchild looked so familiar (if she even remembered the conversation at all).

The take home piece of information here is that even if you traveled back in time, whatever you did or whatever events you influenced always happened back then…nothing has been changed.  This is exactly the sort of situation that leads to an infinite loop and there’s not much we can do about that, but at least it’s a more interesting way of exploring the concept without creating lots and lots of holes and problems.

Time Lapse more or less sticks to this same idea except from the perspective that the future if “fixed” and that whatever “happened in the future” always “happened,” regardless of any apparent changes in the present.  Make sense?  It all comes together a bit better when we realize that the girl has been manipulating events via the 8am photos (in fact, she’s first alerted to this fact by a secret message from her future self) and we see that the 8pm photos are not as random as we thought.  In the film, the future is treated as concretely as the past (a more difficult concept for most people to latch onto) and our “travelers” are just as much of a slave to the future as they would be to the past.

It may be hard to fathom exactly how this is so since certainly a future where we see the future is different from a future where we don’t – this is not a failing of the film or screenplay…in fact, it isn’t even something that the film needs to address if the logic plays out correctly (which I believe it does).  Here’s how it works: “the future” is out there, and this machine can tap into the entirety of this future for the next photo.  Since the future is “fixed,” there’s no need to worry about what will and won’t be done or about what impact of seeing the photo will have on those it affects.  Why?  Because the camera already takes this into account.  The machine already has access to the future where the photo is seen.  It’s not like the trio is getting a snapshot of what will happen in 24 hours assuming the status quo.  No…they’re getting a picture of a future in which they’ve already seen this future.

It’s a tough concept to explain succinctly and simply.  But if you can understand the concept behind “the past is the past” and understand that any time traveling excursions to the past are not changes but instead were always a part of that past, all you have to do is apply this to the future and imagine that the future is just as solid and inflexible as the past.  Whatever happened in the future as a result of time travel always happened/happens in the future.  There are no actual changes taking place; whatever prior knowledge one already has about the future is already accounted for.

That’s what makes Time Lapse so cool.  Yeah, it’s a lot to take in, but it’s this intricacy that makes this such a “workable” time travel film.

I won’t say that Time Lapse is without its flaws; I had a tough time swallowing the friend’s transformation from mild sleazeball to straight up serial killer.  I also felt that the central relationship was a little too underdeveloped and too many past events (that the viewer has no way of knowing about) come into play during the final few twists.  The small scale of the movie worked great, however, I think the filmmakers actually undershot what they were capable of.  I think that they should’ve expanded their scope and given us an even richer story, though I do understand that they were working with a small budget.  And they did a wonderful job of logically keeping the events at a single location and maintaining a small yet entertaining and engaging cast.

There’s no outrageous action or dazzling special effects, but if you want a thoughtful movie that explores the hard-hitting implications of time travel, give this one a shot.  Don’t worry about trying to internalize even half of the stuff I’ve said on your first viewing.  Just let the movie do its job and come to you.  Then a couple of days later (or immediately after, if you’re able) watch it again and pick up any bits you may have missed.  Besides, movies like this always yield deeper understanding when you can watch it again with the ending in mind.  And then, when you’ve seen it a couple of times and developed some reasonable understanding of the plot and the time travel trickery at play, go back and take a look at it with my viewpoint in mind!

Written by The Cubist