I wasn't fully certain what to expect but I giddily jumped at the chance to watch this.
I absolutely have to get into spoilers because the film as a whole just doesn't work properly because of it.
Early on, the film teases us with various theories of time travel, including visual representations of such things like the "infinite object loop" theory (wherin someone brings an object from the future into the past, loses it in the past, then re-gains it in the future naturally), or the "fixed time" theory, in which any attempted "alteration" of the past has essentially already happened and was always meant to happen.
The film itself then digs through the rather uninteresting story of fictional Edward Page and his wife Ann as they work on a fictional Indiana Project to make a time machine. Then his son Richard gets involved and decides to test it by going back in time to inoculate his mother as an infant from polio so she doesn't die.
Right away the "fix" or the "hook" of the mockumentary then plays itself out: changes made via time travel are affecting the film in real time, as suddenly the interviewees are praising Richard and his previously non-existent brother Aidan's time travel attempts.
This goes on and on in a longer, winding way in which various members of their family live and/or die and/ore time travel, and Soviet spies end up stealing it and rewriting history to be more evil because "communism".
But all the while, the changes are essentially happening as you are watching the film, and without any indication of any change except for the fact that the documentary story you're being told is suddenly being told entirely differently from scene to scene. One sequence literally has one guy remark about how Richard's first time travel takes place in December 1985, then the scene afterwards has the exact same guy remark about how Richard's first time travel takes place in December 1987, and if you weren't paying attention you would have completely missed it.
This is a very interesting and fun way to play with time travel in a movie.... but given that this is in the format of a documentary, it is self-sabotaging. It's basically impossible for this sort of documentary to exist in its form without some additional framing device, in part because documentaries are not filmed live and sequential, so the editors in the editing room would have literally been among the first people to sit there and realize they have footage sitting in front of them that is ostensibly from different "times" which they are somehow able to cut together.
As interesting and fun as the story being told was, the documentary framing device, to me, was a mistake, and takes away from the film too much.
Basically, if you are writing in your diary about your very good day, and as you write, the content changes to be about your very bad day, YOU would notice if, after you finish writing, you read what you wrote and see you have written about a GOOD day and a BAD day on the same day.
that's basically all I could think about as I kept watching the film.
I absolutely have to get into spoilers because the film as a whole just doesn't work properly because of it.
Early on, the film teases us with various theories of time travel, including visual representations of such things like the "infinite object loop" theory (wherin someone brings an object from the future into the past, loses it in the past, then re-gains it in the future naturally), or the "fixed time" theory, in which any attempted "alteration" of the past has essentially already happened and was always meant to happen.
The film itself then digs through the rather uninteresting story of fictional Edward Page and his wife Ann as they work on a fictional Indiana Project to make a time machine. Then his son Richard gets involved and decides to test it by going back in time to inoculate his mother as an infant from polio so she doesn't die.
Right away the "fix" or the "hook" of the mockumentary then plays itself out: changes made via time travel are affecting the film in real time, as suddenly the interviewees are praising Richard and his previously non-existent brother Aidan's time travel attempts.
This goes on and on in a longer, winding way in which various members of their family live and/or die and/ore time travel, and Soviet spies end up stealing it and rewriting history to be more evil because "communism".
But all the while, the changes are essentially happening as you are watching the film, and without any indication of any change except for the fact that the documentary story you're being told is suddenly being told entirely differently from scene to scene. One sequence literally has one guy remark about how Richard's first time travel takes place in December 1985, then the scene afterwards has the exact same guy remark about how Richard's first time travel takes place in December 1987, and if you weren't paying attention you would have completely missed it.
This is a very interesting and fun way to play with time travel in a movie.... but given that this is in the format of a documentary, it is self-sabotaging. It's basically impossible for this sort of documentary to exist in its form without some additional framing device, in part because documentaries are not filmed live and sequential, so the editors in the editing room would have literally been among the first people to sit there and realize they have footage sitting in front of them that is ostensibly from different "times" which they are somehow able to cut together.
As interesting and fun as the story being told was, the documentary framing device, to me, was a mistake, and takes away from the film too much.
Basically, if you are writing in your diary about your very good day, and as you write, the content changes to be about your very bad day, YOU would notice if, after you finish writing, you read what you wrote and see you have written about a GOOD day and a BAD day on the same day.
that's basically all I could think about as I kept watching the film.