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NEEDLE IN A TIMESTACK
Director: John Ridley Cast: Leslie Odom Jr., Cynthia Erivo, Freida Pinto, Orlando Bloom, Jadyn Wong MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:51 Release Date: 10/15/21 (limited; digital & on-demand) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 14, 2021 As silly and punny as the tile may be, there's a fascinating premise to Needle in a Timestack. Writer/director John Ridley, adapting Robert Silverberg's short story of the same name, gives us a world where time travel is, not only possible and performed, but also capable of completely changing a person's life without consent or knowledge. Someone might have a dog one day, and after a seemingly random "phase" of the timeline, that same person has a cat. The dog certainly still exists somewhere, but that person's memory of even having it as a pet has disappeared. There's so much potential to this in terms of plot, and Ridley does occasionally tap into those possibilities as the story progresses. For better and worse, he also, though, focuses this particular tale as a time-shifting and existence-bending romance, in which one man finds his love life changed again and again because of time travel. Hence, the story here exists in an unfortunate middle ground between plot and character. It wants the intrigue and gimmickry of the time-travel component and all of the tricks that could be pulled off with that story element. It also, though, wants us to become involved in the lives and relationships of these characters, as they change and re-arrange and disappear without warning. Ultimately, Ridley is trying to accomplish too much, and both the plot and these characters suffer from the lack of attention toward both. Initially, Nick (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Janine (Cynthia Erivo) are happily married, and Ridley spends a bit too much time establishing that happiness without much attention to the characters themselves. Nick is worried, though, that his wife's ex-husband Tom (Orlando Bloom), a wealthy businessman and one of his friends from college, is using time travel as a way to get back with Janine. He suspects as such when a phase, visualized as a kind of temporal wave, washes over Nick at work one day. He's unaware that his beloved dog has indeed been replaced by a cat, but Nick starts to worry that something about his life has changed. He meets with Tom, who insists that he's not manipulating time travel to re-gain his marriage to Janine (although his little philosophical diversion about how loving someone ends all potential to love another person seems a bit suspicious—both in terms of the conversation at hand and of Ridley contriving to fit some philosophical diversions into this tale). Nick becomes increasingly paranoid, and Janine starts to feel her husband becoming distant from her. Considering how little time travel or its repercussions fit into this story for a while, it briefly seems as if Ridley might be using the gimmick, only to bypass it entirely for how fear and distrust and jealousy can betray a present relationship in the future—a kind of emotional and/or psychological form of time-altering. Sure enough, though, Nick and Janine are hit with a larger phase, and Nick comes to, driving a car down a desert highway (The mechanics of all of the time travel and shifting aren't so much inconsistent as they are unconsidered, because the end result gives us an easy metaphor—the imagery of a man traveling a vacant road alone after his life has completely changed). Janine calls, desperately telling Nick about their now non-existent marriage before they both forget it. Instead, Nick is currently married to Alex (Freida Pinto), who was his ex-girlfriend from college in the old timeline. We're given yet another study of a broadly drawn relationship, but the intriguing thing here is how Ridley reverses the process. Nick is initially suspicious and distrustful of this marriage (as one would expect), but as the memories and underlying feelings about his marriage to Janine fade, he starts building a seemingly happy bond with his new—or, as it is in this timeline, long-time—wife. It's a bit of a clever subversion, since so much of the early dialogue revolves around matters of the heart transcending those of memory and altered reality. In practice, it's ultimately more of the same broad sketches of romance (A montage of happy scenes figures prominently to do a lot of work) and more on-the-nose philosophical discussions (Nick's sister, played by Jadyn Wong, used time travel to prevent her best friend from dying, which seems like an intriguing ethical question but is mostly to give Nick an idea about his own situation). The rest, obviously, probably doesn't need to be explained. Since Needle in a Timestack is a story about time travel, we have to eventually see time travel at work (It's a bit amusing how none of these characters have changed appearance in many years when we do see it). Ridley offers one smart, if heavily telegraphed, twist on Nick's plan and its consequences, but by then, the movie has lingered so long on shallow relationship melodrama, the filmmaker is in a rush to make his final, predictable, and mostly unearned point. Copyright © 2021 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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