Timecrimes

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Unfortunately, I have to start this one off by saying my overall experience with this one wasn't as great as I had expected. For starters, I had to watch it on YouTube with a pretty terrible English dub (the film is Spanish, under the title 'Los Cronocrímenes') making it sound as though it's playing out like any "good-bad" movie you've ever seen. To make it worse, the sound was premature by a couple of seconds, so you always heard if something was gonna happen, thus providing no tension. That said, this film may very well be redeemable if watched in proper Spanish with subtitles, 'cause it's otherwise a neat idea.

This guy named Héctor (Karra Elejalde) is bored or something, so starts looking into his backyard forest, only to find a lovely young woman taking off her shirt. When his wife leads, he goes to investigate and finds her lying on the ground, unconscious. He is attacked, and flees to this nearby building to hide. Finding a walkie, he contacts someone to help hide him, and he ends up taking a time machine back about an hour and a half. As events unfold, he finds himself in a very strange time loop, and it becomes a cautionary tale of cause and effect through time travel.

There's a few things that will throw you off throughout it, but again, the idea when it's all over is pretty solid, and often surprisingly unexplored with time travel movies. A lot of the time, you'll consider Héctor to be creepy, weird, even kinda dumb with all he questions about time travel. But as he's put through these events he grows as a character, and by the ends, you're even a bit mindblown by everything he comes up with. And what's funny is as soon as you think to yourself "that was unnecessary", you start to look for ways to make sense out of it. To my surprise, I was almost always able to, except I think there's one of those gaping time travel paradoxes as well in the style of "what came first, the chicken or the egg?" If you watch it, you'll get what I mean.

Again, this one is hard to find as far as a good copy is concerned, but it IS out there. It ends up on a lot of "unknown time travel movie" lists out there as well, so I'm not the only one who manages to see the redeeming qualities of it. Still, at the end of the day, it's certainly not my favorite time travel movie, and couldn't hold a candle to some others I've reviewed this month. But I will say that if you have the means, it's worth checking out.

Starting off kinda slow and confusing, it does eventually get a little intense, and it keeps your brain nice and busy. But it's NOT the thinker 'Primer' was (seriously, I dunno if I'll ever get over how much that movie broke my brain). In fact, there's some similarities to this and 'Primer', but this ones more for those who can't follow ALL the technical jargon. In fact, it breaks it down as if it's explaining it to a kid, which isn't bad, but perhaps a tad condescending to those of us who already get time travel movies.
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3/5

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