Frequency

A slightly different time travel story.  As the previews show a father and his son talking through time over a radio.  The movie implies that it's somehow tied to a particularly southern Aurora Borealis, as if that were something exotic.  The characters make changes to the past and then have to deal with a variation of the Grandfather Principle.

As usual with time travel stories, they're only really interesting if someone remembers both versions.  I've never heard a good explanation that explains how that can happen.  And they don't even try with this movie.  The character simply states that he has two sets of memories.

Even more egregious, there were effects that people were able to see and react to.  In other words, it was as if there was a 30 year delay from when some things happened until the effect showed up.  But some things took effect immediately.

For example, when he saves his father's life the effects are instantaneous.  The son wakes up the next day and everything has changed.

OTOH, when the radio gets smashed in the past we see it short out in the future as if something had just happened to it.  When the father rebuilds the radio in the past we see it slowly morph back to where all the pieces are fixed and the radio works in the future.

Another pair of even better examples.  In the previews they show the father putting something in a hiding place in the past and the son finds it in the future, obviously having sat there for 30 years.  A little earlier the father burns his son's name into the top of the desk and the son sees the letters forming.  Why the 30 year delay?  Why doesn't he just see them pop into place?

And ever worse than those, there are some actions that characters other than the son can see happening, too.  So do they have dual memories, too?

All of that really muddled the time travel story and was a serious verisimilitude break for me.

I found those unanswered questions annoying.  But if you can get past those verisimiltude goofs, it's a fairly fun romp.

The beginning of the movie is where the son saves his father, and by doing so, the father inadvertantly saves the killer.  But since the audience didn't know who the killer was at that point.  I'll bet a lot of people missed that that's what was happening.  I barely caught it, and I think on many days I would have missed it.

From that point on there are a couple of intertwined plots running.  One is trying to catch the killer.  The other is trying to keep him from killing more women.   But pretty much every time the son passes instructions to the father they make things worse.  And that's the most entertaining part of the film.  How are they going to screw up next?

On my brother's Total Movie Value Scale, Pay Per View.  A bit contrived, and bad science fiction, not one of the better time travel stories.   But fun despite that.

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