Science fiction is a finicky thing. Depending on your approach and your tastes and background, this flick can either be 1 to 10. I encourage the reader to read the reviews as a form of entertainment in itself, I would also ask the reader to refrain from critiquing this movie as if it had a limitless budget and was hell bent on employing the best special effects possible. In other words, a Hollywood movie. Sadly, too many of our young are trapped there. It has been my experience that the best SciFi allows you to use your imagination. You read SciFi and imagine great things that Hollywood couldn't begin to portray. "The Time Machine", 1960, must be one of the greatest movies in this subject. It has roots in H.G.Wells' 1895 "The Time Machine" novel. Interesting point, the character in the movie shares a similar name with the author of the book. The acting may not be the best, the special effects not out of this world and the script could use more "airing". Your imagination, however, takes over and fills in the blanks to make it a very interesting movie to this date. If the script and story line can allow your imagination to flourish, then at the end of the movie you find yourself thinking. Although the movie ended.... you're still going.It's nice to see special effects to replace your imagination every now and then but I find it's best when it is left to the imagination. This is why most stories that try to make the transition from book to movie fail. On acting.... you may have an idea how a soldier would reacted when facing a platoon of the enemy on his own. We can draw from our limited experience. But has anyone ever met an alien? How does one act when stepping into a time machine? How does one act when they fall in love with someone who wishes to step into a time machine. You can have a whole movie on that alone. Acting in this instance should allow some leeway for the viewer to fill in with their imagination. On the other hand, acting may be what saves the scene such as the end scene to Casablanca with a fake aircraft with little people or La Marseillaise scene sung in defiance to the Germans. In this movie, although the genre was SciFi, the secondary theme was love. Another, loss. Yet another, jealousy. This requires fine acting, not supper acting, and I think it was done adequately well. Not great but well. To tell you the truth, my heart broke for one of the characters. Lets use our imagination on one angle of the movie.... sound. If you wish to employ frequencies in your experiment and need a fundamental series of frequencies, the piano is an interesting choice. And it's calibrated to some standard. Believe it or not, there are a few established standards in piano calibration and tuning. The piano can be a scientific instrument in every sense of the word. So it wasn't a screwball idea to use a piano. But a piano is also musical. It has Rhythm and beats and bars. Now, imagine an infinite number of future threads to an event. In a song, we may have four beats to a bar. Every four beats you repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Almost as if it is infinite. It generates a Rhythm that explores a theme, or event. Changing notes in one bar with just four beats (4/4 for example) could change the entire theme of the song. Mapping out the future of Victoria's event in the well and navigating it successfully with a sound signature (so may beats to a bar) is an interesting connection to the piano. We can now layer other life experiences to music, such as falling in love, as was the case when they danced through the time map to music, expanding the parallelism to a theme or song. Interesting? How about dancing to music when the old man removed their masks in the beginning of the movie? How about our young hero dancing with the blindfold on in front of the well after removing the welded well cap at the start? In my experience, I have found that the best attributes to enjoying good SciFi is the person's ability to imagine. Overload the person with special effects and at the end of the movie the person may experience relief (and to beat the crowd out of the theater) instead of thought provocative mesmorization as your view the credits. Enjoy this movie and see what happens to you at the end.

This is not your typical sci-fi flick. There are no monsters, mutants or massive special effects. It is science (physics) + historical fiction. It is easy for lovers of sci-fi to get bogged down by details. Rather than quarrel with other reviewers about this, I would just say this is fiction, parallel universes are not currently fact; so one might be more open-minded if someone presents an alternate approach.1) To assume that scientists can't be illogical at times is perhaps short-sighted. Love is truly illogical and childhood love is even more so. They need not be an emotional wreck in order to be illogical about lost love or unfounded guilt. Brilliant scientists come in many forms.2) If you want to know Robert's motivation for traveling back in time, pay closer attention to the love stories.Be open to the story and as others have said, the cinematography and the score are excellent for a low budget movie.

MILD SPOILERS MARKED BELOW.This movie's strengths are many. The premise, although ultimately science fantasy, is immediately engaging: what if someone had devised the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics (all possible realities, deriving from every possible choice, exist in parallel worlds) back in the 1920's, and then gone on from there to invent a time machine? The would-be time traveler who wants to undo an event in their own past is a story we've seen before, but the essentials of this version are quite well done.The film is beautifully designed and shot (arthouse fans will not find it too slow) and very well acted. The screenplay is full of quality moments.So why is this only a 6? Well, to begin with, the screenplay is also full of clichés. But it has a much bigger problem than that: the main character's behavior and motivation, which are the sole engine of the plot, are somewhat unconvincing for an ordinary person, and entirely unconvincing for a scientist.VERY BROAD SPOILERS FOLLOWIf you advise someone not to do something rash or dangerous or wisely decline to do it yourself), and they do it anyway, and it indeed ends badly ... most people will feel remorse -- remorse that they did not do a better job of explaining their concerns. What rarely happens is that they *entirely blame themselves*, to the point of obsession. It stretches all credulity (at least for me) that a brilliant scientist (hence, by nature, an unusually rational thinker) would do so. You don't really want your genius character being told by friends that "it wasn't your fault" when that is in fact INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS.This movie does this twice; one is the engine of the plot, and the other creates a plot pivot.Note that this might have worked if our hero had been portrayed as a general emotional wreck who just happened to be a physics whiz. But he's not: he goes about pursuing his obsession in a cool, rational way that is entirely believable for a brilliant scientist. It's only the source of that obsession that is out of character, fatally so.The pity is, it's easy to imagine how the plot could have been kept intact by giving our hero more complex, more interesting, and much more believable motivations.Oh, and the movie also ends up incorporating a classic time-travel paradox without seeming to address it at all. And there's a huge loose end in the plot that, I think, cries out for more closure.END SPOILERSThe first thing I did after watching this film is check to see who the producers were. My suspicions were correct: the screenwriter, and the director. IOW, no one with an objective take on the film. If I had a time machine, I'd go back a few years and give them a whole set of notes on the screenplay. That's what a good producer does. The creative team here is clearly quite talented; if they find someone who really knows film (and especially knows the genre they're working in) to produce their next effort, it will be one to watch for.

This review - and the comment - was written at Cambridge Film Festival (15 to 25 September 2011), where the film had its UK premiere* Contains spoilers *Although it is received wisdom that 'I can't be in two places at once (or at the same time, in a variant)', not only is that usually just an excuse, but it is affected by developments in cloning.All that apart, the immense popularity of Dimensions, now (after screenings in Screens 2 and then 1) shown again, meant that I could go through the wormhole of watching again: the phrase does not sound favourable, but it is not intended unfavourably, as I was viewing twice to see what happened to something that I thought fine the first time.Why was it fine? It is an extremely intelligent film that uses the concept and theory of time-travel to say something about what I described in my blog as longing. I still think that it is longing, not just obsession – one can be obsessed about something (e.g. Jackie Chan cutting my head off) that (without being psychoanalytical), on the face of it (pun intended!), one does not long for, and long for something that does not obsess one.I said longing for something that one cannot have or that may not do one any good. In this film, that turns out not to be true on either count, and also involves a paradox. The events are separated by fifteen years, but, in some respects, the characters seem unchanged, seem stuck in some childish ways (as we all probably are – now who wants to play the psychology card, after all!), seem full of what I want to call longing. (I call it longing not only because I can't use the German word Sehnsucht, and, because of the connotations, I don't want to use yearning.) I asked a question about that at the premiere – the younger actors had had a chance to speak to their counterparts (and vice versa). What I find myself thinking, this time around, is that there is a generational as well as a dimensional character to all that we see, a temporal distortion that, as much as Alice's worlds reinterpret the present from which she enters Wonderland or the other Looking-Glass House, ripples (a key word in the script) as water, particles or time do with their differing wave-fronts. Which is why Ant Neely's brother's house on the river at Cambridge is such a benefit to and feature of this film.This Cambridge-driven film – Ernest Rutherford split the atom here in 1917, which was then done under both his direction and controlled conditions in 1932 - buzzes with that innovation, but buzzes in the direction of feelings, and Olivia Llewellyn's acting beautifully embodies the spirit of a bright and clear academic mind, seeking to help Henry-Lloyd-Hughes (as Stephen) achieve his brilliant aims.* * * * *To say a little more, enough to tease (as the film often does), about mirror-images, there is a scene that shows Stephen and his friend Victoria after they have tumbled to the ground in a sort of chase of and with themselves.As with something that happens later, which may (as Stephen's cousin Conrad first claims, and later appears unsure about it) - or may not - have been an accident, and which literally ties in with this moment, there is an embodiment of a skein, of the film's title's 'tangle of threads' (or the potential for it). It's a game, but there's bondage, the shackling that Joyce McKinney asserts was a sort of chosen cure, a sort of healing, in Tabloid, and with it there's the breathlessness associated with the other activity, there's the arbitrary rule-making that the game has to be played one way (counter-clockwise), an approach that can form rigid habits and stronger disciplines, not always for one's - or anyone else's - good in life (as with Stephen's father's former friend Richard?).So the mirror-image, of the game being played clockwise, can be imagined - as can any other action involving Victoria and Stephen - happening, but it offends against the street being declared to be one way. (Not too far off from thinking again of Rutherford, of thinking how the characters in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen revolve, dance, around each other like particles in a simple atom...) And the transposed image, the left / right flip? Set aside whether the falling down together, linked, was (as with Conrad's accident) deliberate - although it had to seem so, or not ambiguously so, for us: when we see Stephen and Victoria on the ground, from the waist up, side by side, they are, first of all, in that order, left to right. The picture (taken by the cinematographer, but not one that otherwise existed for Stephen to see (directly)), when he calls it to mind later, becomes Victoria and Stephen, she now on the left. (It is nearly summoned again, but we do not actually see it, are just so reminded of it that, as a ghost of a view, we could almost swear that its image is on our retina at that point, because we know it - or think that we know it - by then.) So these are the hints of Alice, these are the suggestions that, in a world as like ours as the one that she first sees in Looking-Glass House, things may be subtly different, actually harmful: as The Annotated Alice observes, with Martin Gardner talking about left- and right-handed molecules (which are identical but for being mirror-images of each other), milk would not be safe for Alice or her cat to drink in the world beyond the looking-glass. Matter and anti-matter? It goes on...Where would we be without the imagination of Ant Neely (the film's writer) or of Lewis Carroll? The poorer for it, I think.