Colin gets pulled to a parallel universe due to a particle accelerator accident. He then falls in love with the woman, Ottillee, that his parallel self is married to.The pace of the story can be agonizingly slow as typified in one scene which has a long boring sequence watching him shave and dress. A similar paced scene is watching him explore his parallel house.The romantic part is not so much slow as having too little. We do see several scenes with Ottillee partially dressed in underwear or nightclothes that take up a lot of the screen time that could have been better spent building the romance. It is not even clear why Colin chose to exert himself to repair the marriage that his parallel self has damaged due to negligence and infidelity.The movie is also cluttered with an excess of scientific so-called theory. There is enough real science to obscure where the theory becomes pure speculation. The movie would have had better pace with less of it.There is nothing extraordinary about the story, but it is good enough to at least partially make up for the slow development. Nevertheless, I'm a sucker for a love story especially if you throw in some sci-fi.

This is the second adaptation of the 1954 short story of the same name by John Wyndham that I have seen in the last two weeks, the first being the brilliant 1971 film "Quest for Love". All three of them have the same basic storyline: due to a failed experiment, a physicist named Colin Trafford is sent to a parallel universe where his counterpart is a successful author and complete bastard who is married to a woman named Ottilie Harsham, with whom he promptly falls in love. This adaptation is more faithful to the short story than the film but it is not as good as it retains many of the story's problems which the film eliminated. To paraphrase my recent review of the film, its screenwriter Terence Feely gave Ottilie a fatal heart condition which gave Colin's search for her counterpart once he returned to his own universe a great sense of urgency and a greater moral dimension as well as making her even more unattainable.I cannot criticise Kate Ashfield's performance as she does the best that she can with the material but this version of Ottilie does not have much in the way of personality, in contrast to Joan Collins' version. Samuel West is very good as Colin but the character likewise never comes alive in the way as Tom Bell's version. The same is true of the character's love affair. The major problems with the film are its writing and direction, both of which are fairly pedestrian. It is only 58 minutes long but, for some reason, either the screenwriter Richard Fell or the director Luke Watson decided that it was a good idea to waste about five minutes having Colin wander around like a headless chicken while examining his far more financially successful counterpart's big but, for my tastes, tacky house as well as examining his convertible and swimming pool. It doesn't add anything to the proceedings and it would have been a better idea to trim these scenes significantly, not least because the ending feels rushed. That said, the short story had much the same problem, which is another of its problems which the 1971 version managed to solve.In both the short story and the film, Colin is confronted with information which suggests that he is in a parallel universe almost immediately and does not meet Ottilie until sometime later. In the former, he reads a newspaper which states that India is still a British colony in 1954 and Rab Butler is the Prime Minister. In the latter, he reads an edition of "The News Chronicle" which states that JFK is the new Secretary-General of the League of Nations, all three of which were long gone in reality by 1971. In this version, Fell switches the order around and I think that it was a mistake as what exactly has happened is not made clear from the beginning. If I had not known what it was about already, I might have assumed that Colin did not know Ottilie who was as he had lost his memory of the time between the accident and waking up in a strange house rather than having been sent to a parallel universe.When it does address some of the differences, however, most of them are fairly interesting: Condoleezza Rice is the US President, the still living John Smith is the Prime Minister, the US and Japan are on the verge of war, the UK is experiencing widespread drought, human cloning has just been legalised to combat the fertility problem in the West and there was a manned mission to Mars sometime in the past. The most interesting, however, is not mentioned until after Colin returns to his own universe: glasnost and perestroika never happened and so the Cold War continued intensifying until the US and the Soviet Union "burned themselves out," leading China to become the most powerful country in the world. I know that it was not the point of the film but it would have been nice if they had explored that a little more.Overall, this is a decent sci-fi TV film but it could have benefited from better writing and direction and another half an hour to explore the material. The best version of the story is still "Quest for Love" without a doubt.

"Random Quest," based on a John ("Day of the Triffids") Wyndham science fiction parallel universes yarn, shows the BBC at its not-quite top- drawer. Here a so-so love story is made to trump an ingenious fictional study of Einsteinian paradoxes. One of the problems is the actor Sam West. His sluggish portrayal of the chief character is a nice demonstration of human entropy. He starts off so boring as to nearly vanish from the scene and winds up as one of those British vacuum cleaners marketed in infomercials, sucking most of the air and substance out of this romantic science fiction drama and turning it into a two-dimensional "Flatland." The rest of the cast performs adequately, but nobody seems to have really tried to make a difference. There is an attempt at an interesting walk-and-talk discussion of quantum mechanics, but that stops in mid-track. Much of the action takes place in a very modern home that sports a long and narrow basement swimming pool and a cramped closet-like bedroom. At first apparently quite striking, the home reveals itself to be an awkward space more like a very contemporary shop window than a house. If you're interested in how a talented cast and director can breathe life into a story about alternate realities, you only have to watch an episode of "Fringe." Otherwise, there's no parallel.

Colin is a research scientist who is working at a nuclear reactor as part of a team trying to simulate a black hole. The experiment goes wrong and the next thing he knows, Colin wakes up in bed in a white room in a strange house. Next thing he knows his "wife" has come home and he is dealing with calls from people he does not know. The few he does recognise seem to not know him in the way that that he thinks he knows them. Although it is a jump to get there, Colin concludes that the black hole experiment has forced him into a parallel universe and that his alternative has gone somewhere else. While this mystifies him, Colin also enjoys his new life and starts to build on it.I'll be honest and say that when I read about parallel universes and jumping around between them I had expected more from it than this film delivered in the sci-fi realm. It doesn't really explore the concept from the sci-fi point of view but it does do it from a character point of view. This side takes the form of a sort of romantic plot where Colin tries to build a life in his parallel world while also figuring out what has actually happened. It is not as fascinating as it should have been though and discussions over the theory are mostly superficial and not followed through. What it does do well though is give interesting characters and a structure that suggests more mystery than there actually is. The ending is a "nice" conclusion but it is not that clever or impacting The writing does do a good job of building the characters and they are brought out well. West takes the lead pretty well and seems more comfortable with the story inside his character's head than the sci-fi element. Parkes is good in support but it was Ashfield's turn that made the emotional core of the story work – she was convincing even as her character changed. As director Watson does a good job of it and the locations were well chosen and delivered (how much for that house?! Probably too much…).Overall though I did struggle to overcome the disappointment that the central sci-fi concept was not worked for more benefit. The relationship side of it did provide interest but it was not quite enough on its own and I would have appreciated more of the sci-fi worked into it; as it was it could easily have lost the parallel world aspect and still worked as a story about marriage being rebuilt.