Time After Time

timeaftertime.jpgA co-worker recently purchased a Dairy Queen chicken fingers basket for her lunch and brought it in to work. If you have never had a DQ chicken fingers basket I recommend trying one. Not highly recommended mind you, but if you are looking for something relatively inexpensive and borderline tasty you can do much worse.

But what interests me most about the DQ chicken fingers basket is the make up of it. Now of course you get chicken fingers, your choice of 4 or 6 depending on how much of a glutton you are. Me, I’m a 6 finger fatty, but that is straying from my rather ambiguous point.

Now along with the chicken fingers you of course get your choices of sauces to eat them with. By my last count you had something in the neighborhood of 239 different varieties. I’m a honey mustard man myself but occasionally dabble with barbecue sauce or ranch if I am feeling particularly saucy that meal. Along with the fingers and the sauce you get what appears to be a rather large fistful of fries artfully tossed in the general direction of the basket. I’m sure by this time you have absolutely no idea where I am going with any of this, let alone how I could possibly tie it in with my latest review of Time After Time, but I promise you, my thesis shall be made clear quite soon.

Now we come to the pièce de résistance of the meal which, rather ironically, is a piece of toast. Now I don’t know why they would include a piece of toast with the meal, or why they choose to butter it beforehand, but dammit if it isn’t just about the perfect compliment to the meal. In spite of being completely ridiculous, and improbably illogical, it rather simply makes the entire meal work.

And in light of such a ridiculous combination of foodstuffs somehow conjoining to create a meal far greater then the sum of its parts, it is my hope that you see the connection to tales like Time After Time, in which several notable characters are combined in an unlikely, if not utterly ridiculous, situation in the hopes their struggles will entertain the audience.

Now I must admit that I am a sucker for stories that contain either famous figures or characters in a fictional setting. It is a relatively common style in comics with characters bleeding through into various other titles to help drum up book sales. But in the case of Warren Ellis’ Planetary or Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen they have shown that the stories can be far more then a simple marketing gimmick. A for those of you stuffed shirts who don’t read comics, you can always try Neil Gaiman’s A Study in Emerald to see a fantastic blending of styles, genres, and literary giants that is sure to both fascinate and entertain.

But film is another medium that likes to try and blend together famous characters in the hopes of some bock office pull. The Abbott and Costello Meets … franchise comes quickly to mind, as I’m sure plenty of others come to yours as well. But in my experience their really hasn’t been much effort to turn any of these films into anything more then simple cash grabs, which is why I was excited about the chance to finally watch Time After Time.

Now while the story of H.G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper through time to the year 1979 was what initially caught my attention, their were plenty of other reasons why I was intrigued by the film. That it starred Malcolm McDowell and David Warner as the two titular characters was certainly another reason why I was interested. Both are great actors, and while Warner excels at playing villains, I was quite intrigued by the idea of McDowell playing a fairly meek and out of touch character. It certainly is a bit of casting against type, and I wanted to see if McDowell was equal to the task. But the geekiest reason for wanting to watch this film was because it was written and directed by Nicholas Meyer. A relative unknown to most people, Meyer is probably best known for writing and directing the only two Star Trek movies worth watching. Those being Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

It didn’t take long into the film to realize a few things. First the special effects are outright terrible. The travel through time montage is particularly trying, although I’m sure if you just downed a hit of LSD you’ll be thoroughly entranced by the shiny lights. And while I was wondering how Meyer would pull off several gruesome murders by The Ripper and still maintain a PG rating, it quickly became clear that this would be possible because none of the killing occur on screen. Even when the occasional blood splatter does appear it looks far more like watered down ketchup then anything else.

While the effects were dreadful Time After Time had the luxury of McDowell giving a tour de force performance as H.G. Wells. With both wide eyed optimism and jaw dropping awe McDowell prances from scene to scene, happily content at creating a horribly believable character of the highly regarded scientist and author. A progressive in his time, Wells is left dumb founded when he discovers the future is not what he dreamed, and in fact is something often times far more horrible then he could have imagined.

Not to be outdone Warner stalks through the film creating a malevolent being as horrible as one would expect Jack the Ripper to be. This is not Spinal Tap’s haughty Saucy Jack, but a being who thrills in the destruction on display in the modern world, and can’t wait to roll up his sleeves and contribute to its spiraling downfall. In a terrific early scene, Jack painstaking spells out his joy in the current state of humanity for Wells, claiming “Ninety years ago I was a freak. Today I’m an amateur.”

But while the performances of McDowell and Warner are clearly worth renting the film for, the rest of the cast is almost entirely wasted. Or in the case of Mary Steenburgen, a massive encumbrance. Why she thinks she can play a sex symbol in damn near every movie is beyond me. Personally, I’d rather make out with a Plecostamus then that whorehopper. But there is a completely random cameo by a rather famous child actor that was, in a word, totally awesome.

And while Time After Time is pretty effective in telling its fish out of water story, its continual hammering home of its themes of women’s lib and McDonald’s terrible breakfast are delivered in far too heavy handed a style. Granted, they milk plenty of laughs out of McDowell’s Wells struggling to comprehend just where his self-perceived Utopia went wrong, but as you pass the one hour mark it would have been nice if they started to pull back on the throttle a bit.

The other complaint I have, and this is probably just me, but I would have liked if they had actually played with the concept of Jack the Ripper being the Zodiac Killer. There is nothing more then a passing mention of the Zodiac Killer, and considering these two killers both enjoyed taunting the police it could have been relatively easy to have a small side plot of Warner “reinventing” himself as the Zodiac Killer. If nothing else it would have sent the minds of conspiracy theorists spinning, and entertained the hell out of me. And be the fickle film watcher I am, it is this fairly insignificant detail, the toast if you will, that keeps me from loving Time After Time and merely liking it instead.