Review of Time Trap (2017)
Seen in 2020.
A series of incidents with people going to look for their missing relatives all lead to a cave system where time passes at a different rate.
Pulp archaeologists are implausibly attractive and use none of their training in this genre-straddling adventure film. The most basic concept is that epistemologically stable local physical phenomena dynamically result in a Drifting Classromm (1972) scenario. That’s a strong concept. The screenplay pisses it away almost completely, but there’s just enough thinking left to carry the implementation. In particular, the use of found footage within the narrative is sort of realistic.
I was disappointed that phenomena adequate to explain the myth of a fountain of a youth are undercut by the addition of a literal fountain of youth with magical powers of resurrection and healing that have nothing to do with time and that the ancient culture inside the cave seems to have enough of an economy to keep torches burning for light, but how this is possible we never learn. The culture as such has no apparent adaptation to the temporal barriers it “guards”; at the very least, the actors in bad caveman-face should have been seen using the time trap as a literal trap for food. The aspect of science fiction, with a relocation to Mars in perfunctorily greebled technology where everybody survives and is a “big deal”, makes no sense, and the special effects are poor; I prefer the Crunch on Moab in The Ballad of Halo Jones (1984) among soft science fiction narratives about narrowly local time dilation. The lack of cellular reception is a cliché that doesn’t even serve a purpose here. It’s dumber than The Descent (2005) and a lot dumber than Primer (2004), but it’s fun.