Final Rating: 2/5
Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox, directed by Stimson Snead, is a wildly outrageous science fiction comedy that has some bold original ideas. Unfortunately the humour mostly doesn’t work, which makes the 110-minute runtime feel far too long.
Tim Travers, played by Samuel Dunning, is a scientist who manages to build a time machine that transports him back in time by one minute. That means when he steps through the time machine, he is greeted by himself. Panicking that he is about to create a paradox that ruins the fabric of time he panics and shoots the other Tim. Realizing nothing happens even when he tries to surprise himself, Tim keeps time traveling and shooting the other Tim.
Since Tim is the smartest person he knows, he decides to start keeping the Tim’s, allowing upwards of seventeen of them, each getting a name from the Greek alphabet to help him solve this paradox (or lack thereof). You have Alpha Tim the original, Beta Tim, Delta Tim and so on. The film gets quite technical quite fast, as someone who always struggled with science you just have to pretend you understand the jargon and move on.
Tim for some reason decides to go onto a right wing talk show hosted by James Bunratty, a deliciously blowhard Joel McHale. Tim taunts and makes fun of both James and his audience, which delights his producer Delilah (Felicia Day), so much so she agrees to go on a date with him. Alternating between screwing up the date and impressing her, eventually this leads to Tim and Delilah going back to his abandoned factory laboratory where she realizes he’s not just another nutbag that guests on rightwing radio, but the real, terrifying deal.
From there we get plenty of scenes of the Tim’s trying to problem solve but also getting distracted as they are curious about being in a room full of themselves. The special effects of having more than one Tim, oftentimes many of them in a single shot, is seamless and their interactions work really well. The effects get a bit dodgy later in the film when someone shows up and starts exploding people among other more zany effects.
While the film seems to feature plenty of technical jargon, it often feels like conversations between different characters are poorly improvised. While well timed swearing is often funny, the film seems to be of the mind that constant swearing equates to laughs. In more than one occasion and by more than character we get a deluge of F-bombs, that simply never lands.
The film overall feels like a zany concept that would have been a student film project from Abed Nadir, a character from Community, right down to Samuel Dunning performing like Jeff Winger at his most unhinged megalomaniac moments. A concept not lost, since Joel McHale played Jeff on Community and with Keith David who starred in the final season as Elroy showing up in Tim Travers as a character named The Simulator.
There is a delightful storyline where Gamma Tim and Omicron Tim end up falling in love, which is preceded by a Tim orgy that is as disgusting as it is funny. Unfortunately those are just about the best two parts of the film. The hot and cold Delilah acts far too irrationally to be seriously invested in her character choices.
Director Stimson Snead also plays a hitman named Helter, who has a bit where he keeps forgetting to read a message to Tim from his boss before killing him that is stale from the first time. Helter also maintains confusion, but no sort of curiosity about why he keeps killing the same man over and over again doesn’t make sense. The film loses what steam it has everytime we leave the Tim group to go to the inept hitman storyline.
The film has some pretty interesting ideas trying to tackle the science in unbelievable science fiction, something that is either hand waved away or purposely not explored. Sadly, the film has too many eye rolling moments of poorly written and executed comedy that makes the whole film a bit tough to get through. A more interesting soft time travel experience would be something from Japan’s Junta Yamaguchi who made the excellent Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and river, that utilize similar science.
Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox was seen during the 2024 Seattle International Film Festival. Thank you to K.O. PR for the screener.
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