No one ever has a perfect time machine, there’s no drama if you can easily change things and make the world a perfect place. So all time travel stories have to have a fatal flaw-some little weakness that makes using it a bit of a problem. One way to do this is to set a time limit. Say, you can see into the future, but not very far and only in one place. That’s our premise here in Time Lapse, a camera makes a Polaroid snapshot of events in the apartment across the way, twenty-four hours before it actually happens.
So, the question then becomes, what information would you pass along to yourself?
Time Lapse starts off with three losers living in an old apartment complex. One of them is the Maintenance Man and it falls to him to investigate when a neighbor goes missing. The three friends end up wandering around the neighbor’s apartment and discover a very large, steampunk style camera pointed at their apartment. One wall is covered with photos, many showing that the three young people have a serious exhibitionist streak, as they have the blinds to the window open at all hours. Several of the images are missing, but then, so is the old man who lives there, so they don’t worry too much about that. Then they find a Poliroid showing something that hasn’t happened yet. This machine is taking photos of The Future!
One of the losers is a blocked painter and another is a gambling addict, so they both use these peeks into the future to solve their little problems. The third is a pretty girl who lives with the two losers, and doesn’t seem to get the same kind of immediate benefits from the time photos as her two boyfriends do. The Time Photos work in much the same way that Bill and Ted were able to get ever larger guns from behind bushes-make a note to do all this stuff, Dude.
In standard Twilight Zone fashion, nothing good comes from seeing the future. The story worked, for the most part, up until the end, where that whole we can still fix this since we have a time machine thing kicks in. Sort of.
And then we have a set of pretty selfish and small minded people here. They can hold up signs with today’s winners at the dog races but don’t try playing the Stock Market or helping someone who died in a car crash.
None of these things bothered me while I was watching Time Lapse. The pacing was good, the acting was good enough, and the sets looked great, well, except for that giant plastic steampunk camera.
