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    Time After Time Movie Review

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    Oshram Kino
    Time After Time is a 1979 film starring Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells and David Warner as Jack the Ripper. Wells builds a time machine and pursues the Ripper to 1979 San Francisco. There, Wells meets Amy and tries to stop the Ripper's modern murders. The film is well-made with sharp writing and acting, but the reviewer notes it was heavily borrowed from in later films like Star Trek IV and Back to the Future III. While this distracted from enjoying the original film, it also highlights how good of an idea and execution Time After Time had for other films to copy it so directly. Overall, the reviewer recommends the film as still enjoyable and holding up well after 30 years.

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    Time After Time Movie Review

    Uploaded by

    Oshram Kino
    16 views2 pages
    Time After Time is a 1979 film starring Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells and David Warner as Jack the Ripper. Wells builds a time machine and pursues the Ripper to 1979 San Francisco. There, Wells meets Amy and tries to stop the Ripper's modern murders. The film is well-made with sharp writing and acting, but the reviewer notes it was heavily borrowed from in later films like Star Trek IV and Back to the Future III. While this distracted from enjoying the original film, it also highlights how good of an idea and execution Time After Time had for other films to copy it so directly. Overall, the reviewer recommends the film as still enjoyable and holding up well after 30 years.

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    Time After Time (1979) Malcolm McDowell, David Warner, Mary Steenburgen

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    Time After Time movie review

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    Time After Time is a 1979 film starring Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells and David Warner as Jack the Ripper. Wells builds a time machine and pursues the Ripper to 1979 San Francisco. There, Wells meets Amy and tries to stop the Ripper's modern murders. The film is well-made with sharp writing and acting, but the reviewer notes it was heavily borrowed from in later films like Star Trek IV and Back to the Future III. While this distracted from enjoying the original film, it also highlights how good of an idea and execution Time After Time had for other films to copy it so directly. Overall, the reviewer recommends the film as still enjoyable and holding up well after 30 years.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    16 views2 pages

    Time After Time Movie Review

    Uploaded by

    Oshram Kino
    Time After Time is a 1979 film starring Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells and David Warner as Jack the Ripper. Wells builds a time machine and pursues the Ripper to 1979 San Francisco. There, Wells meets Amy and tries to stop the Ripper's modern murders. The film is well-made with sharp writing and acting, but the reviewer notes it was heavily borrowed from in later films like Star Trek IV and Back to the Future III. While this distracted from enjoying the original film, it also highlights how good of an idea and execution Time After Time had for other films to copy it so directly. Overall, the reviewer recommends the film as still enjoyable and holding up well after 30 years.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
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    Time After Time

    (1979)
    Its hard for me to watch this movie on its own merits any more. I had seen it when I was younger and recalled it with some accuracy; but since I had David Warner on the brain recently, I decided to re-watch one of his better known roles. I recalled it being a well-made film, but as I viewed it this go-around, I kept seeing the other films that borrowed from it so prevalently that they interfered with my enjoyment of this film. Time After Time is a brilliant concept: H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) pursues Jack the Ripper (Warner) across time to prevent him from committing murders in modern day (well, modern day when it was made) San Francisco. Wells, a fish out of water, meets Amy (Mary Steenburgen), a bank teller, who helps him navigate modern society and who falls in love with him. Wells must find a way to stop the Ripper he has unwittingly unleashed on modern society. Its a smart idea, and having the majority of the film set in modern San Francisco made it a relatively inexpensive one too. Throw in some sharp Nicolas Meyer dialogue, and you have a real winner. The problem (for me) is, two movies really stole from this film, so much so that they should share royalties. The first poaching took place in 1986, with Star Trek IV, which was also written and directed by Meyer, where Kirk and Spock time travel back to (then) modern day San Francisco and yeah, sounds really familiar, doesnt it? There are even replayed scenes with pawn shops and a repeated gag with broken eyeglasses. Christ, Meyer, it had only been seven years, did you think no one had seen Time After Time? Not that thats really any commentary on this movie, just that parts of it felt very familiar. Im all for homages, but Meyer here steals from himself on the order of George Lucas (how many f**king people have to say I have a bad feeling about this, George? Huh? Every f**king movie, man). Which I guess only highlights how good this film was, that it was plundered liberally to make the second best Star Trek movie. The other film that was playing in my minds eye as I watched this was Back to the Future III, where Steenburgen once again plays the object of a time traveling scientists affections, where they sit and have long talks about the writings of H.G. Wells. Where both time travelers reveal to her that they are, in fact, time travelers, and how she doesnt believe either one of them, but then she eventually does, and oh, man, you know, Back to the Future was a pretty strong trilogy but holy shit did they rip off this movie. Not quite as bad as Meyer, but up there. All of which I guess should be interpreted as commentary on how good this movie is, that not one but two major films pilfered from it within a decade. McDowell is spot-on perfect as the slightly stuffy Wells, just incredibly good and very likable (and remarkably young); he carries the movie effortlessly. Warner is a particular favorite of mine; here he is menacing and subtle, like a viper. Hes all the more terrifying because they cant show you lingering shots of him stabbing someone,

    just his near-ecstatic reactions as he slays his victims. Steenburgen was better than I remembered, an excellent partner for McDowell. And yes, that is a very young Corey Feldman in the museum as Wells first arrives in the future. Its not just a smart pitch, the movie is well-executed and sharply written. Probably the best scene in the film is one where Wells meets up with the Ripper in his hotel room in the Seventies. The Ripper sits him down in front to the television and proceeds to demonstrate to Wells how nave and impossible his dreams of a utopian future are. I was a monster in our time; here Im an amateur, the Ripper says, not only a brilliant character scene but a nice piece of commentary on how crappy our society was in 1979. Of course you can enjoy it without all the baggage that I brought to it, and I daresay you would enjoy it more. It still plays remarkably well after thirty years (only the special effects seem dated and hokey); the script remains sharp, the acting crisp, and the movie very much enjoyable. You dont have to distort the characters the way, say, Guy Richie did with Sherlock Holmes to make a good modern film. You just have to capture the essence of the source material, which here, Meyer did in spades. An excellent film, well worth a look or even a re-look. December 4, 2011

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