There are moments when I look at the reviews I’m writing and the scores I’ve been giving films, when I wonder if I’m generally too positive about the movies I watch. Should I be more critical or do I simply pick out the ones which are, on average, actually good? Paradox quickly gave me an answer to those questions.
A group of scientists have succeeded in creating a working time travel machine. The movie opens with one of them trying to reach the others, telling them not to come to the office because everyone will die. He fails at doing so and the experiment starts. The first time traveller is sent an hour into the future and witnesses that the same room, an hour into the future is filled with corpses. He decides to travel back to try to warn the others in order to change the future. Will the group be able to find out who’s responsible for the murders or has their fate already been decided?
Straight from the first scene it becomes clear that the acting isn’t very strong. The dialog often feels artificial and the way the viewer gets to know the characters is laughably bad (two NSA agents stationed in a clearly visible van across the road telling everything there is to know about a character when they arrive). The time travel element is interesting, but it quickly becomes clear that it won’t play such a big part of the story. It simply makes it a “whodunnit”which is everything but captivating. Add to that a bunch of special effects which should be easy to recreate with a couple of Google searches and the end result is disappointing. It made me realize that in general I simply pick out the better movies and that I’m not too positive about the films I see. It’s just that sometimes you see a movie like this to realize it.
