11 a.m. (Yeolhansi)(2013)
IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 39 minutes, rated 5.6 by 493 cinematizens
Genre: Sy Fy: Species: Time Travel.
DNA: Korean, South.
Verdict: Kaboom!
Tagline: Trans-genre!
In the not too distant future a group of very young researchers in a deep-sea laboratory work on a time machine. (Someone should have told them about clocks.) The lab is astride a Blue Hole near the Marshall Islands because gravity in a Blue Hole ‘behaves differently.’ (So much for science.) The project is funded by a Russian oligarch in a wheel chair.
(1) Contrary to one reviewer, the Marshall Islands are in the middle of the Pacific, no where near Belize in Central America. (2) Is the duty free shopping in the sovereign micro-state of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (Pop. 58,500) good? (3) Why is a Russian funding SOUTH Koreans? What do NORTH Koreans think of that?
The Russian wants to send them into the future to bring back a cure for wheelchairitis. The lab is expensive and the Russian may have a hidden agenda, hidden at least from the subtitles. The scientists isolated in the lab look like four high school students and two teachers who all seem self-conscious about the age difference among them.
Via a zoom meeting with no lag, no drop-out, no incomprehensible error message, no black screen, no loss of synchronisation, no nasal shots (see, it is fiction) the Russians gives the submerged Korean crew a deadline. They travel a minute into the future. BFD.* I do that every 60 seconds without spending a ruble. The Russki wants more or he wants his rubles back. So they try a desperate gamble on the as yet untested equipment to go for a 15-minute projection into the future. That would be enough for proof of concept, and in such a short space of time, what can go wrong? [Psst, check the script.]
Two of them strap into the telephone box and the others push buttons. Everything gets convoluted after this and the genre changes from sort of Sy Fy to Total Disaster when the Kimchi hits the fan.
Spoiler Alert! Go further at your own risk!
It takes a lot of energy to project that Tardis box and sending it off drains the tanks, then it returns with a mighty jolt that destroys the lab before the SSRN Seaview with Admiral Harriman could get there.
The characters react in the way any well-trained, highly selected, wholly dedicated small elite group of individuals would do: they run amok, blame each other, blame Hillary, look for Hunter’s lap top, cry foul, eat canned food, smash computers which give the wrong answers, admire raging fires while keeping the sea water out, keep the sea water out while admiring the raging fires, inhale noxious chemicals while admiring the fire, recover from X-degree burns, beat up on each other with handy steel bars…this spectacle goes on at Hollywood length.
They should have tried Joe’s cocktail shaker from As Time Goes By reviewed on this blog.
The Ground Hog Day-repeated mayhem is as boring as it is exhausting to watch. None of the characters is developed enough to care about, despite an earlier scene of guitar strumming which was supposed to humanise one of the mannequins in the crew. It didn’t work.
But maybe I missed the subtlety of it all. The version I watched had AI English subtitles with the dialogue dubbed in Russian over the Korean, a combination that distracted me.
*All right, already when Joe Bogart time travelled back a minute from 10:26 it was a big deal in a small way. See As Time Goes By reviewed elsewhere on this blog.