Review for Continuum

Introduction

The deep blue of a DVD-R didn’t bode well, and my heart sank at the sight of “PROPERTY OF KALEIDOSCOPE ENTERTAINMENT” plastered across the screen for the duration of the film. If this were an unsolicited check disc, it would go straight into the circular file. But I actually asked to review Continuum, a.k.a. I’ll Follow You Down so I feel obligated to give it the once over, albeit without my usual attention to AV quality and extra features. After all, this sci-fi film stars Gillian Anderson (The X Files, The Fall), Rufus Sewell (Dark City), and Haley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense, AI Artificial Intelligence), it’s about time travel, and it’s just my sort of thing, or so I thought when I requested it. You might have to add a mark or two on at the end, depending on how distracted I was by that watermark.


Gabriel Whyte was a renowned physicist and a devoted family man. It was supposed to be a quick trip to Princeton before coming back to his wife and son, Marika and Erol, but Gabriel never returned home. The consequences of his disappearance have lasting implications. 12 years later, Marika has reinvented her professional life, but her personal life is one of constant medication and depression. Erol takes after his father when it comes to scientific genius, but he’s a lazy genius, spending more time with his girlfriend Grace than in his grandfather’s physics lectures, overly protective of his mother and trying to hold onto what relationships he has.


But for 12 years, his grandfather Sal has been looking into Gabriel’s research, what he was working on the night he disappeared. When Sal hits a dead end and comes to Erol for help, it reveals a new possibility of what happened to Gabriel, and the chance to put things right. But Erol isn’t ready to present false hope to his mother, or to grasp such an ephemeral chance himself.

Conclusion

There are so many time travel movies out there, that it’s hard to do something fresh and original at this point. From the fun of Bill & Ted, and Back to the Future, to the darkness of Terminator, whether it’s pure adventure or the philosophical ramifications of altering historical events, you have to work hard to come up with a new take, or a new twist on an existing approach. Continuum’s approach is the familiar one of undoing an event that should never have occurred. What makes it different from the usual suspects is that it very much looks at the emotional impact of loss, and it asks what the ramifications of undoing that loss would be.


Gabriel’s disappearance has lasting and crippling effects for his family, although the way that Marika becomes obsessed by that loss tends more towards the Hollywood cliché than realistic. The effects that it has on Erol are more subtle but intrinsic, and makes for a genuine character study rather than a simple trope. On the surface he’s a well adjusted young man, but he’s still motivated by a fear of loss and commitment that sees him eschewing his future for the sake of holding onto his present.


So when he’s offered the chance of fixing the past, he initially demurs. It takes a couple of Hollywood tragedies before he’s finally convinced that changing history would be a good idea, and I have to admit that I didn’t see his particular solution ahead of time. That might just be the point of originality and uniqueness that lets Continuum stand alone in the time travel genre. But the ultimate disappointment for me was that while it was diligent in asking the right questions, whether sacrificing one timeline for another was worth it, just what the ramifications of such a change would be, ultimately it never answers those questions. We don’t get to see the happy alternate reality; we don’t get to see if by turning left instead of right the family that was destroyed would now be intact. In that respect it’s hard not to feel cheated by Continuum.


I managed to ignore the watermark like a persistent subtitle, so you don’t need to add anything to the final grade.