K-SCORE: 21
Writer/Director: Bradley D. King
Starring: Danielle Panabaker, Matt O’Leary, George Finn
Spoiler Level: Major (if you can follow my time-travel analyses)
So, you want to tell a story? That’s wonderful. I love stories! Everybody does. It’s a tradition as old as human history. Stories help us work through our conflicts in a safe environment while keeping us entertained, our minds engaged. But - please consult the following chart to determine if it is safe for you to write about your chosen topic:
See? See time travel is all the way at the bottom. It’s the white whale of storytelling - the absolute hardest material to do well. I don’t know how old Bradley King is, but I’m guessing he isn’t old enough to have been taking his storytelling seriously for twenty-five or more years. Consequently, he failed with Time Lapse and he failed miserably.
“I don’t know how this keeps happening to me lately, but again I’m faced with a time travel story where the characters are primarily motivated by a desire to fulfill their chronological destiny.”
On the one hand, he decided to do a few things to make the time travel premise more simplistic, which also makes it easier to handle for a writer. Good start. He decided to anchor the time machine in one place, and instead of sending people back in time, it just takes a picture one day in the future, and it always takes a picture of the same room at the same time. In other words, the camera takes a picture of what you saw yesterday while simultaneously printing what will exist in that room tomorrow. Also, whether King realized this or not, he decided to firmly fall in the linear chronology path, believing there exists a single linear timeline and that knowledge of the future doesn’t change it, nor do time travellers create branching pathways. We’re all victims of fate in such a world, and our ignorance of those fates is all that keeps us believing otherwise. The time travellers lose that ignorance, but presumably fall victim to those fates anyway. It’s not a happy concept, but actually easier to do than branching-timelines stories, so a strong choice (maybe) by King. That said, it’s still very hard to do well and King fell flat on his face immediately and his story lay there staring at the dirt for the duration.
“If you swallow down the paradoxes though, you basically have a film about a couple crazy people perfectly willing to murder each other because a camera told them to.”
There’s an essential problem of motivation in Time Lapse. In any story, characters are motivated by different things yet often surround the same conflicts and premises. Understanding and relating to these motivations is at the heart of a viewer/reader experience and critical to the success of the story. Here Finn, Callie, and Jasper, all discover the time travel camera quite early on, diagnose it to be a time travel camera shockingly quickly, and then have to decide what to do with the pictures of themselves and their living room in the future. They decide, because they’re two psychopaths and an idiot hipster, to recreate exactly what they see in the picture, assuming the camera has their best interests at heart and that something bad will happen to them if they don’t. Not understanding the nature of this camera, nor having any kind of real evidence for the something bad, they plow forward with no knowledge on time travel or the scientific process - worshiping the camera like a God. I don’t know how this keeps happening to me lately, but again I’m faced with a time travel story where the characters are primarily motivated by a desire to fulfill their chronological destiny. That is not something I can understand or relate to. It’s craziness. Just because the magic camera in the apartment across from yours takes a picture of you making out with your boyfriend’s best friend doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good idea to do it. Even worse idea: seeing your dangerous dog-racing bookie in a picture of tomorrow and inviting him to come pose for it today. Even worse idea: knocking your best friend unconscious with the plan to have sex with his girlfriend with him lying on the couch (which should be oddly familiar) when you know of a picture of the future of that room featuring no one and nothing but a big old blood smear on the window.
Yet even if you accept the character motivation, you can’t reconcile the paradox of origin. Somehow, for example, Jasper wins a lot of dog-racing bets in a row because he knows the future. He can send himself messages from the future by holding signs up to the camera, right? Sounds simple enough. But how did the camera come to print that picture with the race outcomes? It can’t see the races and it’s what sees the future. Jasper never knows who is going to win until he tells himself, but he can’t tell himself without knowing who will win. Paradox. Another example is Finn the desperate artist. Like the insufferable douche that he is, he spends his pre-camera life staring at a blank canvas. He knows he’s a painter - you know, in his soul - but he just doesn’t know what to paint. (Kind of like me. I know I’m a writer, but I just don’t know what to write. I spend all my hours staring at blank word processing documents, sitting in front of typewriters, and holding a feather pen over an inkwell with a piece of parchment on a hand-carved mahogany secretary desk just hoping I’ll figure out what to say.) So the camera shows him the future and in that future, just one day ahead, he has a beautiful painting almost completed or totally completed sitting on the easel in the living room. Then all he has to do is copy the photograph. Finn never knows what he’s going to paint until he sees the photo, but the photo depicts a world with a Finn that knew what to paint and painted it - presumably the time traveling machine managed to summon artistic inspiration through the chronological ether.
The bookie is another example. He’s a dangerous man. Why? He’s got guns and bodyguards and takes illegal bets for a living. When Jasper goes on a winning streak and calls him up because he appears in one of the photos, the bookie diagnoses the time travel camera lightning-fast and with next to no evidence. He is way faster than the other three and I thought they came to accept this ground-breaking invention alarmingly quickly. All he sees is a snapshot that features his own silhouette, and assumes, “Hey, that dark shadow must be me, which means that whatever camera took this must be a time-traveling camera. I can use this for my own personal gain, but of course, I too must worship the God of time and always fulfill my chronofate.” I guess he has experience. Yet even if he does, I still don’t get how they acquire the winning race numbers or why he would ever allow the three weak young people to be a part of the process of making money with future foresight.
The most egregious example of the paradox really makes the entire plot and especially the twist unravel. Callie has secretly been sending messages to herself using the morning photos the camera takes that the men didn’t even know existed. She’s been using those messages to make things work well for her, or so she claims. She’s simultaneously giving messages to her past self and using her future self’s messages to orchestrate complex plots. How? Presumably, just like in the night photo, Callie just sees the printed future photo and writes down whatever message she sees and holds it up for the camera a day later. Why in the world would she think she has the power to alter realities and change the past or future with these messages? She’s just been a drone to the camera God twice as often as the men.
Of course, the time travel premise a writer comes up with is very often not complex enough for his or her tastes. Such it was with King, who decided one (maybe more?) photo breaks the twenty-four hours ahead rule, taken weeks before its outcome. When is the camera taking these photos? How do you know the “when” of a photo’s image if it can break the day-by-day rule? Regarding the final photo with the vague science painting and blood-smeared window, who first plucked that photo from the machine, where did they put it and why, and why was it viewed as special? Wouldn’t whoever plucked it from the machine assume it was a day-by-day photo like the rest until it didn’t come true?
If you swallow down the paradoxes though, you basically have a film about a couple crazy people perfectly willing to murder each other because a camera told them to. Jasper especially jumps to the “I need to kill this person” conclusion really fast. The bookies are really just trying to learn about the camera and make money off it, exactly like he is, when he premeditatedly murders them. The other scientist that shows up is hilarious. They try to lie to her about the existence of the time-travelling camera and she picks through that lie immediately, so they bring her to the corpse of the camera’s inventor, who they failed to report to the police, and in a stunning act of good-naturedness and trust, she starts to explain a bit about how the science works and starts to finally think rationally about what to do with the knowledge the pictures give - so Jasper promptly shoots her in the chest a few times. Callie, instead of being horrified by Jasper’s actions, is a little bitter that her boyfriend Finn didn’t do the murdering himself. She really shows him the right way to murder when she shoots him for the crime of… not appreciating her day-photo message scheming and several-months-old infidelity. Unlike Primer where the time travel storyline too creates inevitable violence, these characters aren’t geniuses. For example, they don’t date stamp the photos as they come out. They don’t think to use lottery numbers or stock prices instead of dog-racing bets. They don’t ever think to close the blinds. They don’t think to put mirrors in their living room or outside, so they can photograph more than just the one space. They don’t think to put a television set in the room and tune it to a news network or at least the weather channel. They don’t use their newfound cash to buy security for the compound, to buy out the other apartments nearby, or to buy surveillance equipment so they can have eyes on the camera room at all times. Of course they don’t do any of those things, though, because the camera says they don’t! All hail the camera! All hail the camera! Murder each other for the camera! Murder for the camera!
Picking at the paradoxes will usually keep me entertained regardless, so I didn’t hate watching Time Lapse for however much it failed with the basic storytelling necessities. It has a good title, and at one point Callie buys a book called The Art of Nude Modeling and is casually reading it in bed, which is a brilliant choice. Though the character does some nude modeling in the film, sadly you never get to see Danielle Panabaker naked. Fun fact about Danielle Panabaker, she’s a different person from Hayden Panettiere. So Time Lapse is not only entertaining, it’s also informative.