Timecrimes – DVD review

The Film:

I love when critics say when a film uses time travel, that it is convoluted in its method. Like we know the intricacies of time traveling! I enjoy the moral implications more of time traveling than a writer’s fictional science behind it. I think most audiences can just accept the fact that one can travel back into time, so give us a reason to care. Back to the Future, Terminator, even Primer let us care about the obstacles and moral conflict that time travel bring up. Granted, those films are superb.

Timecrimes has a striking image about it. You have this man in a pinkish gauze wrapped around his face, a long trench coat, and a knife. What does he want? The film offers us probably one of the easiest-to-follow time traveling stories and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Speaking of the narrative, the film is edited and paced with precision and that helps aid the story aspects of the time-traveling. The film is definitely focused more on repetition than moral conflict, and with that, I mean it in a bad way.

While the science takes a back seat to the film, the story overall is quite simple. What hurts it, is the overall conflict is only worthy of more than a shrug. Hector and his wife are moving into a new home, when he sees a naked girl in the bushes. Curiously, the phone rings with gibberish and then he sees the man in the pink gauze. That’s the basic set-up as Hector is now curious on the woman and what had happen to her. I’ll admit, this first part is really effective. We got the mystery, a strange character, and still no time travel. But once the film offers the scenario to Hector to time travel, we get into this rut where, it unhinges our liking of Hector. Maybe the point was to show how much of a bubbling screw up he is, but its hard to truly care for him.

Now, does that make Timecrimes bad? No, it just keeps it from being great, something I felt it could have been. It’s an interesting film for the first half, and then really generic in its last half. If the writer/director offered us a grander solution to the main character’s moral conflict, this would’ve been a great film. The film is a good example of a director’s attention to detail which is important for the repetition nature of the film, and the pink gauze killer is a cool looking character, its just that Timecrimes is a case of the “almost”.

The DVD:

Audio/Video: This is probably one of the worst looking DVDs I’ve seen in a while. Now, I recognize some of the director’s aesthetic choices, but there’s haloing and noise artifacts riddled throughout this transfer. The audio is fine.

Making of Timecrimes: Running 40 minutes, I get the sense that the director, Vigalondo might be an international voice soon to watch for. This is a thoroughly good feature, full of behind-the-scenes footage and information.

Cast and Crew Interviews: Light and breezy, but a good watch in case you wanted more than the making of gave you.

Make Up Test: Simple feature on how they made the character of Hector like he was in the film.

7:35 de la Manana: Vigalondo’s short film which is pretty good. Like I said, he might be someone to watch for soon.

Trailer, Galleries, and over 30 minutes of Timecrimes Internet Games they used to build a marketing campaign for (all of which start interestingly but get old fast) round out the extras.

Conclusion: A decent film, solid rental, but one wishes the overall story was something more. Too bad the DVD from Magnolia’s Magnet label is high on extras, low on picture quality. Rent.

The Film: Rating:

The DVD: Rating: