Director: Jeannot Szwarc
Cast: Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour, Christopher Plummer, Teresa Wright
Have I Seen it Before: I’m sure I had to have. It lies among that long list of movies which seemed perpetually on cable. I would have had to see it over the years, but I may have only seen clips.
Did I Like It: I’m going to double down on that assessment that I must have seen it before, because I found the whole affair—besides the last few minutes; we’ll get to that in a minute—thoroughly predictable. I had to be remembering it, right? Szwarc might be purveyor of films I can’t bring myself to watch all the way through (Jaws 2 (1978)) and films that feel like the studio barely decided to release (Supergirl (1984)), but Richard Matheson really doesn’t have it in him to miss.
The chemistry between Reeve and Seymour sells the movie, but maybe I’m just too inured to the charms of a time travel story to get engaged, especially when traveling across the 4th dimension is presented less a question of improbably physics, and more a question of philosophy, willpower, and the need to clean one’s pockets.
When the film isn’t being predictable, it’s going out of its way to be aggravating. How did Elise (Seymour) put it together that her love (Reeve) was from the future and had to go back there based on the available information. Even Christopher Lloyd and Malcolm McDowell had to level with Mary Steenburgen in order to move things along. There’s also the suddenness of the film’s final moments. It takes great pains to sell us on the romance of the early years of the 20th century, only to rip Richard Collier back to the present and have him miserable amongst some of the most depressing vies of the early 1980s (the film really did have a great casting director when it came to actual, literal garbage). He then dies in such a way that leads me to believe Reeve has to walk before Natalie Portman could run in Star Wars — Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005). Then their together in heaven. Hey, movie: Jim Cameron called, and he’s positively one submarine away from trying to sell us on the idea of one vacation ruining you from making another connection with a human being for the rest of your life.