Review of Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox – A space-hopping comedy that asks the big question | film

FOr the sheer amount of gossip and gossip, this movie deserves some points. That, and the ultimately amusing appearance of Keith David as the Simulator, aka God, who explains to the astonished humans that God is a completely free creator, like a self-publishing novelist, and then becomes annoyed when the humans think self-publishing is lame: “It’s not my fault if you don’t understand the industry!”

This is a fun, exhausting standalone story on the subject of time travel, and at times plays out as a funnier version of Shane Carruth’s classic time travel primer – well, a little funnier. Samuel Dunning plays Tim Travers, a goatee-bearded scientist who stole nuclear material from a terrorist group to power the time machine he invented. He sends himself back one minute into the past with a gun to kill his younger self to investigate the Time Traveler’s Paradox: If he removed his younger self one minute, wouldn’t he also disappear at that moment, bursting like a soap bubble, because that would mean he couldn’t exist in the future? But since he must exist in the future to set all this in motion, doesn’t that mean this time-traveled self must still be alive?

Well, it seems to be the last one, and Tim keeps coming back again and again, creating many different people who at some point indulge in a bizarre off-camera orgy. A hitman, working for that angry terrorist group that Tim was stolen from, has the unhappy task of beating up all these space-time clones.

It’s a film that keeps getting repetitive, although it does have a great performance from Danny Trejo and there is the unintended side effect of making you appreciate Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which did all this and more with a much lighter touch.