Dimensions (I) (2011) User Reviews

The reality of enjoying a movie

[torontofred · 7/10 · 5 July 2016]

Science fiction is a finicky thing. Depending on your approach and your tastes and background, this flick can either be 1 to 10. I encourage the reader to read the reviews as a form of entertainment in itself, I would also ask the reader to refrain from critiquing this movie as if it had a limitless budget and was hell bent on employing the best special effects possible. In other words, a Hollywood movie. Sadly, too many of our young are trapped there.

It has been my experience that the best SciFi allows you to use your imagination. You read SciFi and imagine great things that Hollywood couldn't begin to portray. "The Time Machine", 1960, must be one of the greatest movies in this subject. It has roots in H.G.Wells' 1895 "The Time Machine" novel. Interesting point, the character in the movie shares a similar name with the author of the book. The acting may not be the best, the special effects not out of this world and the script could use more "airing". Your imagination, however, takes over and fills in the blanks to make it a very interesting movie to this date. If the script and story line can allow your imagination to flourish, then at the end of the movie you find yourself thinking. Although the movie ended.... you're still going.

It's nice to see special effects to replace your imagination every now and then but I find it's best when it is left to the imagination. This is why most stories that try to make the transition from book to movie fail.

On acting.... you may have an idea how a soldier would reacted when facing a platoon of the enemy on his own. We can draw from our limited experience. But has anyone ever met an alien? How does one act when stepping into a time machine? How does one act when they fall in love with someone who wishes to step into a time machine. You can have a whole movie on that alone. Acting in this instance should allow some leeway for the viewer to fill in with their imagination. On the other hand, acting may be what saves the scene such as the end scene to Casablanca with a fake aircraft with little people or La Marseillaise scene sung in defiance to the Germans. In this movie, although the genre was SciFi, the secondary theme was love. Another, loss. Yet another, jealousy. This requires fine acting, not supper acting, and I think it was done adequately well. Not great but well. To tell you the truth, my heart broke for one of the characters.

Lets use our imagination on one angle of the movie.... sound. If you wish to employ frequencies in your experiment and need a fundamental series of frequencies, the piano is an interesting choice. And it's calibrated to some standard. Believe it or not, there are a few established standards in piano calibration and tuning. The piano can be a scientific instrument in every sense of the word. So it wasn't a screwball idea to use a piano. But a piano is also musical. It has Rhythm and beats and bars. Now, imagine an infinite number of future threads to an event. In a song, we may have four beats to a bar. Every four beats you repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Almost as if it is infinite. It generates a Rhythm that explores a theme, or event. Changing notes in one bar with just four beats (4/4 for example) could change the entire theme of the song. Mapping out the future of Victoria's event in the well and navigating it successfully with a sound signature (so may beats to a bar) is an interesting connection to the piano. We can now layer other life experiences to music, such as falling in love, as was the case when they danced through the time map to music, expanding the parallelism to a theme or song. Interesting? How about dancing to music when the old man removed their masks in the beginning of the movie? How about our young hero dancing with the blindfold on in front of the well after removing the welded well cap at the start?

In my experience, I have found that the best attributes to enjoying good SciFi is the person's ability to imagine. Overload the person with special effects and at the end of the movie the person may experience relief (and to beat the crowd out of the theater) instead of thought provocative mesmorization as your view the credits.

Enjoy this movie and see what happens to you at the end.

Missed Opportunity for Greatness

[emvan · 6/10 · 11 January 2015]

MILD SPOILERS MARKED BELOW.

This movie's strengths are many. The premise, although ultimately science fantasy, is immediately engaging: what if someone had devised the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics (all possible realities, deriving from every possible choice, exist in parallel worlds) back in the 1920's, and then gone on from there to invent a time machine? The would-be time traveler who wants to undo an event in their own past is a story we've seen before, but the essentials of this version are quite well done.

The film is beautifully designed and shot (arthouse fans will not find it too slow) and very well acted. The screenplay is full of quality moments.

So why is this only a 6? Well, to begin with, the screenplay is also full of clichés. But it has a much bigger problem than that: the main character's behavior and motivation, which are the sole engine of the plot, are somewhat unconvincing for an ordinary person, and entirely unconvincing for a scientist.

VERY BROAD SPOILERS FOLLOW

If you advise someone not to do something rash or dangerous or wisely decline to do it yourself), and they do it anyway, and it indeed ends badly ... most people will feel remorse -- remorse that they did not do a better job of explaining their concerns. What rarely happens is that they *entirely blame themselves*, to the point of obsession. It stretches all credulity (at least for me) that a brilliant scientist (hence, by nature, an unusually rational thinker) would do so. You don't really want your genius character being told by friends that "it wasn't your fault" when that is in fact INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS.

This movie does this twice; one is the engine of the plot, and the other creates a plot pivot.

Note that this might have worked if our hero had been portrayed as a general emotional wreck who just happened to be a physics whiz. But he's not: he goes about pursuing his obsession in a cool, rational way that is entirely believable for a brilliant scientist. It's only the source of that obsession that is out of character, fatally so.

The pity is, it's easy to imagine how the plot could have been kept intact by giving our hero more complex, more interesting, and much more believable motivations.

Oh, and the movie also ends up incorporating a classic time-travel paradox without seeming to address it at all. And there's a huge loose end in the plot that, I think, cries out for more closure.

END SPOILERS

The first thing I did after watching this film is check to see who the producers were. My suspicions were correct: the screenwriter, and the director. IOW, no one with an objective take on the film. If I had a time machine, I'd go back a few years and give them a whole set of notes on the screenplay. That's what a good producer does. The creative team here is clearly quite talented; if they find someone who really knows film (and especially knows the genre they're working in) to produce their next effort, it will be one to watch for.

Thoughtful low budget time-travel/multi-verse Scifi film; a near miss.

[liam_j_hogan · 6/10 · 9 May 2012]

Despite the low budget, the cinematography and the score are simply sumptuous. It is certainly enjoyable to watch, even if, in the final analysis, it lacks substance. There is a scene early on, a garden party by the side of a river, where the ribbons in Victoria's hair stand out with shocking luminosity. Combined with the orchestration, it certainly looks a bigger budget film than it is.

But it doesn't feel that way. It feels constrained - perhaps by the cost of the props, of the settings, and of the time and resources available. The production company is known as "Sculptures of Dazzling Complexity" - but the story is all too simplistic, and while setting it in Cambridge between the wars allows that simplicity some breathing space, it still lacks the depth of true emotion that might be expected of a simpler time and place. The characters, for me, fail to live up to the film's title - they are rather too 2D. The adults have no more substance than the excellent child actors. Walking in to a Cambridge Physics lecture and asking the (under?) graduates there "Who likes Physics?" is a rather obvious example, but more fundamentally, I fail to feel the driving force behind Stephen's obsession, and I want - NEED to see a more fundamental tension between Conrad and Stephen, even if this is not overt.

You might suppose that I might be snobbish about the "Time Machine" itself, but it has a certain charm, reminiscent of something by HG Wells, and being appropriate for something very much the production of a mad professor in a shed at the end of the garden. Yes, there is an element of early Dr Who about an image of biplane's appearing in the smoke filled jar of the device, and yes - it's a pianola, and yes, the gateway DOES rather look like a hula hoop (thus beating the Hudsucker Proxy to the invention!) but hey, it's fun, at least! But the are holes in the plot that are far from fun, and which a bigger, better resourced film might have avoided. Such as what was Robert's motivation for travelling back in time? How long was Victoria in the well, if she had time to scratch out a message? Why the dinner party and ball - did they have some costumes they simply had to use? And if Conrad went first, how did he avoid Robert's fate? Did Stephen and Conrad together waltz their way through the labyrinth between worlds? And quite WHAT is Victoria saying when she says farewell to the Professor? And then there is the multi-verse approach. I don't object to this particularly, but it weakens the film to set it NOT in our version. And for the differences to be so trivial and farcical as calling an apple an orange? Better to leave the whole "99% sure" theory unproven, I'd suggest! So, a brave effort, and not by any means unworthy, but if you want a time-travel Sci-Fi film that actually challenges the viewer to keep up, I'd watch Primer instead.

Good watch with Aaron from Killing Eve as a likeable character

[catanniegwyn · 7/10 · 15 April 2023]

Another example of me being happy I ignored a rather low overall IMDB score and trusted in the more generous reviews. Beautifully shot movie with beautiful music. Natural performances all round. I am interested in movies to do with time/ universe travel - Back to the Future, Time Traveller's Wife (book not movie though) Somewhere in Time with Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve, Groundhog Day, Everything Everywhere All at Once. I try not to live in the past anymore but my heart breaks for past times and lost love. But things happened as they did and they couldn't have happened any other way. Maybe there are many universes. Maybe we can come into alignment with the one we most desire. Maybe there's some truth in Neville Goddard's imaginal and law of assumption theories. Affirming that it is already done. I have the life and the love of the life I want etc. Maybe it's for the best that such a machine doesn't exist.

Underwhelming

[brianberns-1 · 3/10 · 8 August 2018]

I'm usually a sucker for science fiction, and time travel in particular, but this movie was underwhelming. The characters are severely under-developed and uninteresting. One of the main characters is so empty that at one point the protagonist suggests that she might not be real, and she has no response.

The time-travel elements of the movie are similarly devoid of interest, and the supposed plot is elementary. I think most of the effort on this movie went into period sets, costumes and haircuts. It certainly doesn't show up in the writing, acting, or directing.

Who and why made this piece of nothing.

[selena-71096 · 1/10 · 13 September 2015]

Just like someone had already said the first 15 min. were somewhat watchable, minus pretense of the "era" and sub-par performances including children. From 15 years forward it is all downhill. I stopped watching on 57th min. into the film, just could not take it any longer. An absurd in every boring sleepy scene. They aged a mother too much. She could not have looked totally gray and old just after 15 years when she was very young in the beginning. Did women go to bars in early 40s to drink alone? The "bartender" cracked me up, or was it a waitress that said "One of those days?". Yeah a woman stole some tools from University? Give me a break. In short, all you will see in this movie is a couple of guys and a woman with screwdrivers in a so called lab and some absurd characters and meaningless dialogues in between.

It Reeled Me In

[bjon1452 · 8/10 · 8 November 2015]

I came upon this film by accident. I thought I'd chosen something else on Amazon Prime, but I must have clicked this movie by mistake. The music reeled me in first. Then the time frame reeled me in; I love re-creations of the 1920's. After that, the subject matter piqued my interest. For once there was a screenplay that was cleverly written, without robots, blood, gore and violence.(Well, there was a touch.)

The music had a haunting quality that I loved. It was a smattering of classical pieces, especially by Fredrick Chopin, done in modern fashion, interspersed with the Gramophone effect. I then was wondering how they'd pull off the time travel, and that's where it gets interesting: The mechanism consisted of some steam-punk props, electrical gadgets and an old upright piano. The story line was more or less a romantic novel, but it didn't go too overboard. It's a picture that was a bit difficult to understand, yet very clever. Coming from a family whose father figure was an engineer, it made me think, and I'm still thinking about it. No special effects were necessary. I added my own imagination to it, and there you have it, a very entertaining movie-but you had to work your brain for it!

Very refreshing indeed!

Really ???????

[cekadah · 2/10 · 18 November 2014]

This flick should have been entitled - "The Cookie Jar, The Hula- Hoop, and The Old Piano".

This movie is just plain goofy! Actually the first part with the children at play in the countryside is interesting. You get a good look into each character and their friendship with one another. After the story jumps forward 15 years the plot becomes a partially science fiction comedy thriller thing. As I was watching I could not help laughing each time I saw the instrument for time travel. What a hoot! An old cookie jar, a metal hula hoop thing, and an old upright piano, some electric dryer vent tubing and a collection of wires. I thought, 'really', they expect the viewer to go with this?

And then those long scenes of the adult girl and boys working and just being with one another. Completely boring! I actually felt sorry for the actors having to put their 'all' into this goofy story of reality, time travel, greed, and love. And it all comes to a head at that infamous well. Sorry Director U'Ren this one is a no no.

Elegant...but not quite really Sci-Fi

[Rabh17 · 8/10 · 23 February 2014]

It's a Time Travel Story. And it's listed as Science Fiction, thereby.

But Be Advised: It's NOT 'The Time Machine'. Nor is it your standard Hollywood Special Effects wagon-train.

No Splashy special Effects. No Journeys to the end of Time. No Monsters. No Weird Paradoxes. No Dinosaurs either.

It DOES has an element of Time Travel...but that's all. The rest of the Movie is a distillation of a very nice work of emotional Fiction. It's a Love story about Three Childhood friends in 1920's era England. Once you settle into the measured, dialogue driven pace of the story. I found it elegant, touching and memorable.

Totally Girlfriend Friendly, BTW.

Learn from this

[bdhuggins · 1/10 · 4 April 2019]

There are just too many things wrong with this film for me not to make a comment. I would suggest aspiring new movie makers to watch this to learn how NOT to make a movie.

Barely scifi, barely about time travel

[Gabriel_Kuntze · 3/10 · 16 May 2021]

Don't be fooled by the tags: it's barely scifi, and it barely deals with time travel. I'm going to say the only good thing right off the bat: the movie looks great, in picture quality, scenery, wardrobe, and chicks. Sadly, the music is nothing but a single tune of a piano constantly, and it's depressing. Other stuff are simply hilarious: a girl goes alone to a bar and asks for a gin tonic, while the bartender, also a woman, says "it's one of those days, uh?". In Cambridge. In 1930. Seriously?

All right, the bad: everything else. The movie starts with two boys and a girl who are very best friends, the girl dies in an accident and the boys blame themselves. Before this, they're visited by a mysterious old man who gives them a lecture about time travel and the fourth dimension. All this takes 40 minutes of the movie, and I'm no joking. I was so incredibly bored that I honestly wanted to shut it off, but I endured, because in enduring, grow strong. I inmediatly knew who the old man was, as anyone with the smalles experience in time travel movies would, but I decided not to dwell too much on it...

So, the movie goes on 15 years later, the main guy is obsessed with time travel and giving lectures about it and saying with 99% certainty that the future can't be changed, no matter how far you travel to the past (mind you, he uses the same techniques the old man gave him). He meets a nice girl who becomes his helper, he manages to build the machine but gets stolen by his jealous childhood friend / cousin, an evil mal with money (he has money, therefore he's evil and do evil stuff) uses it and becomes trapped in it in which is probably the only good scene in the entire movie. More drama, more boring stuff about love, at the very end of the movie he finally uses the machine with his cousing and travel back in time, revealing that the old man... OMG IT WAS HIM ALL ALONG!!11 I NEVER EXPECTED THAT!!11111

Besides the preditable ending, I was laughing at the huge plot hole they left there. While the paradox of him travelling in time, using the same teachings he gave himself as a child by travelling in time, is nice (handled a million times better in PREDESTINATION though), he spends the whole movie trying to convice everyone that changing the future is impossible. Yet, in the final scene, he "saves" his childhood friend from dying by changing the events - apparently, it was a different timeline or something, but it's not the same visit from the beginning of the movie.

So, to sum it up: he visits and teachs himself in one timeline, but the he does it again in another one but here he saves his friend. Why not doing it from the go and saves us from this film? The movie contradicts itself in a silly way, and I was pissed off about waiting all this time for such a terribad ending.

Whatever, skip this one unless you like big dramas about love.

Saddest time travel movie I've seen

[Gigantoscula · 4/10 · 2 February 2021]

Unfortunately, I'm not talking about the plot. This movie had a lot of potential but failed, at least in my eyes. There are a lot of dumb plot related problems and the characters are bland and mostly uninteresting. It looks like they blew all the budget for setting the scene. This is the only saving grace of the movie so that's why it gets a 4/10 and not a lower score.

A wonderful story!

[silvaria928 · 8/10 · 4 September 2018]

This will be my first movie review, and I realize that I'm quite late to the game here, but I just had to say something about this film.

For the last few weeks, I have been binge-watching indie sci-fi movies online. I've seen some pretty good ones but this is the first that I am leaving on my Watchlist, because it is the first that I actually want to watch again.

The reasons are varied, but the main one is that it doesn't leave you hanging. No, it isn't what you may have hoped for but I get really tired of the movies that draw you in emotionally then fail to give any closure.

This movie has a sweet, heart-warming end and it leaves me smiling. If you're looking for a good story with some science sans the glitzy special effects of Hollywood, then I recommend giving this movie a go. Two thumbs up!

Mess of a movie

[blott2319-1 · 2/10 · 10 November 2021]

Dimensions is a crappy movie that doesn't seem to know what kind of story it wants to tell. They are exploring the idea of time-travel, but never do much with it other than the most obvious things. There's an attempt at a clumsy love story, but they can't commit enough so we can even understand who we should hope will get together. The ending doesn't clear it up at all, in fact we are left wondering what the point of the whole story might have been from the beginning. It feels as though the primary motivation of the entire film is to time travel to save a life, but later the audience is left questioning if the main character even tried. They needed to spend more time on discussions of why they were really building the machine, and what their end goal would be. Spending a short day of quality time with someone doesn't seem like enough to warrant this lifelong obsession.

I also found it ridiculous how the characters in Dimensions spend time exploring a bunch of nonsense science that they could never know in advance. One aspect I found particularly humorous (in a bad way) was the rehearsal of dancing through the time portal. There was no explanation how he knew any of this information, like the path through time, and then later someone who has done no rehearsals is able to navigate things just fine. I'm always a sucker for time travel movies, and there were brief snippets of clever ideas that Dimensions touches on but never fully explores. Instead the plot would get sidetracked with longing looks of love, or some random guy who is thrown in as an antagonist merely to demonstrate the dangers of their machine. I wouldn't recommend anyone waste their time watching Dimensions.

Thoroughly enjoyable and thought provoking

[rosencharlie935 · 9/10 · 27 September 2011]

Note: This review contains mild spoilers - but nothing that would affect your enjoyment of the film.

I saw Dimensions at the Cambridge Film Festival and ended up going to see it twice. It is a beautiful, thoughtful and interesting piece of work and evidently shot on a micro-budget. At the Q&A afterwards the filmmakers mentioned someone had said it is as if 'Merchant Ivory had made Primer'. I think that is a fair description.

The acting is superb throughout, with some extremely emotional scenes and I found myself quickly falling into this strange little world 'Cambridge, 1921 - one of many'.

On first viewing, I primarily watched the story unfold without really exploring the concepts that are woven into the film. As the film progresses (mild spoiler alert) it is unveiled that it is set in a parallel universe, that is almost identical to ours, save a few differences. This doesn't change the plot - it is almost as if it is just a bit of background information, another layer. I like that.

This is definitely the sort of film that you need to engage with, and the group I was with discussed it in length after the first screening. One of my friends mentioned that (spoiler alert) she thought that the events in the film were all the product of the lead characters imagination. On second viewing, I must admit I think she has a point - but I like that the filmmakers leave it up to the audience to decide!

The key is Stephen's (the lead characters) conversation with Dr Schmidt (a University lecturer). Throughout the film the two characters discuss 'reality'. Is it possible that we imagine our own reality, to fit with what surrounds us?

I don't want to give the impression that the film is overly philosophical. I think it perfectly possible to ignore all the parallel universe / reality questions and just watch the characters interact and the plot develop in beautiful surroundings. The film is at heart a love story, albeit it one set in a sci-fi environment.

Highly recommended.

Disappointing

[ulla-fleu · 3/10 · 6 July 2022]

The idea was good but much potential is lost. Scenery and costumes are nice but after the introduction the movie becomes very lenghty, the dialogues are boring. There is much trial and failing with the time machine which is built from strange items and the conflict between the two male protagonists about the girl/woman is recurring. Sadly the worst implementation of a time travel story I've seen so far.

An enchanting intelligent film, a breath of fresh air

[dianneferris1 · 8/10 · 4 February 2016]

This is not your typical sci-fi flick. There are no monsters, mutants or massive special effects. It is science (physics) + historical fiction.

It is easy for lovers of sci-fi to get bogged down by details. Rather than quarrel with other reviewers about this, I would just say this is fiction, parallel universes are not currently fact; so one might be more open-minded if someone presents an alternate approach.

1) To assume that scientists can't be illogical at times is perhaps short-sighted. Love is truly illogical and childhood love is even more so. They need not be an emotional wreck in order to be illogical about lost love or unfounded guilt. Brilliant scientists come in many forms.

2) If you want to know Robert's motivation for traveling back in time, pay closer attention to the love stories.

Be open to the story and as others have said, the cinematography and the score are excellent for a low budget movie.

A Nice Period Drama with a Time Travel Theme

[tabuno · 8/10 · 12 January 2019]

19 August 2016. This English production offers up a period drama with a science fiction theme as background. As such, this movie is not a thriller or adventure or action movie. In a similar way that Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) or Some Where in Time (1980) involved time travel but focused more on the journey than the travel through time, Dimensions is more a romantic drama with a sense of emotional mission, purpose, and even loss. It has the period trapping found in the English production of The First Men in the Moon (1964) or American production of The Time Machine (1980). Yet it is probably best reflective of Australia's Peter Weller's period piece Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) which contained the same quality set design and costumes and the same quality photography and setting experience. While it doesn't quite have the sustained air of mystery as Picnic at Hanging Rock, there is a both rather poignant romantic climax as well as a more defined resolution.

Beautifully done, as if HG Wells himself were here

[naq-1 · 9/10 · 17 December 2019]

The strong points of the film: Excellent production design, excellent costumes, excellent acting and excellent music. All combine to an esthetic whole which is much better than the sum of its parts.

The storyline is similar to one of the HG Wells novels, especially the Time Machine. But in this particular instance, the Time Machine is only able to bring someone a few years into the past. It is a limitation which encapsulates the entire plot, as there are several limitations put upon the film because of its low budget. Set in a Great Gatsby-like setting in the early 1920's, the film could easily have been one of HG's lesser-known stories.

Fortunately for this reviewer, the Director is savvy enough to understand her limitations, and to keep the film utterly under control for the entire length of time it takes to unravel the mystery that is set up in the opening scene, when an old man arrives in the middle of a garden party and begins the education of the guests in the physics of the 4th Dimension.

As the plot progresses, a young genius named Steven is beside himself with a mission to right a wrong that happened in his childhood, and is obsessed with finding a method to return to the past to do so. We suspend our disbelief at his feeble but well-intentioned attempts, and when one of the experiments backfires, we wonder if Steven will give in to his demons and descend into madness. It almost happens--if it were not for "the love of a good woman".

So that there are no spoilers in this review, I will summarize by saying that there is a final resolution which neither disappoints nor does it fail to engage our deeper intellect. Since I encourage anyone tired of the mall-screen movies of the 2000's, (with their overblown heroes and ridiculously unrealistic plots and absurd bombastic gun combat and fight scenes), to take a breath and let themselves be drawn into a meditative state as they sail down a lazy river and be contented with the calm, thoughtful work of art that was so effectively made into this film.

Excellent Movie If you have an open mind

[travis-lowe · 10/10 · 21 November 2014]

First things first! Do not take the negative reviews of this movie and dodge watching this!! Unless you are a close minded fool who can't use an imagination this movie is great. If you cannot open up to sci-fi fantasies such as this do yourself a favor and quit watching sci-fi.

With that said...

This movie is an excellent thought provoking film that really gets the gears turning. It does a great job of putting theoretical time travel into perspective while doing so in a way that isn't too geeky or brain melting.

It was actually better than I had expected and deserves a better score than it got. Don't expect lots of action scenes or crazy super futuristic technology that blows your mind but rather philosophical theories of time and space and the personal implications that they have on relationships.

This movie is definitely not one where you can anticipate whats coming next and has a few twists that keep it very interesting.

Overall an amazing film that should have received much more attention that it got. Being an avid movie lover that has blazed through netflix and other movie services I was surprised to have not seen or even heard of this one until fall 2014.

Do-overs

[Bernie4444 · 10/10 · 9 November 2023]

Displayed as Dimensions (2014) Really Dimensions (2011) AKA Dimensions: A-Line, a Loop, a Tangle of Threads

Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Born: August 1985 in London, England, UK

I accidentally stumbled onto this critter. It is one of the most fun-sounding least plausible stories.

Cambridge, England, 1921 Three young friends frolic around the countryside. Even at this early age attachments and rivalries are created. Whoops, someone threw a jump rope into the well which sets off a series of events in these lives and friendships.

Years later Stephen and Conrad each blame themselves for not retrieving the jump rope which inadvertently causes the demise of their friend Jane.

Stephen, the son of the scientist, is inspired to create a Time Machine and as his main target intends to correct the past.

Will he succeed?

Or will he mess up time for the rest of us?

Or is this whole Time Machine a concept of his mind?

This is one of those movies that you cannot fast-forward through as the description of how time works, which is displayed in the introductory credits, and elaborated throughout the story is that time is a series of dimensions running parallel with every decision. Or at least he is 99% sure. Therefore, if one goes back into time and changes it, they create a new timestream and not change the stream that they were in originally.

Following the timeline or parallel universe theory will help make the story and even the ending quite clear. There are no loose ends. The original appearance of the professor (Patrick Godfrey) and the subsequent appearance of the professor even though similar are two different timelines.

Do not waste your time with plausibility. Do spend your time with the intertwining love stories and relationships. Why was he compelled to leave the one he now loves Annie (Olivia Llewellyn) to travel back and make a correction that he cannot be a part of?

Dimensions: Through the looking-glass of time?

[anthonydavis26 · 10/10 · 25 September 2011]

This review - and the comment - was written at Cambridge Film Festival (15 to 25 September 2011), where the film had its UK premiere

* Contains spoilers *

Although it is received wisdom that 'I can't be in two places at once (or at the same time, in a variant)', not only is that usually just an excuse, but it is affected by developments in cloning.

All that apart, the immense popularity of Dimensions, now (after screenings in Screens 2 and then 1) shown again, meant that I could go through the wormhole of watching again: the phrase does not sound favourable, but it is not intended unfavourably, as I was viewing twice to see what happened to something that I thought fine the first time.

Why was it fine? It is an extremely intelligent film that uses the concept and theory of time-travel to say something about what I described in my blog as longing. I still think that it is longing, not just obsession – one can be obsessed about something (e.g. Jackie Chan cutting my head off) that (without being psychoanalytical), on the face of it (pun intended!), one does not long for, and long for something that does not obsess one.

I said longing for something that one cannot have or that may not do one any good. In this film, that turns out not to be true on either count, and also involves a paradox. The events are separated by fifteen years, but, in some respects, the characters seem unchanged, seem stuck in some childish ways (as we all probably are – now who wants to play the psychology card, after all!), seem full of what I want to call longing. (I call it longing not only because I can't use the German word Sehnsucht, and, because of the connotations, I don't want to use yearning.) I asked a question about that at the premiere – the younger actors had had a chance to speak to their counterparts (and vice versa). What I find myself thinking, this time around, is that there is a generational as well as a dimensional character to all that we see, a temporal distortion that, as much as Alice's worlds reinterpret the present from which she enters Wonderland or the other Looking-Glass House, ripples (a key word in the script) as water, particles or time do with their differing wave-fronts. Which is why Ant Neely's brother's house on the river at Cambridge is such a benefit to and feature of this film.

This Cambridge-driven film – Ernest Rutherford split the atom here in 1917, which was then done under both his direction and controlled conditions in 1932 - buzzes with that innovation, but buzzes in the direction of feelings, and Olivia Llewellyn's acting beautifully embodies the spirit of a bright and clear academic mind, seeking to help Henry-Lloyd-Hughes (as Stephen) achieve his brilliant aims.

* * * * *

To say a little more, enough to tease (as the film often does), about mirror-images, there is a scene that shows Stephen and his friend Victoria after they have tumbled to the ground in a sort of chase of and with themselves.

As with something that happens later, which may (as Stephen's cousin Conrad first claims, and later appears unsure about it) - or may not - have been an accident, and which literally ties in with this moment, there is an embodiment of a skein, of the film's title's 'tangle of threads' (or the potential for it). It's a game, but there's bondage, the shackling that Joyce McKinney asserts was a sort of chosen cure, a sort of healing, in Tabloid, and with it there's the breathlessness associated with the other activity, there's the arbitrary rule-making that the game has to be played one way (counter-clockwise), an approach that can form rigid habits and stronger disciplines, not always for one's - or anyone else's - good in life (as with Stephen's father's former friend Richard?).

So the mirror-image, of the game being played clockwise, can be imagined - as can any other action involving Victoria and Stephen - happening, but it offends against the street being declared to be one way. (Not too far off from thinking again of Rutherford, of thinking how the characters in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen revolve, dance, around each other like particles in a simple atom...) And the transposed image, the left / right flip? Set aside whether the falling down together, linked, was (as with Conrad's accident) deliberate - although it had to seem so, or not ambiguously so, for us: when we see Stephen and Victoria on the ground, from the waist up, side by side, they are, first of all, in that order, left to right. The picture (taken by the cinematographer, but not one that otherwise existed for Stephen to see (directly)), when he calls it to mind later, becomes Victoria and Stephen, she now on the left.

(It is nearly summoned again, but we do not actually see it, are just so reminded of it that, as a ghost of a view, we could almost swear that its image is on our retina at that point, because we know it - or think that we know it - by then.) So these are the hints of Alice, these are the suggestions that, in a world as like ours as the one that she first sees in Looking-Glass House, things may be subtly different, actually harmful: as The Annotated Alice observes, with Martin Gardner talking about left- and right-handed molecules (which are identical but for being mirror-images of each other), milk would not be safe for Alice or her cat to drink in the world beyond the looking-glass. Matter and anti-matter? It goes on...

Where would we be without the imagination of Ant Neely (the film's writer) or of Lewis Carroll? The poorer for it, I think.

A good time travel story!

[frankbenn-598-279541 · 10/10 · 31 July 2021]

You've got to remember, this is a British movie. Many move slower than American movies! That said, its a very good movie if you have an imagination. That's required.

Dr. Ronald Mallet, theoretical physicist even noted this movie in his book "Time Traveler", the books worth the read!

This was built with vacuum tubes, an old round screen tv and an upright piano. Talk about high tech. Don't discount this story! I love it!!!!