Time Trap (2017)
December 11, 2018 6:10 PM - Subscribe
A group of students become trapped inside a mysterious cave where they discover time passes differently underground than on the surface.
This is a movie that plays fast and loose with big ideas. People less charitably inclined towards this kind of genre stuff will likely find plenty of bones to pick.
The only thing that truly cheesed me off was that the future humans only seemed to save the 21st century people. How could their scientists possibly resist saving the missing link cave people? And even if you drew the line at them because they were dangerous, why not save the conquistadors, cowboys, etc.?
I'm thinking the eight foot tall super advanced future humans wouldn't find our contemporaries much less backward than Ponce de Leon.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:05 AM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
The only thing that truly cheesed me off was that the future humans only seemed to save the 21st century people. How could their scientists possibly resist saving the missing link cave people? And even if you drew the line at them because they were dangerous, why not save the conquistadors, cowboys, etc.?
I'm thinking the eight foot tall super advanced future humans wouldn't find our contemporaries much less backward than Ponce de Leon.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:05 AM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]
Well, that and unless future humans are pretty racist, I don't know why cavemen who attacked him got clamped to the ground and left to die but college students who attacked him got carried to the Fountain of Youth to be healed.
They were a little slow to consider helping him back, too.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:06 AM on December 12, 2018
They were a little slow to consider helping him back, too.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:06 AM on December 12, 2018
I can't believe my SO hasn't forced me to watch this (yet); time shenanigans is her favorite genre element.
posted by fleacircus at 6:02 PM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by fleacircus at 6:02 PM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]
The future people have plenty of time (ha ha) to come back and pick up the cavemen and conquistadors. Maybe they already did, but didn't want to leave them alone with the modern-day humans, given the cavemen's obvious propensity for violence.
Also keep in mind that the eight-foot-tall astronaut is actually the rescuers' far-far-distant ancestor, so you can't expect too much consistency. The giant obviously considered herself culturally connected to our time, since she brought along TV footage of Donald Trump making a speech about space exploration and expected it to be recognized.
Anyway, this is a good "hard SF" movie. You'll have to get over the "idiot plot" of scientists and students charging off into the unknown all alone without telling anyone where they were going. But the time-logic works.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:44 AM on December 17, 2018
Also keep in mind that the eight-foot-tall astronaut is actually the rescuers' far-far-distant ancestor, so you can't expect too much consistency. The giant obviously considered herself culturally connected to our time, since she brought along TV footage of Donald Trump making a speech about space exploration and expected it to be recognized.
Anyway, this is a good "hard SF" movie. You'll have to get over the "idiot plot" of scientists and students charging off into the unknown all alone without telling anyone where they were going. But the time-logic works.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 2:44 AM on December 17, 2018
Also, my guess is that the outside-world sequence of events goes like this:
In our time, they never found the kids, the vehicles, or the cave. (Boss ran off and became King Of The Coyotes.) The global catastrophe struck and the Earth became uninhabitable, but with the high tech space triangle, humanity got to Mars, and can travel quickly back and forth between the two planets.
When Cara came back up and turned on the GPS transmitter, the signal was detected by the space triangle -- you can see it turns toward her. Future humanity realized some people were still alive down on Earth. I don't know if there was some kind of unique GPS signal that meant they figured out it's those missing kids from the past, but it seems likely, since the giant woman had the TV broadcast about them cued up and ready to play.
I'm not sure how she knew about the healing powers of the Fountain Of Youth. Nor do I know how the early Native Americans outside the cave (whose secret signs the hippies were following) learned the cavemen's occult knowledge. At this point, nobody has ever come out of that cave to report back. The cavemen must have been "recent" arrivals, not too long (inside the cave) before the main characters, because they didn't seem to have any source of food.
The far-future rescuer people, who lived many millennia after the eight-foot-tall astronaut, have figured out what's going on with the Time Trap. They can use super-fast nano-bot cables to grab things inside the cave and explore it. They spot Cara emerging -- very slowly, it seems to them -- from the cave mouth into the water covering the area, grab her, and debrief her, which lets them plan the rest of the operation.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 3:03 AM on December 17, 2018
In our time, they never found the kids, the vehicles, or the cave. (Boss ran off and became King Of The Coyotes.) The global catastrophe struck and the Earth became uninhabitable, but with the high tech space triangle, humanity got to Mars, and can travel quickly back and forth between the two planets.
When Cara came back up and turned on the GPS transmitter, the signal was detected by the space triangle -- you can see it turns toward her. Future humanity realized some people were still alive down on Earth. I don't know if there was some kind of unique GPS signal that meant they figured out it's those missing kids from the past, but it seems likely, since the giant woman had the TV broadcast about them cued up and ready to play.
I'm not sure how she knew about the healing powers of the Fountain Of Youth. Nor do I know how the early Native Americans outside the cave (whose secret signs the hippies were following) learned the cavemen's occult knowledge. At this point, nobody has ever come out of that cave to report back. The cavemen must have been "recent" arrivals, not too long (inside the cave) before the main characters, because they didn't seem to have any source of food.
The far-future rescuer people, who lived many millennia after the eight-foot-tall astronaut, have figured out what's going on with the Time Trap. They can use super-fast nano-bot cables to grab things inside the cave and explore it. They spot Cara emerging -- very slowly, it seems to them -- from the cave mouth into the water covering the area, grab her, and debrief her, which lets them plan the rest of the operation.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 3:03 AM on December 17, 2018
Okay, so it's now four years later, but that's kind of appropriate for this movie.
I just saw it because it had been lingering on my list of things to watch at some point for quite a while, and I saw some online thing telling me it's leaving Netflix right about now, so I watched it.
Yeah, fun little B-movie as long as you don't think about it too much. I'm still trying to figure out how the outside world found out about the fountain. I mean some people could have come out in historical time. Hopper comes back out with only several years passing, but only because he didn't spend enough time in the cave the first time to have any idea what was going on. But okay, maybe someone managed to make contact with someone who'd been in the cave long enough to know what was going on, but not so far separated from themselves that they couldn't communicate. They step in, run into someone else who tells them what the cave is about (and maybe has waiting for just such a person to arrive) and then sends them back out. I'll give them that.
As for the cave people, I'm not sure they need food as long as they have the water. I don't think they'd starve.
Here I am thinking about it too much. It was fun and that's enough.
posted by Naberius at 5:49 AM on April 15, 2022
I just saw it because it had been lingering on my list of things to watch at some point for quite a while, and I saw some online thing telling me it's leaving Netflix right about now, so I watched it.
Yeah, fun little B-movie as long as you don't think about it too much. I'm still trying to figure out how the outside world found out about the fountain. I mean some people could have come out in historical time. Hopper comes back out with only several years passing, but only because he didn't spend enough time in the cave the first time to have any idea what was going on. But okay, maybe someone managed to make contact with someone who'd been in the cave long enough to know what was going on, but not so far separated from themselves that they couldn't communicate. They step in, run into someone else who tells them what the cave is about (and maybe has waiting for just such a person to arrive) and then sends them back out. I'll give them that.
As for the cave people, I'm not sure they need food as long as they have the water. I don't think they'd starve.
Here I am thinking about it too much. It was fun and that's enough.
posted by Naberius at 5:49 AM on April 15, 2022
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I have a feeling that the polished/commercial but lower budget Netflix/direct-to-video vibe may make some people wrinkle their noses. It's a bummer, too, as this is a clever, breezy little sci-fi trip. If it had some indie film scuzziness around the edges or was made out side of North America and had less of an industry sheen, it would likely go down much easier as a cult film. And it probably deserves to be a cult film.
Heck, it'd make a fine tv series.
This movie has time-bending/acceleration, cowboys, cavemen, hippies, eight foot tall future humans, aliens, conquistadors, the end of earth, space stations, Mars colonization. And the other Wilson brother.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:43 AM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]