Although the short film will never be a form as appreciated as the feature film, it is a type of film that has an advantage in terms of the running time – so an idea that would need a lot of development and work to be a 90+ minute long film, can often be done better as an isolated scene over 10-15 minutes. That is how this film appears at first. It is about time-travel as the title says, but ultimately it is two men in one set just talking – so really the ideas, themes or images can be as big or as small as the pictures made through these two characters having a discussion.
Unfortunately, the film doesn't play to this strength and rather undercuts itself from the get-go. The film should be simple, realistic and gradually build with a sense of intrigue and humanity, but instead it jumps very quickly into overplaying the drama so that it feels forced and artificial as a scene. It does this through the music (that is heavily foreboding for no real reason); it does it through the character design (where quirks exist for no reason) and it does it through the performances. It is the last of these that hurt it the most; in particular the time-traveler is delivered with too much weight and tension in the delivery, forcing the intrigue to be something it is not ready to be at that point rather than letting it develop. This is not the actor Johnson's fault, he does as he is directed, but it is Cooper's fault as director since it is a problem across the whole film.
As a result the simple scene is overdone so it loses its main strength – the simplicity of the film. The story offers interest but it is overplayed and forced from the very start, so in the end the viewer has not been allowed to be drawn into it as would have been best. Accordingly the film feels like a missed opportunity, delivering very little on the promise it had.
