On the couch

THE Time Traveler’s Wife, Robert Schwentke’s adaptation of the successful 2003 novel by Audrey Niffenegger, is such a slow-moving annoyance that even when watched in fast forward, it’s still a ponderous piece of work.
This is not hyperbole. I tried it. It is sloooooooooow. Which is a shame because the story’s premise is interesting and the cast more than capable of turning the sorts of performances that could carry the necessary melodrama.
Eric Bana stars as Henry DeTamble, a Chicago librarian with a peculiar genetic deficiency – he slips through time, seemingly at random, finding himself landing, naked, at various points of his life with nothing to do except survive the ordeal and wait for his condition to whisk him back to his normal place in time.
As the title suggests, however, the story focuses less on the errant time traveller, but on his wife, Clare (Rachel McAdams), an aspiring artist from a wealthy family who first meets a temporally displaced Henry when she’s six. And he’s 28.
The two continue to meet at various points along their respective timelines and, while the relationship turns out to not be nearly as creepy as those previous two sentences may suggest, there is a certain amount of weirdness in the apparent absence of free will in the cementing of the relationship and then marriage.
While this might prove an interesting topic for exploration it takes a back seat to the story’s apparent focus problem of what do you do if your hubby randomly disappears? On your wedding day? At Christmas? While he’s bringing you a spare loo roll? (Only two of those actually feature in the film). It’s a messy state of affairs altogether.
Unfortunately, despite ignoring many of the other issues in the film – and potentially interesting ones at that – the story devotes little more than a brief montage of missed moments to really push home the message that it’s not ideal to have an unreliable partner.
Beyond that, the film moves slowly from one inevitably uninteresting incident to another, never quite letting anything so much as a token moment of excitement, intrigue or drama invade its little bubble. And despite the relegation of supporting characters to the sidelines, there still doesn’t seem to be an awful lot of time devoted to the couple or why the hell they’re so fond of each other.
Which is bloody annoying considering the obvious potential the film had to be either a thoughtful sci-fi noodler like Solaris or a harsh but intriguing relationship drama. Eric Bana once again proves his leading man mettle, bringing a realisitic charm and charisma to Henry DeTamble. Rachel McAdams, meanwhile, does justice to the film’s lighter moments but is unconvincing when any real emotional weight is required of her.
It amounts to a disappointing swipe at potential greatness.
From one half-baked science fiction flick to a half-mad, half-lit one. Pandorum is a spiritual descendant of such space-based horror films as Cube and Event Horizon, that peddles a good line in creepy, jump out of your seat frights and maintaining a sense of dread.
Starring Dennis Quaid, the film is set on a giant starship, an ark of sorts, sent into the cosmos after it becomes clear that Earth is no longer viable as digs for the human race.
En route to a new Eden to rebuild the civilisation, Quaid and his co-pilot, Ben Foster, wake up from their space sleep to find the place overrun with both technical problems and killer alien thingies.
What follows is a claustrophobic tear across the ship as Foster, and a few survivors he picks up along the way, take their cues from Captain Sensible (Quaid) to find and fix the ship’s engine and make sure humanity makes it to its destination.
Action packed and spooky, Pandorum is full of old-fashioned scares. Things go bump in the dark and the aliens, when you can’t see them, are terrifying.
It all comes unhinged a bit at the end when over-energetic camerawork starts to turn action scenes into instant headaches and too much effort is made to explain exactly what happened before the crew woke up.
It’s a small quibble to have though with a film that does exactly what you want it to – show you space and scare you senseless.