Crew
Director/Screenplay – Scott Sawitz, Producers – Mike Noyes & Scott Sawitz, Photography – Dan Lotz. Production Company – Drunk Justice Productions.
Cast
Gabriel Fries (Chris), Jessie Carl (Veronica Fields), Ilya Gaidarov (Daniel), Nickie Kruszyinski (Stephanie Savage), Sam Selah (Newscaster)
Plot
Chris and Veronica have been together for ten years since they were in high school and have even talked about marrying. She is now tired of his ways and accepts a job that requires moving to California. She prepares to leave but the act of going back to the house to give Chris the keys ends in an ugly argument. One year later, Chris is mourning her departure. His best friend Daniel shows him a time machine he has invented, built as a watch, although this only allows travel into the past for ten minutes at a time. Chris takes the watch and uses it multiple times to go back to his argument with Veronica and persuade her not to leave, all within the same ten-minute window.
The 2010s onwards have shown a peculiar confluence between the Time Travel film and the Romantic Comedy, beginning with the likes of Kate & Leopold (2001) and Happy Accidents (2000). The most influential of these seems to have been About Time (2013) where Domhnall Gleeson discovers an ability to go back into his past and change time and uses it to perfect his romance with Rachel McAdams. There have been a number of others on the theme including Time Freak (2018), When We First Met (2018) and James vs. His Future Self (2019), all centred around the idea of one person travelling back in time with the intent to repair their relationship and/or not allow the love of their life to leave. My favourite among these was Meet Cute (2022) with Kaley Cuoco continually returning through time to her one perfect date with Pete Davidson.
Save State is less on the comedy side and plays more as a film cast with regular actors as opposed to one playing to comedy beats. On the other hand, when they have their break-up, Gabriel Fries and Jessie Carl are so bitchy and cutting in their dialogue and insults traded at the other, and subsequently when they argue throughout, it leaves you wondering why you would possibly root for these two characters to get back together. Crucially, there is little done by the film that establishes why they should be together. It feels like a case of a writer who is so in love with the wittiness of his barbs that he was unable to kill any of his precious darlings to the detriment of the likeability of the characters.
There is also the peculiar conception of time travel as being like a videogame. By its very title, the film talks about a ‘save state’, a piece of videogaming terminology that refers to the restore point – the state the game was at when it was last saved. In other words, the film’s time travel has Gabriel Fries constantly going back to the same moment just like a gamer and trying to alter things from there. (What I failed to understand was what there was to prevent Gabriel going back to different points in time – surely rather than focusing everything on one ten-minute window, could he not have inserted himself in multiple points and done different things at different times to heal the relationship?)
The film also gets distracted with a good deal in the way of nerd inserts and fan jokes. It opens on Gabriel Fries monologuing to Ilya Gaidarov about how Tony Stark ended up creating every single villain in the MCU. There are gags about the Terminator series and one ongoing gag that gets repeated throughout where the situation of Gabriel Fries going back and inhabiting his own body is compared to Wolverine in X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014). There is one cute gag with Gabriel and Ilya delivering the news in the style of a thrash metal band.
The film is modestly conducted and definitely shot on a minimal budget. The entire film, for instance, takes place in a single living room with a couple of ventures outside that go no further than a car parked on the street. The entire film is stripped down to a cast of four, plus one person who appears as a newscaster.
Save State was a directing/writing debut for Scott Sawitz who had previously made short films.
Trailer here