Director – Erwann Marshall, Screenplay – Chad Fifer & Erwann Marshall, Producer – Amanda Marshall, Photography – Ed Herrera, Music – Rene G. Boscio, Visual Effects – Crafty Apes (Supervisor – Sean Thigpen), Special Effects Supervisor – Skyler Gorrell, Production Design – Molly Coffee. Production Company – Synapse Pictures.
Jack Lambert has failed in his bid for the US senatorial race due to a televised gaffe where he swore in front of kids during his campaign. He and his wife Maggie take some time away and retreat to Jack’s family home in Georgia, where he has not been since his teens. Jack is then startled to encounter Elise, the girlfriend he had as a teenager, in the supermarket. She went on a 28-year space voyage but due to time dilation and cryo-sleep has barely aged. Maggie encourages Jack to invite Elise over. Despite the fact that he is nearly three decades older, this stirs buried feelings for Elise in Jack and he begins to question the career in politics he has followed since he was a teenager.
There have been surprisingly few films about the effects of Einsteinian time dilation. The theory of relativity states that time slows down for a traveller aboard a ship travelling at or close to the speed of light, as opposed to the observer travelling at a relatively slower speed (such as someone standing on a planet). The upshot of this would mean that a journey that took two months in terms of shipboard time for the relativistic traveller moving close to the speed of light may have meant that 10-20 years has gone by back on Earth.
On film, time dilation has been dealt with surprisingly seldom. It was there by implication although not directly so in Planet of the Apes (1968). Surprisingly, the first film to deal with it proper was Disney’s Flight of the Navigator (1986) where Joey Cramer returns from an alien abduction unaged while his younger brother is now older than he. It also appears in other space travel films such as Interstellar (2014) and the same year as this in Disney’s Lightyear (2022).
The Time Capsule does also use Cryogenics as part of its space travel process as well as relativistic time dilation, which is kind of like double-betting to make sure it really does achieve the things that it wants the story to do. It did give me cause to wonder where exactly Brianna Hildebrand could go on a round trip of 28 light years (it is said that they were travelling at the speed of light). However, a quick google shows me that there are some forty stars within a fourteen light year distance from Earth.
Middle-aged Todd Grinnell reunited with his still teenage girlfriend Brianna Hildebrand
All of that said, The Time Capsule doesn’t seem that interested in a particularly rigorous exploration of its SF premise. It is in essence a film that operates as a middle-aged man’s romantic/nostalgic fantasy – what if you were to go home again and the teenage love of your life were to reappear as though not a day had passed? – having been given an SF rationale. No real depth or detail has gone into the background of the future, which still looks exactly like 2022 but where humanity is capable of making thirty year round trips to the stars.
For some time in, The Time Capsule felt like no more than a tv movie treatment of its idea. However, then the relationship drama kicked in – about the point that Todd Grinnell sneaks out of the house with Brianna Hildebrand – and surprisingly enough the film starts to work. The writing, the discussions of the improbability of the romance, the longing of the middle-aged man who has settled into another life, the incomprehension of the teenage girl for whom only a short time has seemingly passed – are all brought out and written with reasonable effect. The ending the film reaches does seem an improbable happy fix to a seemingly impossible dilemma – I kept wanting to see what a middle-aged Brianna Hildebrand looked like.
The most well-known name present is Brianna Hildebrand who came to fame as Negasonic Teenage Warhead in Deadpool (2016) and has played in other films like the blackly hilarious Tragedy Girls (2017). In all her other work, Hildebrand has affected a very gender-neutral boi look but here plays femme and reasonably well too. Todd Grinnell steps into what would be the hapless dad role in a sitcom – I kept thinking of him as Tim Allen in Home Improvement (1991-7). The best performance in the film however actually comes from KaDee Strickland as Todd’s wife – she has a way of coming across as controlling without seeming to or delivering an acidic offhand comment that seems honed to perfection.
The Time Capsule was a feature-length directorial debut for Erwann Marshall.
