There is definitely a place for movies like Journey to the Center of Time. I really believe that if it weren't for astonishingly bad movies like this, it would be harder to really appreciate the good ones. I also, on the other hand, wonder what the people were thinking when they were making movies like this, because no one makes famously bad movies deliberately, do they?
At any rate, the movie starts out with a whole dialogue of scientific mumbo jumbo. A lot of it went right over my head because I have no background in science, but I don't think much of it makes sense anyway, because would a movie like this really make a serious argument about the logistics and technical aspects of time travel? I doubt it, because their destination, as you know, is the "center of time." Whatever or wherever or whenever that is.
Early in the movie they describe their destination as "the balance between past and future," which until now I had always assumed to be the tenuous and fleeting place known generally as "now."
But not in this movie, here there are enormously complex time travel experiments being conducted using enormously simple equipment. It's not long before we are given the bizarre explanation that this is a $14 million project to create a satellite that can show pictures taken 24 hours ago. Is that how much $14 million buys? 24 hours? That's really too bad. Maybe that's why most people can only afford surveillance cameras. The cheap, boring time-travel- less ones. No one makes movies about those!
Then again, for all the cardboard simplicity of the lab, they did have a hydraulic lift built in to raise and lower people about 18 inches from the upper platform to the lower platform. A more frugal team would have installed the two stairs, but maybe these guys weren't quite sure what to do with all that money.
There is a scene about 30 minutes into the movie where the crew, under a surprisingly effective 24-hour deadline, finally manage to conduct a successful experiment using the, ah, temporal displacement device they have been working on, and they are all shocked to see, on the characteristically 1970's oval-shaped big screen TV in front of them (and after more than a minute of pictures of galaxies, b-roll, and random head shots), what one of the scientists describes as "the test area. Time central!" I'm glad they knew what they were looking for, the rest of us may have reached the center of time and passed it on by without even knowing to stop!
But soon they notice that they've opened a window through which they can see 5000 years in the future, so I reckon it's going to be a good idea to stop about then. But soon we learn that it's a window that matter can pass through, so it's not going to be long before some silver guys in shiny jumpsuits mosey on into the lab and say come with us if you want to live.
They say that good science fiction movies, especially time travel movies, show us the future to comment on the present. This is a bad science fiction movie, but it still makes sure to comment on the present, specifically man's seemingly endless capacity and drive to kill each other in war. Even super-advanced future-people can be killed by man's "primitive" nuclear weapons!
The last third of the movie seems to consist of nothing but seemingly endless montages shown on that video screen, mostly of modern wars, and yet there's still only enough here for an 82 minute movie. And don't miss the hilarious hand-to-hand combat scenes! Classic!!
