When Time Expires

Watched this movie years ago. It is not that great of a stand alone film but for the sc-fi fan it is awesome Richard Grieco and Mark Hamill really make this movie work. Mark Hamill really did a few good low budget movies back in the 1990's.

Avoid at all costs. Poor, American TV movie writing. Checked-shirts, jeans and guitar music with some consumer- necessary and plot-irrelevant pseudo-sex scenes.

If I had the original recording of this movie, I would incinerate it. I implore the owners of this film to BURN, BURN, BURN. Start here and move on to other greats like "A.P.E.X.".

The film started out promising, but then got muddled and slow as it went on -- I'm not stupid but I could have sworn that the dialogue indicated that there wasn't any actual time travel involved, just highly sophisticated prediction of the future, and then suddenly at the end there was actual time travel -- ending in dumb shootouts in which a regular pistol in our hero's hand constantly trumped the bad guys' futuristic rayguns. The cast mostly does their best, especially the veterans like Tim Thomerson and Pat Corley (who only appears on a tv screen and I assume shot all his scenes in one or two days completely independently of the rest of the film's production), but there are reasons why Grieco was never a big star and that while Cynthia Geary has a lot of post-"Northern Exposure" credits none of them are very impressive. And the only way I can describe Mark Hamill's performance is as a combination of about 80% "Hey, I'm TRYING here!" and 20% "WHY am I trying here?"

Caught this movie on TV and it definitely held my attention. I appreciated the fact that what little violence there was mainly took the form of fistfights. I would have rated it 10, except for the gratuitous and really ridiculous taking of the Lord's name in vain so many times, considering that we're dealing with an organization of advanced planets. Certainly this "federation" of thousands of planets must know Who it is that created those planets. Probably the smarmy Showtime networks idea. So minus two for that. The few special effects there were just reminded me of the low budget original Star Trek. If the story is there, and it is, special effects used judiciously are fine. The beautiful Cynthia Geary is a plus.

I'm glad I read the positive reviews that caused me to give this movie a chance. It's not great in that the acting is mediocre, but the whole time travel beurocracy part and everyone's motivations made sense by the end of the movie, so that all worked for me. The movie also had some nice touches in it ghat I appreciated, like the assistants working through tv sets, the watches that beep when the time travelers are getting too close to doing something that woould adversely effect the future, and the bad guys in long coats and cowboy hats moving in slow motion. I also enjoyed the happy ending. Both I and my wife were glad we watched.