APORIA – Review

Time-travel tales always raise logical questions about inconsistencies and effects. One of the tropes is that everything will go kablooey if your time-traveling self meets the prior one. Another is the warning to minimize interactions with those of yore to avoid collateral influences that will change their future and your present, as in the “Butterfly Effect.” Generally, films using this premise minimize our mental gymnastics by filling the screen with so much action that we don’t have time to think about the science what-ifs. The TERMINATOR franchise exemplifies the distraction factor. The title’s definition is of internal contradictions or a logical impasse.

APORIA tries a different approach to avoid the first problem in this drama. A guy named Jabir (Payman Maadi) builds a time machine that’s not strong enough to send a person back but could send something small – like a bullet. Judy Greer plays Sophie, a widow devastated by the loss of her husband, Mal (Edi Gathegi), to a drunk driver a year earlier – not only for her own sorrow, but its having turned their bright, energetic daughter (Faithe Herman) into a sullen a-hole. Mal had been the inventor’s best friend and partner in the early stages of crafting the device, so Jabir is grieving as well.

After a lot of musing on whether they should try to off the guy who killed Mal “before” that fateful moment could occur, they give it a literal and figurative shot. It works. Their present changes to one with a restored loving husband and happy child who have no knowledge of the year Sophie and Jamir had lived. They, in turn, have no memories of the year the rest of this new reality experienced. That’s based on the quantum physics principle that the presence of an observer alters the outcome of what we consider to be objective reality. So whoever is aware of the maneuver will have lived and retained a different past than the rest of the “new” world, which in turn, has no idea their lives had been manipulated. (I hope any physicists reading the previous sentence will forgive whatever shortcomings they find in my untrained attempt to describe this concept.)

The first problem arises when Sophie learns that the wife and child of the drunk dude suffered greatly and unjustly from his loss after her temporal futzing. She tries to atone for that, leading to other forays into yesteryear, each of which brings unintended consequences. Not usually in good ways.

That’s the problem for the cast to deal with. The problem for audiences is that Jared Moshe wrote and directed what may be the slowest, talkiest time-travel flick in the reality “I’ve” experienced. The principals moralize and agonize endlessly over the justification for each step, and all the possibilities of any action they could take. This gives viewers too much time to ponder options and directions the script might provide to reach a desirable ending, and to do their own mental gymnastics about the logic of the underlying concept. There’s more melodrama here than in most time-travel features. There’s also the unsubtle movie reference of naming Greer’s character Sophie and giving her such drastic life-altering choices.

Most sci-fi buffs will likely find this rather tedious. Those seeking family character dramas should be more satisfied. I can’t begin to speculate on what actual scientists will think. I ducked too many of those classes in the reality I believe we’re experiencing as I type this.

APORIA debuts on Digital, DVD and Blu-ray on Tuesday, Sept. 12.

RATING: 1.5 out of 4 stars