Time Wars, the review of the science fiction film on Prime Video

Visionary scientist Ethan Blake and his brother Jacob discover a previously unknown energy source, capable of potentially changing the destiny of humanity forever. The two build an aircraft that runs on this innovative “fuel” called Quantamanium and recruit a team to conduct a peculiar scientific research. On board the futuristic remotely piloted vehicle, the group sets off on their journey when an accident occurs which forces them to make an emergency landing.

As we tell you in Time Wars review, the passengers suddenly faint. When Ethan wakes up he is confronted by soldiers who have stolen their fuel capsule and begins to follow them. He thus comes across the charming Tina, a girl who was swimming in the ocean before a mysterious fog lead him into a time leap. Between past and future Ethan will have to solve an enigma on whose resolution the fate of the entire world depends he won’t be able to trust anything or anyonenot even of himself.

Is wanting a power?

In recent years, Russian cinema has launched itself into the blockbuster market, often without a precise identity, limiting themselves to copying in an arbitrary and confused way the homologous Hollywood productions, to the point of having the actors act directly in English. And if at the level of special effects at times manages to compete with their reference models, the same fate does not also befall screenplays, which seem to be “daughters of a minor god” and are wasted in a quotationism without art or part. This is also the case with Time Warswhich in addition to rehashing consolidated science fiction imagery without a minimum of coherencecontinually uses great classics – first literary and then cinematographic – in jokes and dialogues like The Lord of the Rings And The Hobbit: definitely the director and screenwriter Alexander Boguslavsky he must have watched Peter Jackson’s adaptations many times, so much so that he took them up word for word in different circumstances.

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An indefinite place

And what about this unknown setting where almost all of the running time takes place, which perhaps would like to recall in the intentions the iconic area of ​​a masterpiece of Soviet cinematography as the Stalker (1968) by Andrei Tarkovsky? They call each other and copy names of excellence in an abstruse narrative, even written twelve (!) by a team of writers who got lost along the way. The One Hundred Minutes of Time Wars they are emotionless with this continuous alternation between past and future, in a limbo of parallel realities and quantum variations, where the viewer soon ends up losing the needle of the compass. A sensation that is actually already palpable from the very first moments, with the story that accompanies us an already beautiful and well-taken background without the slightest introduction about it, further increasing the disorientation.

Times and ways

As mentioned, the staging on an aesthetic level holds up well, complete with gigantic flying warships and the mysterious fog that transports the unfortunate characters into this time loop, mixing realities with the – more or less veiled – ambition of recalling the atmospheres of Tenet (2020) by Christopher Nolan. And at a certain point the protagonist also finds himself quoting the famous phrase that has become famous thanks to Oppenheimer (2023), or “Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds“, although in this case it is a simple coincidence given that Time Wars was released a few weeks before the Oscar-winning bio-pic. It’s not missing the inevitable romantic subplotalso this one wandering between the various realities, and a lighter soul entrusted to the slightly crazy character, passionate about classic and adventure novels, but everything seems put together haphazardly, without a minimum of cohesion such as to guarantee the viewer’s attention, which he will probably already have after the first half hour pressed stop on the remote control.