Time Traveler's Wife, The

Love stories are hard. Life is pretty complex and love stories usually aren’t true to anyone’s real life experience. They’re a romantic ideal, a fantasy of what life and love will never ever actually be like. There are those love stories that are so tragic and painfully heart wrenching that they make one hell of a good movie. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” was one of those. And while that movie was about many things, at its center was this sad and touching love story. There’s another love story out in theaters that doesn’t offer much, and despite having a similar twist it’s definitely no “Benjamin Button”. It’s called “The Time Traveler’s Wife.”

“The Time Traveler’s Wife” is the story of a man with a genetic disease that causes him to slip backward or forward in time to other moments in his or his future wife’s life (regardless of spatial relations I might add). The time traveler, played by Eric Bana, falls madly in love with Rachel McAdams and they spend the whole movie trying to lead a normal married life despite his constantly disappearing. While the premise is interesting enough, it’s poorly executed here. The film is based on a book that I haven’t read, so it’s unclear who’s to blame for this bland nothing of a movie. It could have been doomed from the beginning with the source material, or it could have just been poor storytelling by the screen writers, but there is really nothing to this movie. Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams must be great actors to have been able to play such dull people. And while the film attempts to tell the story in as linear a fashion as it could, the reveals of certain information due to the time slips aren’t particularly illuminating.

The characters and really the whole plot for that matter are not realistic; that is to say if it were possible to time travel the way he does nothing would ever play out the way it did in the movie. Eric Bana keeps visiting Rachel McAdams when she’s a little girl which is what jump starts her infatuation with him in the first place. That whole scenario is pretty creepy to be honest. It’s like how Woody Allen knew his step daughter her whole life, when she was a little girl and everything, and then just waited for her to be old enough so he could hook up with her. There’s nothing illegal about it, but it’s kind of disturbing. At one point he uses his time travel abilities to win the lottery, but in this paradox free universe why wouldn’t he keep winning every week until he could live like a Saudi prince. Every time he slips backward he arrives naked and has to rob people for their clothes, which is just an excuse to give the women in the audience a good look at what they came for: gratuitous Bana butt shots.

This movie is pretty boring for the most part and there’s not really much reason to see it. I read somewhere that the author wrote the story as a metaphor for how relationships with men come in and out of her life. Just cause some lady can’t keep a guy around doesn’t give her to right to unleash this dreck on the world. The only good thing I can say is that I’m sure everyone in the production worked really hard on this movie, especially the actors, but when the story sucks there isn’t much hope. On a side note, time travel used to be pretty murky territory and you could pretty much do whatever you wanted. But these days we know a lot more about how time travel would actually work based on math related to particle physics and all kinds of other stuff I could never dream of comprehending. The current thinking regarding time travel is that if you went back in time and killed your grandfather you would create a parallel universe in which you were never born, but you wouldn’t cause any actual consequences regarding your own life in your own universe, therefore you would still exist. I’d like to see more movies that try and stay within this construct; it makes it seem more plausible, but I doubt the writer of this movie even cared about plausibility in the least. I’d like to go back in time and tell myself not to see this movie.