Review: Needle in a Timestack Puts the Butterly Effect Through a Hallmark Wringer

The film is too blinded by manufactured sentimentality to see the more compelling what-if scenario lying right in front of its eyes.

Needle in a Timestack
Photo: Lionsgate

John Ridley’s Needle in a Timestack imagines a near future where time travel isn’t only a reality, but a luxury vacation experience. For an exorbitant price, the wealthy can “time-jaunt” back to any point in their past and relive their dearest memories—a more personalized twist on the corporate Time Safari at the center of Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder. Here, though, the butterfly effect that results from this enterprise is less a global crisis than a common by-product of modern living, resulting in massive translucent energy waves called “phasings” that sporadically wash over the present-day environment and bring with them the potential for subtle changes to people’s lives, like one’s pet cat becoming a dog.

Based on a short story by Robert Silverberg, Needle in a Timestack immediately opens up a plethora of questions. Chiefly, wouldn’t this time-jaunting endeavour cause utter temporal and physical chaos given how many people are trampling around precipitously throughout the past? The only possible chaos that architect Nick Mikkelsen (Leslie Odom Jr.) is worried about, however, is within his marriage to photographer Janine (Cynthia Erivo). Convinced that his former friend and Janine’s ex-husband, Tommy Hambleton (Orlando Bloom), is trying to break up the relationship by time-jaunting through their shared past, Nick frantically attempts to devise a way to safeguard his memories in case the next phasing wipes them out for good.

“Love is drawn in the form of a circle,” is a refrain repeatedly intoned throughout the film, doggedly reminding us that the heart will always return to what it wants despite any pesky metaphysical obstacles thrown in its way. And once the unthinkable happens, with Nick suddenly waking up now married to old flame Alex Leslie (Freida Pinto), Ridley plunges into Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind terrain as our hero starts to long for Janine even though he can’t quite remember who she is. But whereas Michel Gondry’s film utilized an almost tactile lo-fi aesthetic for its sharp examination of love and loss, Needle in a Timestack aspires to a more sweepingly bombastic aura, often to the detriment of the delicate emotions in play.

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Ridley aims for the same key of heightened spiritual profundity as Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain and Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas, yet his script lacks the scope or sincerity required to pull off its gonzo ambitions. The characters are as thinly sketched as their sleekly anonymous urban surroundings, and they’re prone to spouting hollow aphorisms like “happiness is the only thing more fleeting than time.” Add in the monotonously overbearing Mark Isham score and British trip-hop group Lamb’s “Górecki” on the soundtrack and the film begins to suggest an attractively sterile music video erratically blown up to feature length.

Without any real stakes to the narrative, our interest in Nick’s haphazard quest for eternal love quickly wanes. And all the while, the internal logic of Needle in a Timestack’s high concept only gets fuzzier. Early on, for instance, it’s stated that the act of making any major changes during a trip to the past is deemed illegal. But not only is there no further mention of this law, there’s absolutely no sense of how it’s even enforced, as no one ever swoops in to stop the film’s characters as they conspicuously and recklessly alter the course of the future.

In some ways, this wobbly narrative structure inadvertently allows us to ponder the more intriguing film that could have been—that is, one that confronts the next logical step in the class divide as Needle in the Haystack’s privileged characters go about rearranging their lives at the expense of the less fortunate. But ultimately, the film is too blinded by manufactured sentimentality to see the more compelling what-if scenario lying right in front of its eyes.

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Score: 
 Cast: Leslie Odom Jr., Cynthia Erivo, Orlando Bloom, Freida Pinto  Director: John Ridley  Screenwriter: John Ridley  Distributor: Lionsgate  Running Time: 111 min  Rating: R  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Mark Hanson

Mark Hanson is a film writer and curator from Toronto, Canada, and the product manager at Bay Street Video, one of North America's last remaining video stores.

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