“The power to cross the universe in an instant; the impossible becomes possible; all the unbelievable things you could accomplish; the eternal questions you could answer… and you want to get laid.”

This piece of dialogue – part of a witty repartee amongst 101 minutes of quasi-seriousness – could stand as the synopsis for the recently released (video on demand and iTunes), time-travel tale Synchronicity. The film is a kind of Primer for the less inquisitive, a Predestination with more talk and less action, all the while paying homage, stylistically, to Blade Runner.

Writer/director Jacob Gentry (The Signal) hasn’t created anything wholly original in Synchronicity, adhering to the well-worn tropes of several time-travel movies, but if you’re into that sort of thing: wormholes, eternal loops, people having to hide from their doppelganger, you should watch it. It’s just, a little bit, not as good as its genre predecessors. What will bother the viewer about this is that it easily could have been.

The opening credits, similar in aesthetic to those of Blade Runner, appear to the sound of swooping and fading synths.  We immediately find out that physicist, Jim Beale (Chad McKnight), has discovered a way of “opening a wormhole”, although with the possible annoyance of “the universe collapsing in on itself.” To do this he requires MRD, an expensive substance owned by the corporation run by the hostile venture capitalist Klaus Meisner (Michael Ironside). Abby (Brianne Davis) then turns up, seemingly out of the blue, and Jim is smitten before they’ve even seen each other in profile.

This is one of the fundamental flaws in Synchronicity; it’s a sci-fi romance in which the relationship that is supposed to move the film along always seems inchoate. The physicist’s love affair lacks a large dose of chemistry. Another problem is the film’s budget. The mega-metropolis in which the characters inhabit is so under-populated and un-life like you are always aware that it’s not a city, but the static backdrop you see in many shots where the clouds never move and the skyscraper office lights never go out.

Notwithstanding the misguided romance and hard-to-believe cityscape there are some touching moments in Synchronicity. Such as after Jim has been through the wormhole himself and realized the object of his attraction is with the other him. Not only does he have to put up with excruciating migraines and a kind of time-traveler’s Ebola, a result of “temporal feedback”, but he’s put in the unenviable position of having to watch himself make out with the woman he loves. In one scene a threesome of sorts takes place, but one unfortunate Jim is reduced to the state of Peeping Tom. Needless to say he doesn’t much like being cuckolded by the other Jim; he wants his own intimacy.

To achieve this Jim jumps back down the wormhole, only for an already complicated relationship to become much more complicated. How can he get rid of this other self and be with the woman he loves? We are reminded of the Cure’s love triangle song In-between Days…”and it couldn’t to me with her in-between without you.” For this alone Gentry’s film deserves some praise.

A jealous and peeved doppelganger is a novel idea, an admirable quirk in the sometimes cliched script. The problem is, you never really believe they are in love; the film just says they are. Unlike Primer the viewer is not asked to think too much about the ramifications of time travel, and that’s fine, who wants a migraine every time someone hides in a closet away from themselves. But when at heart you have a love story, bereft of feeling, all you are left with is a kind of cinematic instruction manual. Synchronicity ends up being all ideas and not enough pathos.

Photo credit: Magnet Official