Review of 12:01 (1993) by Michael G — 14 May 2009

Yesterday is such a fascinating moment in time. You don't need to go much further back to get most of the thrill of time travel. And yet you were there only yesterday, and it didn't seem so special back then. In fact, as you'll realise tomorrow, you're there now, and you're not even paying attention to it.

Many time travel films only go yesterday, or thereabouts. Among the ones I have recently reviewed I can think of "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time", "Summer Time Machine Blues" and my favorite, "Primer". "12:01".

Belongs to that category. It could also be characterised as involving timeslip, i.e. "a phenomenon that causes unexpected time travel", except for the fact that the timeslip being recurrent, it soon ceases to be unexpected (maybe the term should be used to refer to passive time travel, in opposition to active time travel, which involves the deliberate use of some technology or power of some sort.).

More specifically, "12:01" belongs to the "timeloop" subgenre, of which the most famous example, released the same year, is "Groundhog Day". But while the latter film was a romantic comedy, "12:01", being directed by.

Jack Sholder (whose sci-fi thriller "The Hidden" was critically acclaimed here in France), might be called a romantic action comedy, involving a level of threat comparable to that of the cop shows of the 80s, with ugly-faced goons in black vans and rather farcical policemen and security guards running to and fro.

Apart from the time travel itself, what I enjoyed most about the film was its cast, which is a real reunion of Jewish leads from TV series I used to watch in the 80s and 90s: "Space 1999"'s Martin Landau as the scientific genius; "The Single Guy"'s Jonathan Silverman as the protagonist; and, a real favorite of mine, "Cupid"'s Jeremy Piven as the hero's sidekick. To add to the nostalgia, Helen Slater, who was the "Supergirl" of the mid-1980s, is the love interest (she was also Superman's Kryptonian biological mother in "Smallville", but I just didn't recognise her.).

"12:01" is a curious sort of movie because it is so hybrid. Though it involves a lot of violent deaths, they're not "really real" (to borrow a phrase from another time travel movie) because of the time loop, and anyway, much of the dying is performed by just a few individuals, so one gets used to it.

I think someone like Joe Dante might have been able to get more out of the material than Sholder did, but as a whole, this is a pleasant way to spend 90 minutes, especially if you enjoy the cast as much as I do. It only go 6 out of 10 rating from Timelinks, which is two points less than the short of the same title based on the same 1973 story by Richard Lupoff (who has a cameo in both films.) In this earlier version, only one hour gets repeated. The funny thing is that the long version features an alarm clock that looks like ED-209, and the short one stars Kurtwood Smith. I wonder if that makes the clock an inside joke (I want one anyway.).