As Good As It Gets

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This is not your typical sci-fi flick. There are no monsters, mutants or massive special effects. It is science (physics) + historical fiction. It is easy for lovers of sci-fi to get bogged down by details. Rather than quarrel with other reviewers about this, I would just say this is fiction, parallel universes are not currently fact; so one might be more open-minded if someone presents an alternate approach.1) To assume that scientists can't be illogical at times is perhaps short-sighted. Love is truly illogical and childhood love is even more so. They need not be an emotional wreck in order to be illogical about lost love or unfounded guilt. Brilliant scientists come in many forms.2) If you want to know Robert's motivation for traveling back in time, pay closer attention to the love stories.Be open to the story and as others have said, the cinematography and the score are excellent for a low budget movie.

Just like someone had already said the first 15 min. were somewhat watchable, minus pretense of the "era" and sub-par performances including children. From 15 years forward it is all downhill. I stopped watching on 57th min. into the film, just could not take it any longer. An absurd in every boring sleepy scene. They aged a mother too much. She could not have looked totally gray and old just after 15 years when she was very young in the beginning. Did women go to bars in early 40s to drink alone? The "bartender" cracked me up, or was it a waitress that said "One of those days?". Yeah a woman stole some tools from University? Give me a break. In short, all you will see in this movie is a couple of guys and a woman with screwdrivers in a so called lab and some absurd characters and meaningless dialogues in between.

MILD SPOILERS MARKED BELOW.This movie's strengths are many. The premise, although ultimately science fantasy, is immediately engaging: what if someone had devised the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics (all possible realities, deriving from every possible choice, exist in parallel worlds) back in the 1920's, and then gone on from there to invent a time machine? The would-be time traveler who wants to undo an event in their own past is a story we've seen before, but the essentials of this version are quite well done.The film is beautifully designed and shot (arthouse fans will not find it too slow) and very well acted. The screenplay is full of quality moments.So why is this only a 6? Well, to begin with, the screenplay is also full of clichés. But it has a much bigger problem than that: the main character's behavior and motivation, which are the sole engine of the plot, are somewhat unconvincing for an ordinary person, and entirely unconvincing for a scientist.VERY BROAD SPOILERS FOLLOWIf you advise someone not to do something rash or dangerous or wisely decline to do it yourself), and they do it anyway, and it indeed ends badly ... most people will feel remorse -- remorse that they did not do a better job of explaining their concerns. What rarely happens is that they *entirely blame themselves*, to the point of obsession. It stretches all credulity (at least for me) that a brilliant scientist (hence, by nature, an unusually rational thinker) would do so. You don't really want your genius character being told by friends that "it wasn't your fault" when that is in fact INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS.This movie does this twice; one is the engine of the plot, and the other creates a plot pivot.Note that this might have worked if our hero had been portrayed as a general emotional wreck who just happened to be a physics whiz. But he's not: he goes about pursuing his obsession in a cool, rational way that is entirely believable for a brilliant scientist. It's only the source of that obsession that is out of character, fatally so.The pity is, it's easy to imagine how the plot could have been kept intact by giving our hero more complex, more interesting, and much more believable motivations.Oh, and the movie also ends up incorporating a classic time-travel paradox without seeming to address it at all. And there's a huge loose end in the plot that, I think, cries out for more closure.END SPOILERSThe first thing I did after watching this film is check to see who the producers were. My suspicions were correct: the screenwriter, and the director. IOW, no one with an objective take on the film. If I had a time machine, I'd go back a few years and give them a whole set of notes on the screenplay. That's what a good producer does. The creative team here is clearly quite talented; if they find someone who really knows film (and especially knows the genre they're working in) to produce their next effort, it will be one to watch for.

It's a Time Travel Story. And it's listed as Science Fiction, thereby.But Be Advised: It's NOT 'The Time Machine'. Nor is it your standard Hollywood Special Effects wagon-train.No Splashy special Effects. No Journeys to the end of Time. No Monsters. No Weird Paradoxes. No Dinosaurs either.It DOES has an element of Time Travel...but that's all. The rest of the Movie is a distillation of a very nice work of emotional Fiction. It's a Love story about Three Childhood friends in 1920's era England. Once you settle into the measured, dialogue driven pace of the story. I found it elegant, touching and memorable.Totally Girlfriend Friendly, BTW.