Paradox (2016)

Save your time and money and move on to something else.

Breed3011 has already written the perfect review for this movie - if you really want to know whether Paradoc is for you or not, ignore all the other reviews and just read that one. But much in repeat of his/her review:Ultimately enjoyable for me personally because: * Intriguing plot that in a detective mystery style keeps you guessing with red herrings and twists and turns. * Satisfying ending that I didn't expect. * Time travel that's sensible.But a struggle to get through at some points because: * B-grade acting to the extreme. * Very weak dialogue. * Stereotypical character types not developed, just overtly thrown out with single lines of dialogue. * B-grade special effects (though this only mattered in one or two places).I hope they have a remake with better acting and scripting one day - it could be an amazing movie.

The manipulation of time is my favorite form of Science Fiction, it also happens to be the most difficult to write. Alternate histories, time travel, and of course paradoxes, can very easily go from entertaining to confusing to unwatchable in the blink of an eye. There is a very fine line between explaining too little, confusing audiences, and explaining too much, hence boring them to death with the scientific stuff. Lucky for us, not only does the new Sci-Fi thriller, Paradox manage to find that line, but much like it's story, it manages to come back to it over and over again. The story seems like a rather basic one, as a group of scientist are hired by a mysterious billionaire, to create a machine for the purposes of time travel. On this day, the group is pretty confident that they have completed the machine and will be sending one member, one hour into the future. The test works perfectly, only when the man arrives an hour into the future, he finds the lab is a mess and many of his colleagues are dead, hence the paradox. Will going back to warn everyone cause what he just saw or will it prevent it? Paradox is one of those films where it isn't about the acting, any decent actor could have been cast, it's the story that matters and the story was fantastic. The way they manage to utilize the machine and equipment that you never even noticed, or how they amp up the mystery by making everyone have that one thing that could make them a possible suspect, just makes the film that much more intense. This was honestly one of my favorite movies of 2016, and believe it or not, it was Written/Directed by a completely unlikely source. After seeing this, I had to know who wrote it and to my surprise, it was Michael Hurst, a guy who until now had only written some B-horror movies and directed some Xena episodes!?! This time he tried something different and may have found his true calling. If you love science fiction and a great mystery on top of that, you won't find many films that combine the two with the ease and satisfaction of Paradox.

It is not a good movie, but fun to watch. The idea of time travel can have some promising story lines and this movie tries to incorporate some of these ideas (Casual loops, Novikov self- consistency principle). The execution of the time travel loops is a bit shabby and you have to pay attention because it is easy to miss a "plot" point due to the fast pacing. Especially towards the end of the movie I couldn't follow exactly what was going on... to fast and also bad writing.The story has a lot of loose threads, silly plot twists, very bad dialogue and useless sub-plots (why incorporate the cop/NSA plot into it and not keep it focused on the time travel loops?). Writers could have done a better job on this one, but I still was compelled to keep watching and was interested in how it worked out in the end because time travel can be awesome (Primer, anyone?).Zoë Bell kicks some ass and adds a bit of talent to the cast, but most of the acting is not believable. Especially the "main" character (though the actor didn't have a lot of great material to work with) does a bad job.