TimeTrap (2017)

Warning: plot spoilers

“TimeTrap” (2017) asks the question “What if the legendary ‘Fountain of Youth’ wasn’t a fountain at all, but a location where time slows down?”
Instead of drinking something that prevents aging, there’s a cave where time goes magnitudes more slowly. Seconds for you are hours to the rest of the universe, so if your friend stepped in “just for a minute,” you might not see them for a decade, and thus it would seem like they were magically youthful.

Cool, right?
I liked the twist, I thought it was a fun way for them to play with an ancient piece of lore to come up with a whole new concept.

And then they screwed it up.

Some of the best short stories are the ones that don’t have an ending. That’s not to say that they’re anti-climactic, just that the end doesn’t get spelled out for you - the story sets up the premise of the universe then leaves you hanging to draw your own conclusions. Think about “Black Mirror,” “Twilight Zone,” or “The Outer Limits.”
“TimeTrap” could have been one such short story, unfortunately, whomever came up with the premise decided it needed to be a 90-minute movie instead of a 30-minute ‘what if’ adventure.
And, because they decided to make it a full-length feature film, we got an overdose of character development, extraneous plot points, and an ending that absolutely didn’t fit but had to be awkwardly bolted to the end to justify the runtime.

So: Attractive male lead, attractive female lead #1, attractive female lead #2, teen, tween, and Discount Jamie Lannister all managed to find the same cave in the Middle of Nowhere, Texas. Upon entering, they all (somewhat separately) came to the realization that time was going much more slowly inside the cave than it was outside. They also found a cowboy from the 1800s and Discount-Jamie’s parents, the three of whom were all freshly dead thanks to a tribe of Neanderthals who were unfortunate enough to have entered the cave a short eon ago.

While the story made it quite clear that time dilation was happening, they were never clear on how quickly it was happening, and multiple trips in/out of the cave seemed to have alternating time windows based on what was convenient for the plot at that moment. 

Whether by accident or on purpose, much of the first half of the movie was played like a suspenseful horror film, with long haunted pauses, dramatic musical swells, and characters deciding to wander off down random offshoots of the cave network they were in. I was very much expecting the six “main” characters to get killed off one-by-one in whatever gruesome ways you can die in a cave. 

After about an hour of wandering around in the cave, which translated to a millennia outside, male lead and Discount-Jamie found another time bubble, where time moved even more slowly, showing a scene of Spanish Conquistadors fighting a Native American tribe, but frozen in space-time as if locked in amber. It was a cool scene, until Discount-Jamie ruined it by “there’s multiple layers down here, to protect the fountain!”

Oh, did I not mention that?
Yeah. 
They also found the “actual” fountain of youth while wandering around, which completely mitigated the twist of the fountain lore.
It also suggested that there was some kind of entity involved who initially placed the time discombobulator there an unknown number of millennia before.

And then aliens, because why not?
Our six leads were saved, along with the dead parents who were magically resurrected, and that’s it. 
Apparently the cowboy wasn’t worth saving, nor were the proto-humans that would forever be stuck down there, nor the entire battle scene of Spaniards and Indians. 
No rhyme or reason why, it just was.

The characters’ reactions, most of which were “holy shit, I’m lost in a time-altering cave” existential horror realizations, were fitting. But the entire cast was made up of D-list nobodies and their acting was rough around the edges which turned into “too hysterical for film” space.
I’m positive that if this happened to me, I’d have a complete mental breakdown, but  because this was a movie, we the audience are used to only a certain amount of emotional distress on-screen before it simply becomes too much, crossing from “sympathetic” to “please fall into a crevasse.”

This movie took a very tight premise and stretched it out well beyond its means.
It ended up feeling like the Lawrence Fishburne 2014 turd “Signal,” which also started with a cool concept but had no idea where to go with it and created the stupidest endings they could think of.

This definitely wasn’t the worst movie I’ve seen this year, and I gave “The Wandering Earth” a 2-Claw rating, so to be fair, that’s what this one gets too. 
It’s just mildly entertaining enough to make for a tolerable airplane movie, but nothing more.