How a Renegade Sci-Fi Subgenre Continues to Challenge Hollywood's Worst Habit

When Jared Moshe's son was born, he suddenly found himself thinking about time travel.

“I was thrown into a world that seemed more frightening and unstable,” Mosh says. Reverse. “I wanted to control everything. So, as a filmmaker, I decided to explore these feelings through my work. I had had the idea of ​​a “weapon that kills people” in the past, and it always seemed too big and wide. Then I realized I could use this sci-fi hook to tell the story I wanted to tell about parenting.”

This idea evolved into Aporia, a 2023 sci-fi drama about Sophie (Judy Greer), a widow dealing with grief after her husband Malcolm is killed by a drunk driver. Overwhelmed by depression, Sophie's relationship with her daughter Riley suffers. But then Malcolm's best friend reveals that he created a machine capable of sending a subatomic particle through time. With the right data, they can send this particle at a specific time and have it kill any living thing that comes into contact with it. Sophie is offered the chance to use the machine to kill the man responsible for Malcolm's death, but messing with the past has dark consequences for the present.

Aporia is part of a minor science fiction phenomenon: indie time travel movie. Movies like Aporiathat of Zal Batmanglij The sound of my voice (made on a budget of $135,000), that of Shane Carruth Primer (only $7,000), and that of the Spierig brothers Predestination ($5 million) reveal how time travel tropes can work outside of a well-financed studio picture. Even if there is no shortage of successful time travel epics (many adaptations of the HG Wells film The time machine to Marvel's epic $356 million crossover Avengers: Endgame), it is in independent cinema, often run by scrappy filmmakers working on tiny budgets, that the most ambitious and daring examples of the genre can be found.

Time trap

For Ben Foster, co-director of the 2017 film Time traptime travel was a way to “take full advantage of the medium” of cinema while remaining on a limited budget.

In the film, a group of archeology students searching for their missing professor stumble into a mysterious cave where the laws of time do not apply. Hours, days, even months pass in minutes, while creatures that shouldn't exist lurk in the shadows. In this cramped space, centuries were distorted in a single moment. The outside world watches decades pass while the students can only watch in horror. When the group finally emerges, they find themselves in a bizarre and dangerous future. It's essentially a locked room mystery where a cramped space becomes the epicenter of all time.

“If this could be made in 1985, it was well within our resources when we made the film in 2015.”

As Aporiathere is also family drama at the heart of Time trap. Hopper, the students' teacher, is searching for his missing family, who were searching for the mythical Fountain of Youth among the caves.

“The power lies in the tragedy of a father and daughter who are increasingly estranged from each other as their time expands,” says Foster. Reverse. “At the end of the film, she hasn't seen her father in 80 years, but for him, maybe he was one. This film forces audiences to think about what love is in a way that no other story can.”

Time traps Budgetary limitations encouraged Foster and his co-director Mark Dennis to get creative. They used a cave on a friend's property near Austin and mixed miniature work and green-screen CGI to create a natural place where the distinctly unnatural happens. They managed to blend the past, present and future through old-school effects, with the cave becoming a sort of battlefield for cavemen, conquistadors and astronauts before a climax that ends with the survivors pulled through a portal to a space station.

“We took the mentality that if this could be made in 1985, it was well within our resources when we made the film in 2015,” says Foster.

Often, the most subtle changes reveal the biggest impacts of time travel on screen. In Time trapthe sun rises and sets over the roof of the cave so quickly that it resembles the flickering of a street map, showing the gruesome passage of years at a time in just a few seconds.

Follow the rules

With Aporia, Moshe had “always envisioned being able to make this film on a limited budget”, a process he found “both inspiring and frustrating”. He and his team only had 17 days to shoot 103 pages, so they worked as quickly and efficiently as possible. He is beautiful Aporia at a friend's house to save money while making “dozens of small changes” to that house — a cost-saving measure that successfully conveyed the subtle but unsettling changes brought about by using the machine (“Un art different. A reorganized kitchen. Just enough to keep Sophie off balance.”)

The device itself, a jumble of metal, gears and wires that looks more like a rickety bomb than a time machine, was inspired both by the film's low budget and by the limited resources of the characters.

“Make something that’s based on a particle accelerator and looks like a fire hazard.”

“I wanted it to feel like it was built by people with no resources who had to piece together salvaged machine parts and old computers to make this project a reality,” says Moshe. “The instructions I gave to my production designer were: create something that is based on a particle accelerator and looks like a fire hazard. You should feel like every time you turn it on, it's more likely to burn the building down than actually work. »

The rules of the machine were also rigid, as both the narrative and the budget demanded. The more he enforced the rules, the less likely Moshe and his team would be to deviate from their plans and inadvertently spend more money. Ultimately, this improved the story by keeping the emotional focus on Sophie.

“When I wrote the story, I set clear rules for the machine,” says Moshe. “Rule #1: The machine can only kill. Rule #2: Changes are permanent. You cannot undo destruction. Rule #3: Once you have “When you use the Machine, you remember the original timeline, not the new one. To me, this third rule was important in my story because it created a division between our characters beyond just the morality of using the machine. “

Huge flexibility

From The time machine has Dune has Everything everywhere at the same time, the greatest science fiction stories are fundamentally about humanity and how we change (or don't change) when the world evolves beyond our understanding. And if science fiction is a way to explore the very real concerns of our daily lives, then time travel is an immensely flexible metaphor with which to dissect the way we live in the here and now.

But while blockbusters use dazzling special effects and stunning locations to convey these heady concepts, independent films understand that the greatest changes happen within us. By Shane Carruth Primer with his admirable dedication to details regarding public accessibility, to The sound of my voiceZal Batmanglij and Brit Marling's claustrophobic cult drama whose leader claims to come from a broken future, these films get to the heart of why time travel is so captivating.

But perhaps the best example is the work of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the duo behind a recent string of indie sci-fi hits exploring the dangers of time travel. Their film Infinity follows two brothers who return to the UFO cult they grew up in and escaped as children. There, they encounter several people stuck in time loops, many of whom suffer their own violent deaths on multiple occasions. Their 2019 follow-up, Synchronicexpands this theme with the discovery of a new designer drug that trips people through time, including a scene where Anthony Mackie's protagonist goes through violent encounters with the KKK and other historical threats.

As for Aporiastripped down to its beating heart, Jared Moshe's film is about how heartbreak is inevitable and will come for all of us.

Sophie's desires to release her grief are so powerful that she is willing to inflict them on someone else. It's a conundrum that many of us who have lost a loved one have pondered. This is what the film explores much more than the intricacies of a time machine, and it makes it all the more compelling.

“Science fiction offers us the incredible opportunity to use fantasy as a window into the human condition,” says Moshe. “For me, it was really important to keep the sci-fi intimate and grounded so that the stakes remained personal for our characters. As people, we are a collection of memories. And if those memories don't line up, how do we can we connect with the people we love?