Timecrimes (some spoilers)

One of my favorite movies is Primer, the smartest time travel movie I've ever seen. I happen to be taking a class called The Evolution of Sci-Fi Film right now, and we're talking about time travel. Most of our discussion towards the end was about how awful Looper is, but my teacher mentioned Primer and a movie that was slightly similar. I asked about this, and he let me borrow his copy of Timecrimes.

I just watched it the other night, and...I don't know how to feel about it. The worst part was the dubbing. It's a Spanish movie, and I was lazy about subtitles, so I watched it with all English voices. And all that does is make the characters sound like idiots. I watched parts of it over again in Spanish, but of course the subtitles just said exactly what the English dub said, so...yeah, no real improvement.

Basically, the movie shows Hector, a middle-aged man who, upon seeing something strange in the woods by his home, goes to investigate and gets chased by a dangerous man whose face is covered in bandages. As one can easily guess by the nature of the movie, this is himself from the future, and he soon stumbles upon the time machine that leads to him doing everything he already saw himself do. It's a bit of a paradoxical thing, since he has no reason to force the girl who follows him into doing what she does other than to create the scene he saw originally. As far as being consistent with time travel, this movie wins a gold star. But this consistency comes at a price. The main character switches between being very dumb and very insightful at almost random times. He does almost everything in an attempt to recreate the right conditions, but his motives aren't very clear from time to time. I thought that he would make a big deal about saving his wife, but the way he does it--while very clever--doesn't make it seem like he's very passionate about doing it. While most people would try to change things drastically, he sticks to the plan, almost without emotion.

So with those things in mind, it's a very strange film. I would've liked it better if it were a bit more complicated, or if the characters were more developed. Still, it's worth watching.