"A Path in Time", Christian Sci-Fi Movie

A Path in Time

Movie written and directed by Keith Eidse

Found this movie on Amazon Prime video while doing a search on time travel movies. Billed as a “fast paced adventure about time travel and the preservation of the Word of God.”

Well, it is about time travel. But fast paced? Not really. The preservation of the Word of God? No. The characters keep saying if they do such-and-such the Bible will be preserved but it’s never explained how this gallivanting about in time is supposed to save the Bible.

This movie features atrocious acting. No one has a lick of acting ability. The “actors” stand by looking at the other characters waiting for them to deliver their lines in a monotone whereupon they awkwardly step in and deliver their own robotically intoned lines. The three high school boys that bully the main character are especially laughable in this regard. To say the acting in this movie is wooden is an insult to trees.

The plot is a mess. I really don’t know what it was about and I pride myself on knowing the ins and outs of time travel paradoxes and possible repercussions of time travel gone wrong. The villain in the movie has invented time travel via a handheld device. In order to use the device you must:
1. Have a genetic link to the device
2. Get your heart rate up to about 120 beats per minute

The villain has traveled into the future and has learned that he will become a powerful wealthy man using his time travel device to manipulate people and events, bending them to his advantage. He then travels a bit further into the future and learns that he becomes a Christian, has repented of his evil, and now serves Christ. He decides he doesn’t want to accept this particular future, so in order to keep his worldly power and wealth he decides he has to go back in time and destroy the original Biblical manuscripts. That way he’ll never hear the gospel and never convert. And neither will anyone else.

I guess it’s the ultimate in Free Will theology. Though the villain seems predestined to be saved, he doesn’t want to be saved, so he plays God and “un-saves” himself.

There’s also a subplot about transporting Christians (yes, the device can transport people too, which is convenient for the plot) from the 20th century into his secret underground lair buried seven miles below Antarctica. Whew! I’ve never typed “transporting Christians to an evil, secret lair seven miles below Antarctica,” before nor have I become remotely close to typing it until now. Anyway, if he’s successful in destroying the Bible, why round up Christians and send them to Antarctica? Surely, if he succeeds in stopping the Bible from being published there won’t be many Christians.

The main character is supposed to stop the villain. Whether he succeeds or not is never explicitly shown.

One thing this Christian based movie does fairly well is special effects. (Hey, there’s another sentence I thought I’d never write!) The depiction of the time jump is pretty good. The person holding the device starts running in order to increase their heart rate and as they are running flashes of ball lightning start to emit off their bodies until they reach the heart rate necessary to time jump, whereupon they are frozen in mid-stride while a bunch of crackling blue lightning engulfs them and they wink out of that time into either the past or the future. Also, the device can act as a computer storage unit and project holographic images. This was also an effect that was done well.

Too bad the special effects are the only good thing about this movie. It’s almost as if the director was enamored with the effects and cobbled together a script so he could show off his special effect technology.

This “movie” was less than an hour long, which, with the non-sensical plot and terrible acting, was too long. Filmed in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

 

Time Changer