Time Trap

A group of students are trapped inside a mysterious cave, where time passes differently underground than it does on the surface.

The film opens with Hopper, who is an archaeology professor, and very clearly an example of a particular type of Texas-flavored hippy. Hopper is on the trail of some other Texas hippies who have been missing since the 1970s. Far out in the Texas scrublands, he stumbles upon a hidden cave, and inside, a little ways back, he can see what appears to a cowboy frozen in place.

He enters the cave.

Several days later, Hopper has not returned.

His graduate students, a young man named Taylor and a young woman named Jackie, go looking for him. They take their friend Cara along, I think because she is a rock climber. They also bring along Cara’s middle schoole age sister, Veeves, as well as Veeves friend, a kid who inexplicably prefers the name Furby, because they couldn’t find them a babysitter. The group locates Hopper's campsite, and his trail to the cave. When they enter, they push through a strange curtain of shimmering air. On the other side, they find climbing ropes that go deeper into the cave. They decide to climb down to see if Hopper might be injured at the bottom, while Furby elects to stay behind on the radio at base camp.

But when they all get to the bottom, not only is Furby not answering their radio calls, but their ropes break. Now, stuck at the bottom and calling for help on the radios, the only answer they receive is a garbled transmission that is coming from deeper inside the cave. They decide to follow it.

Further inside, they discover another opening to the cave. It's a well shaft that goes up to the open sky. Also, they find Furby, and he’s been dead for a while. Watching his video recordings, it weirdly seems like, from Furby’s perspective, several days have passed, despite them only being in the cave for an hour. Watching more, they find that Furby spent his time on the surface digging through Hopper’s belongings, and because of this, he figured out that the hippies Hopper was searching for were his parents and his younger sister, and that they had vanished while searching for the Fountain of Youth. They watch the video as Furby finds the well opening far above them, and then how he falls when his rope breaks.

With few options, Cara free-climbs up the well in order to try to call for help. But once she reaches the surface, the surrounding terrain is unrecognizable, and the air is barely breathable. Not only can she not find a signal for her phone, but as the clouds part, she sees a strange triangle-shaped structure floating high in the sky.

Climbing back down the well, they realize that despite Cara being up there for nearly 30 minutes, only a few seconds had passed for the others. They then watch more of Furby's footage, and realize he survived the fall, but was then murdered by a caveman. Perplexed and afraid, they watch the shutter-flash flicker of the sliver of sky high above as it goes light and dark, light and dark, and realize entire years are passing above them every second, meaning that the few hours they have been inside the cave could mean that several thousand years have passed on the surface.

Suddenly, a retractable ladder descends from the surface and a futuristic 8-foot-tall humanoid spaceman descends into the cave. But before the group can figure out who the giant is, a caveman attacks the giant spaceman.

The giant tases him.

More cavemen show up, and the group flees deeper in the cave, and find the recently dead bodies of the cowboy, and also Hopper's parents. Taylor fights the cavemen, but he is killed in the process. The giant shows up, and he protects the others from the other cavemen, then places Taylor into one of the cave's pools of water.

Turns out, the giant is a future human who has come to take samples of the cave's water. Taylor is revived, but before anyone can be too happy about it, even more cavemen attack. It’s caveman city down there. The giant takes out the cavemen, but is fatally wounded in the fight. His helmet device scans Cara’s face, and then it plays news clips about their disappearance, and goes on to explain that mankind has abandoned Earth and colonized Mars. The triangular thing Cara saw in the sky is the space station used to access Earth.

Finally, the group finds Hopper. He is mortally wounded, and is watching a second shimmering current of air, which is a second time dilation deeper in the cave. In this one, they can see a young girl, a legion of conquistadors, and even more god damn cavemen, all frozen in place, battling before a huge waterfall, the source of the healing waters.

It's the Fountain of Youth.

Hopper explains that the girl is his sister, and that time dilation is strongest here, which makes his rescue of his sister impossible, as time is moving so slow beyond the shimmer, that if he were to enter it, he would basically never return. He tells Taylor to go and save the others, as he is dying, and is choosing to stay here and watch his sister in his final moments.

The group returns to the giant spaceman's retractable ladder, and prepares to leave, but they’re attacked by even more god damn cavemen. Then Cara is yanked up the ladder and she disappears through a shimmering portal above the well. She almost instantly reappears, but now she is dressed differently, and urges the others to join her as a tangle of strange future-ropes reach down from the portal, and pull her friends up to safety.

A short time later, Furby awakens in a futuristic tub of water in a futuristic room, and finds that Hopper and Hopper's family have all been retrieved and resurrected too. No cavemen or conquistadors though, because fuck those guys, I guess. Also, no sign of the giant spaceman that they got killed in the cave either. The rest of the group enters the room, and happily explain that they’re now in a space station that is about to head to Mars.

Despite having lost everyone they ever loved, as well as their whole society, not to mention their entire planet, and in only the span of a few scant hours too, they’re very excited to go see this society of giant humans who now live on Mars, saying: "We're kind of a big deal around here.”

Shot in Texas, apparently in a cave near to where writer/director Mark Dennis grew up, and initially conceived as a found footage film, Time Trap is clearly influenced by adventure films of the 80s like Indiana Jones and The Goonies. The premise of the film was the result of Dennis's experiences coming home after four years at the South Pole, and how surprised he was by how much the people and places he had once known had changed, even though he felt like he had not.

I really liked the use of the Fountain of Youth here, and how even the quest to find it was ultimately a trap. Yes, you do get to have eternal youth, but it's mostly due to the fact that an eternity is passing outside. In the film, they say that 1 year passes for every 4 seconds, which means, for the few hours they were in the cave, nearly 3 millennia had passed outside, which is a crazy amount of time to imagine. Really, the most believable part of the film is that, in that time, humans have destroyed the planet. It’s a clever idea, and cleverly applied too.

But it's almost too interesting, really. I was more interested in the fallout of being unstuck in time on the characters, then I was in their time within the cave. I mean, fighting cavemen is cool and all, but it's really more a novelty. Let's be honest here, ou've seen one caveman fight, you've seen them all really. There's only so much dramatic tension you can wring from the situtaion. As a result, the film ended up feeling more like a pilot for a tv show that wasn't picked up, then it did as its own complete story. This wasn’t a deal breaker for me, it's still fun, but it definitely ended up feeling like more of a prologue than anything else.

My biggest complaint is that there’s two blonde women in this movie, Jackie and Cara, and because of the lighting and their similar faces and hairstyles, I constantly lost track of who was who. I'm not saying that all white people look alike either, it's that these two specifically look so much alike, that I started to wonder if I missed the part where the film mentioned that they were twin sisters. And if they weren't twin sisters, then I wondered why, in a cast of only six or so main characters, all of whom are white, why did the filmmakers allow for one third of their main cast to look so much alike? How could they not notice this? Why not make one of them be dark haired, or maybe a red head, or maybe just not have their long blonde hair in a pony, or shit, maybe just cast one of the characters as someone who is not white?

That shit aside, for what is otherwise clearly a small budget little sci-fi genre film with some huge ideas, Time Trap is surprisingly not bad. The fighting is not good, and there's a lot of running back and forth between three or four sets, but still, it’s actually pretty well done. It's TV fare, sure, but that's not bad. And yeah, it’s a little talky maybe too, but like I said, it’s got some big ideas.

All in all, I enjoyed this.

Your mileage may vary, but regardless, one thing is definitely true, Time Trap’s use of the Fountain of Youth here is much better than Fountain of Youth’s use of the Fountain of Youth.

So, yeah... not bad.