User Reviews

People wake up in confused and bizarre circumstances, not knowing where they are or what has happened... That can be a really fine premise for a film, but if it is present, we the audience have a right to expect enlightenment AT LEAST at the same pace as the protagonists.

In this film, rather soon a person from "beyond the current situation" (it turns out spatially and temporally) comes a-knocking at the barricaded door our assemblage of characters find themselves behind, they DO let him in (why?), and he DOES know what is going on, yet DOES NOT sit down and tell the full, exact story, but merely reveals the odd soundbite and then tells the group that they need to help him. The group is idiotically and unnaturally and outrageously prepared to accept knowing a fragment of the full story (presumably on the ludicrous basis that the gaps will be filled in as time passes), and proceed with various random-looking tasks.

There is some talk of a pandemic, he wears a hazmat suit, yet barricaded windows offer protection and, while the streets cannot be travelled, tunnels can. Nobody in the film tries to elucidate why that should be, so why on Earth should I?

This is a completely unnatural situation and a fatal blow to the film, however atmospheric or creepy or pseudo-intellectual it might try to be.

A dumb and unrealistic premise can only bluff its way through as mysterious or complex for so long - and in the case of "Collider" that period lasts maybe 15 minutes.

Sorry, willing as I was initially, I just switched off and deleted...

This is on PRIME as a four 25 minute episode series. It makes no sense. I read, but might be wrong, that there are other media associated with this which might explain some of the glaring mistakes.

PIECES MISSING It continually feels like we are missing half the movie. In the first episode, someone very early on refers to another person by name and yet there has been no introductions. There are references to others, to one being a cop, and yet there has been no discussion of this. In episode 4, one person pulls out a gun, but to our knowledge there was only one but no explanation for where that person got a gun. Two people leave the building but only one returns with a story about how the other was taken although we don't believe it. At the end those two don't seem to hold any grudge. At one point a character says "before the meteor hit" and that's the first mention of it. Another time one character says to another "I Need You" but we've seen nothing to imply any relationship happening. Nor was there time for that since the storyline is on a short time table.

TIMELINE Maybe time slows down but there is a limited time period (I think 36 hours) to get to the collider and reset everything. But people have time to discuss past lives and mistakes; go exploring outside the building; and just do dumb things.

AMAZING SKILLS Although most have just woken up from their time line in a strange hotel in a foreign country and are just learning about how harsh the outside world is - two of the newbies are allowed to take the only suits and go looking for spark plugs. Wouldn't the guy from that time line and location be the better one for that? When they get to the collider, the person who went missing in the first episode is there and is operating the machine. She says she's read the operating instructions. Is that all it takes to run a nuclear super collider? And then when someone has to replace fuses, the cop, is able to pick up a manual and direct another person to the exact box and decide where the fuses go.

Also after only being awake minutes, the cop says "It's not safe here, we have to move on" but he knows nothing of what is happening and there is a guy right there that has been there longer who could tell him.

BAD CHARACTERS and CHARACTERIZATION None of the characters are really likable. One, a gambler, is made to be selfish and crude and we are to hate him. He's sexist and from the first time we see him grabbing one of the other women, I'm sure no woman would trust him. He finds the spark plugs and plots with another woman to run off with them leaving all the rest behind to their dome. We don't see what happens but we all suspect he ran away and left that other woman to the mercy of the creatures and just saved his own skin. Yet at the very last moment he sacrifices his own life for the others. Made no sense. Also he had a damaged foot but one good foot, two good hands so could easily have climbed up the ladder if he wanted. When they are leaving him, they all talk nicely to him like he is a friend but he has been a pig the whole time.

The cop, the only person we think has a gun, doesn't miss it or even mentions it, when one of the women takes it and puts it in her pants. They then leave to go through the tunnels and he never wonders where his gun is. The gambler guy sees the gun later on in the back of the woman's pants and says "you have a gun" which she denies. I guess neither of them remembered that she used the gun when they were running from the hotel to the tunnel.

Although they only have 36 hours to get the job done and are running ahead of nocturnal monsters and have had some of their own serious internal squabbles and they don't know really what the hell is happening.... they still have time to joke about things like starting up a time travel company. What?

CREATURES There are creatures in this future world but we never know what they are for sure. It is a poor plot device but oddly the one piece that sort of worked. We didn't see them well. They had glowing eyes. Their snarling was scary. They seemed to be limber and vicious. This could have been explained a bit more.

I watched it all just because it was so disjointed and I wondered if there was going to be something near the end that would tie this mess of plot and script together. Nope.

If you have nothing better to watch then it is a fast 2 hours but don't say you were not warned.

What failed for me was the straight acceptance of the characters of their situation. That's the main flaw (for me) of this film and/or mini-series. The fact they accept it so quickly (a minute, at best) was mind-boggling (though for one of the 'kidnapped' it's understandable.) 80% of the world has been wiped out, there are these mutant creatures that have no explanation of who/what they are but in a nice (sarcasm) rip of another film, they're somewhat explained but not really.

So, the elements of the story is: five (or six, I forget) people are transported to the future of 2018. Apparently, the Hadran Collider transported these people from around the world into an abandoned hotel (all of which speak perfect English), and they have to get back to to Collider to travel back to their own time period to save the world, oh and there's a scientist who not only just so happens to be a time-traveller himself but also happens upon the hotel where all these people are located but is later explained by a theory of his near the end of the film/series.

So, this is a rip of many things but two things in particular: the film 'Pitch Black' (which I've somewhat explained but will explain further) and a theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho's of time travel; though their theory is more about being able to send messages to the past/future rather than people; which they posit could never be realistic, and their theory - in their and almost everyone else's opinion - is a long shot, at best.

The plot: six people (really five, one dies by mutant attack) have to get from the hotel they're in to the Hadran Collider. They have to travel by night because of radiation and/or because it's so hot outside and there isn't enough suits for everyone to travel in the daylight in which will directly burn their skin off. So they travel in tunnels (why at night and not whenever? who knows...) but have to deal with mutants. Were they people, are they aliens? Who knows...it's not explained. Sound like the film 'Pitch Black'? You know...except for the mutants which in 'Pitch Black' were alien creatures.

I think they rushed the beginning. If they expanded that, didn't rip off other films and TV shows etc., and made it more science than fiction, I think it would have been great. Oh well.

The basic idea behind this film (series?.. I watched it in 4 "episodes" on Amazon) was intriguing, and the small budget didn't seem to hurt it too badly. It was an interesting take on a time-travel story, with the characters merely shifting a few years into the future to discover a world on the brink of collapse.

However, and there's always a "however" to these reviews:

Technically, the film suffered from being almost constantly shot in darkness. To the extent that events occurred that were completely lost in the murk leaving the viewer to wonder what they missed. The editing was also choppy, in a few spots creating what felt like holes in the story as we saw events switch back and forth too rapidly. This last one is a pet peeve of mine , so please take it with a grain of salt: I REALLY dislike shaky-cam. There were far too many "running down corridors in pitch black using weak flashlights" scenes that were filmed as though the cinematographer was in the middle of an epileptic seizure.

The actors ranged from a bit better than "truly awful" to "not bad at all". However (there's that word again) the writing of the characters left more than a lot to be desired. There were too many idiots doing idiotic things for the group to have been "random" (which is implied from the start). Every single person in the group was deeply (some severely) flawed. These were not normal humans, they were caricatures. A film can get away with including one character like this, but making ALL of the characters have melodramatic backstories was pushing it. Especially for such a short film.

There are "monsters", which we never really get to see (see previous comments regarding shaky-cam and choppy editing) nor are they ever really explained.

And a word of warning: there's no end, really. We don't quite know whether events are repaired at the end or not.

I didn't regret watching it, but I am grateful for Amazon's "fast-forward 10 seconds" button, because some scenes were interminable and pointless.