Review: Spacetime Chronicles invites you to live in the now

If you thought I might be reviewing a movie about a red-clad Italian today, you are correct. But I'm not seeing The Super Mario Galaxy Movie until tonight.

No, I'm talking about the dreamy mind warp of Spacetime Chronicles, a hard-to-pin-down sci-fi feature from Stefano Bertelli. This is one of those movies that doesn't feel much like anything I've ever seen before. Or at least, the things it maybe reminded me of feel like distant relatives, a third cousin or something, so it's not even worth evoking their titles. This is a unique work that defies easy description, but I am here to attempt to describe it nonetheless. Wish me luck.

While there is a plot here, and I'll get to that, it feels to me like Spacetime Chronicles is more interested in its thematic and artistic pursuits than any narrative goals. It's a movie that has a lot on its mind, and maybe hammers some of its points home more than it needs to, but when a film is going about its business so originally and strangely, it's hard to bemoan it underlining its points. The vibe here is maybe the main thing, the liminal dream-space the film exists in, borders between worlds barely defined by blurred lines, the past and present and future all only existing as the moment in front of us, the pre-supposed linearity of time exploded into a thousand tiny cubes.

Watching Spacetime Chronicles made my brain feel fuzzy in that pleasant way that settles in when you take an edible that hits you just right. It made my eyelids a little heavy, not out of boredom, but out of getting onto its odd wavelength and just going for the ride.

Our hero, Fred, finds himself in a sort of purgatory, from which he finds himself displaced to different moments of his memory. A lot of these memories connect to a book which shares the name of the film, a book he read until he reached the final, ripped-out page. He's haunted by that missing page, and as we journey with him through different points in time, we piece together the mystery of it. Kind of.

This doesn't feel like a movie you can "solve," per se, or one where you can neatly lay out the story points of after the fact, and honestly, that's part of its strength. The film touches on different ideas of time, and really hones in on the idea that the only time that really exists is the now, the present, and time as we think of it is just a series of nows that overlap each other. The past and the future don't exist in any meaningful way, so maybe it makes sense that the viewer cannot possibly anticipate what might come next in Spacetime Chronicles, and might have trouble summarizing it after the fact. This is a movie that invites you to meet it in the now, to be present with it and engage with it moment-to-moment, divorced from the framework of what's come before and what's coming next.

On that front, this feels like a big swing that connects and accomplishes what it's setting out to do. It feels like a weird dream, one that's enhanced by the variety of animation techniques that bring it to life. There's a lot of incredible paper animation, some CGI, some rotoscoping. One of my favorite parts of the movie is the BTS footage that's included during the credits, where you get to see some of the massive builds and various effects work that went into bringing this movie to life. It's a really impressive package, one where it feels like the ambition of the creative was fully brought to fruition. 

And if the film is maybe a bit meandering, and a little repetitive, well, that's easy enough to forgive in the face of something so strikingly original. I was happy to spend a series of overlapping nows in this trippy place, letting go of any past thoughts or future worries. Every moment is important -- we'll think about the future later.