Somewhere in Time (1980)
Directed by Jeannot Szwarc
Young writer Richard Collier is met on the opening night of his first play by an old lady who begs him to "Come back to me". Mystified, he tries to find out about her, and learns that she is a famous stage actress from the early twentieth century. Becoming more and more obsessed with her, by self-hypnosis he manages to travel back in time—where he meets her.
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What critics compared Somewhere in Time to
The possible answer to the dilemma of the missing Avengers is the film’s biggest joke, and I mean that literally since the dialogue will reference such fan favorites as “Back to the Future,” “Star Trek,” “X-Men,” “Terminator,” “Time After Time” “Somewhere in Time,” “About Time” (but not “Timecrimes” and “La Jetee,” the two coolest movies of that type ever made).
Before long, the surviving characters are ricocheting through the recent past, cheekily referencing movies like “Back to the Future” and “Somewhere in Time,” and reviving the classic would-you-kill-Hitler debate for the Thanos era.
In some of these realms, writer-director Jaco Van Dormael's film is a fancifully high-concept weepie that, at its best, occasionally recalls the sweeping and heart-wrenching melodrama of Somewhere in Time and The Fountain .
A less lofty, though no less charitable comparison might be made with the time-travel romance Somewhere in Time, while Adaline’s sturdy cross-cutting evokes Stanley Donen’s relationship puzzle Two for the Road; there’s even a scene here, surely no coincidence, set around 1967, with Lively driving a black convertible and meeting cute with a young man stranded on the English countryside.
Hollywood long ago ceded “love that stands the test of time” to the realm of science fiction and fantasy, so “The Age of Adaline” falls neatly into a genre that includes “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” “About Time,” and even “Somewhere in Time.”
"About Time" will never stand up as solid time-travel science-fiction any more than the cult romance "Somewhere in Time" did in 1980.
Even the title of the new effort from the creator of “Love, Actually” is a sad cliché, but the whole plot treads the same territory as “Somewhere in Time,” “The Lake House” and “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” and its mixture of whimsy and mawkishness is familiar, too.
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But movies like1980’s Somewhere in Time and The Final Countdown, two of the best, had plausible bases for the time travel.
As a sucker for time-travel romance (I’ve considered joining the dewy-eyed souls who make yearly pilgrimages to the lake where Christopher Reeve went loop-de-loop for Jane Seymour in Somewhere in Time ), I’m over the moon about this movie, which smooths out the psychological dissonances in Audrey Niffenegger’s fine novel but is still an emotional workout.
Think Christopher Reeve seeing that shiny brown penny in “Somewhere in Time.”
The same sort of temporal dislocation used in "The Lake House," "Somewhere in Time" and half the episodes of "Star Trek" is wielded more poetically in "The Time Traveler's Wife," from the novel by Audrey Niffenegger.
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Throw in healthy dollops of "Somewhere in Time" and Dante's "Inferno," and the concoction you'll get is something approximating "What Dreams May Come."
While it would seem that Chris' time in what turns out to be his own personal Heaven would allow us to reconnect with him, director Vincent Ward ("Map of the Human Heart") -- working from the screenplay by Ron Bass ("Rainman," "My Best Friend's Wedding") that's based on the novel by Richard Matheson ("Somewhere In Time," "The Legend of Hell House") -- instead focuses on the visual wonders of Chris' new world.
(Matheson also wrote the screenplays for The Incredible Shrinking Man and Somewhere in Time.)