Picking a movie to watch on an airplane is tricky business. Inexpe­ri­enced travelers make the mistake of choosing the movie they’ve been waiting to watch for the past month, or the one they think they’ll like the most. Bad idea. The audio is pretty bad on any airplane, and add the engine noise to that, and you’re left trying to lip-read the actors. Or you’ll crank up the volume to a point where you go deaf, and then life isn’t as much fun anymore.

Worse still, the little video screen in front of your seat may get turned off a little early, just before you’re told the name of the villain in a whodunit. And if that’s the movie you’ve been itching to watch for a while, it’s been effec­tively ruined for you.

That’s why I decided to watch “A Time Traveler’s Wife” on my trip from Seattle to Mumbai. It’s a perfect pick: I never really intended to watch the whole thing, so I couldn’t care less if it got cut off in the middle. The dialog didn’t matter too much, since Rachel McAdams is easy on the eyes and this is such a typical romance (man loves woman, woman loves man, man keep disap­pearing and popping up in other times, yada, yada…). And of course, I dozed off several times as the movie played on, but that didn’t matter all that much either.

Anyway, with this a priori stance about the movie, you shouldn’t really be expecting an unbiased review, but the truth is, I’m not here to comment on the movie at all. In fact, the only comment I have is on the name of the movie: I strongly believe the movie should have been named The Guy Who Disap­pears and Steals Clothes because, well, that’s what the lead character does all the time. Yes, he travels through time, sure, but that’s quite irrel­e­vant, especially on mute.

Speaking of traveling through space-time, have you ever noticed how time-travelers appear elsewhere almost instan­ta­neously? In real life, I would expect molecules of air and dust to get shoved aside violently when this happens, causing a tiny explo­sion. Oh well, I guess you can’t be all that realistic in a movie.…

On the bright side, this time traveler was less annoying than Hiro the Hero.

Tags: Heroes, Hiro, Movie Review, Time Travel

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 14:46 and is filed under Movie Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.