Dimensions: Watercolor Time Travel

With another winter storm howling on the doors of New York, I took refuge in Dimensions tonight, a lushly beautiful 2011 British time travel movie, recently made available on iTunes and Amazon Instant Video.

The director, Sloane U'Ren, has previous credits as a set designer in television shows ranging from Alias to Six Feet Under, and it shows in Dimensions.  The movie, which tells a close-up story of a young scientist in 1920s England obsessed with time travel, moves like an Impressionistic painting from scene to scene, with images and textures and lenses that brush the soul.

There is a palpable innocence in the movie, which almost makes it akin to Primer, though Dimensions is barely about paradox and time loops.   It is rather about love, sought and lost, accidental and deliberate.   The movie also resonates with Daniel Faraday and Lost, which also has the charm of the young man as scientist -- though, again, Dimensions is manifestly not about the world-changing implications of the time travel we find in Lost.

The first part of the movie is indeed so uncontrived - a rarity for any time travel story - it almost seems like a YA or younger tale.  As the movie progresses, we get a romantic triangle of characters in their twenties.  The acting in this section is very good -  the most memorable coming from Olivia Llewellyn and Camilla Rutherford's quietly powerful performances, and good work from Henry Lloyd-Hughes as the scientist, too - and this more than the storyline makes this part of the movie blossom.   Antony Neely, whose main previous movie credits are in music, wrote the screenplay for Dimensions, and the story indeed progresses like a song, with versus and repeated chorus and bridge - an apt form for a time travel tale - or maybe an etude from Debussy.

Watercolors and tears, a story that moves like Donovan's "Wear Your Love Like Heaven," make Dimensions an unusual and even remarkable time travel story, which not only takes place in the 1920s but almost feels as if it was written and filmed back then, had such evocative color cinematography been available.  See it if you'd like a compelling introduction to what time travel could be, or the sense of wonder you had when you encountered your first time travel story at 12 years of age.

Other reviews of off-the-beaten-track recent time travel movies: 95ers: Time Runners: Original and Entertaining and I'll Follow You Down: Excellent Time Travel Movie

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Enjoy time travel stories? check out



"one of those extremely rare sequels that end up better than its predecessor ... worthy of the title, blockbuster, if this were a movie ... by far the best time travel story I've ever read" - Scott Sandridge, SpecMusicMuse 




"resonates with the current political climate . . . . heroine Sierra Waters is sexy as hell . . . . there's a bite to Levinson's wit" - Brian Charles Clark, Curled Up With A Good Book

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And The Chronology Protection Case movie


podcast review of Dimensions and two other time travel movies