A Promise of Time Travel: Just That, And A Bit More

I decided to expand my time-travel short binging horizons with a feature-length time-travel movie - still on Amazon Prime, and free, as befits my cheapskate ways - a complete hour and 28 minutes, and A Promise of Time Travel.

And for most the movie, indeed, until the very end, it's just that: a clever, colorful, woman-works-in-a-bookstore kind of time travel story.  This part works well enough, as Zelda - well played by April Grace Lowe (who doubles as the movie's producer) - not only reads intelligently about the metaphysics or philosophy of time travel (not the science), but gets drawn into some kind of time travel plot or scenario which is unclear to her as well as the audience.   I should say here that I find this emphasis on theory not science very enjoyable, and consistent with of my own time travel fiction in novels and stories.  Not only that, but the story preceding or being a prelude to time travel is also something I'm partial to, hence The Chronology Protection Case.

[spoilers ahead ... ]

But the promise is amply fulfilled at the end of A Promise of Time Travel, when Zelda and we learn that a kind of time travel has indeed taken place, but it's the projection of minds into bodies, not the actual transport of full human beings to the past.  In this, A Promise has a kinship with Bonnie Rozanski's The Mindtraveler, one of the best time travel novels I've read in years.  (See here for my brief review.)

There's an interesting romance that runs through A Promise - or a romance that runs through the story in an interesting way - and indeed turns out to be the engine that drives everything else that's going on.  I'm glad I saw this movie - written and directed with style by Craig Jessen - and I'd recommend it to both devotees of the genre and the world at large.

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