Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Needle in a Timestack’ on Amazon Prime, an Utter Mess of a Sci-Fi Romance

Now on Amazon Prime, Needle in a Timestack is a movie whose title sounds like the product of an internet name generator – it could’ve been Hell in a Handstack or Staple in a Fundstack or Thimble in a Needstack or Hoople in an Affleck. Anyway. Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave screenwriter John Ridley directs this adaptation of a story by sci-fi writer Robert Silverberg, about a near future in which total assholes disrupt the entirety of time-space to see who gets to be a beautiful lady’s boyfriend. This kind of thing seemed more civilized when the two warring parties just shot at each other in the thoroughfare at high noon, but hey, at least this far-out premise is just begging to be convoluted to the point of discombobulation!

NEEDLE IN A TIMESTACK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Nick (Leslie Odom Jr.) really loves Janine (Cynthia Erivo). Really REALLY loves her. You have no idea. Like, sits in a meeting at work and can only think of her. She feels the same. Her assessment of their relationship is, “You and I, we are just… forever.” We know these two are meant to be because we see them in a room listening to jazz flute and in a frame that’s just being devoured by LENS FLARE!, which is the universal symbol of ultra-profundity in movies. Nick says something about how he pretends to spot her across the room and stares at her and wonders, would he love her even if he didn’t know her? How would he ever know he once knew her but now no longer knows her, nonetheless know the person he once knew but doesn’t know now, I ask? And the only answer to this is, don’t ask, and I’ll get into that here in a minute.

Anyway, Nick and Janine live in such bliss, they never smile. It’s intense. They just smolder in each other’s company. Long pauses pass between the words that are spoken between them, by them. The words, I mean. They’re spoken by them, Nick and Janine. One says things that sound like the most humorless, dryly romantic greeting cards ever, and then waits several beats before the other one says things that sound like something that just got scratched out of a Danielle Steel first draft. They are insufferable; insufferable, they are. We might not feel that way if we sensed the chemical attraction between them, an electricity that might occur if they acted like actual humans instead of constructs tickering overbaked slogans from their mouths about how f—ing in love they are with each other. They kiss, passionately, but also sadly, like it might be the last time ever, before they go off to work, she as a photographer of male ballet dancers, he as an architect. They have a dog named Charlie who, shockingly, has not run away.

Then, one day at work, a warplike special effect surges through the conference room at Nick’s office. It’s a time phase. See, this is an era in which time travel exists, and if you have a shitpile of money, you can spend your way to visit the past. It’s against the law to alter the timeline, but it happens anyway, and that’s when the CGI distorto-wave gives all the non-rich people nosebleeds as it disrupts the continuum. People remember things from the previous timeline until they don’t, which is, I think, usually when the plot needs them to. Nick exercises great humility as he thinks it’s all about him: Janine’s heavily moneyed ex Tommy (Orlando Bloom) is obviously time-traveling (“jaunting” being the parlance of the times) to the past to tweak things and get her back. I mean, look, Nick is a dog person, so why do they have a cat named Charlie? And there’s Charlie, who is now a cat, although a transformation hasn’t occurred. In this universe, Charlie has always been a cat, but Tommy apparently isn’t clever enough to jaunt back and turn Nick into a cat person.

But oh, this isn’t the first “time crime” Tommy has committed, nor will it be the last. He’s a fiend, I tell you, a fiend. Then there’s a scene where Freida Pinto looks directly into the camera. Oh, all the characters get moments like this, profound moments where they stare right into our very souls. She plays Alex, Nick’s ex-wife, and it seems like only a matter of time before she’s involved in this mess. Lucky for Nick, in this future, when a person senses that their brains are being effed with, there’s an app for that. He goes to the mall and signs up for a “memory protection plan,” which allows the subscriber to upload photos and the like to a “time capsule” that’ll help them remember the memories that go poof when a phase occurs, although, if I may apply logic to it, the challenge may be remembering that you have things to remember, things that are stored in a “memory protection plan” that, to this ear, just sounds like a “hard drive” with a monthly subscription fee. Janine then asks exactly what we’re all thinking: Why did you buy such an important service from a place that’s right next to a Mrs. Field’s cookie shop? Ridiculous! It seems only inevitable that another wad of CGI will disrupt the universe, so Nick can lose Janine and try to get her back, and find out if he shouldn’t have used the KMart of memory retention banks.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This one from an alternate timeline: Nicolas Sparks’ Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Performance Worth Watching: The scene: Oscar nominees Odom and Erivo lie on the floor, bleary and defeated. They weakly reach out their hands. “Pray… for… Mojo,” they type on the Speak ‘n’ Spell.

Memorable Dialogue: “Love is drawn in the form of a circle,” a nonprofundity Janine says so many times, it’ll make you never want to see a circle again.

Sex and Skin: None. Be thankful, because I can only imagine it would be insufferable.

Our Take: You know how some sci-fi movies are bogged down by too many scenes in which the characters stand around and explain the mechanics of a complex premise? Needle in a Timestack has zero such scenes, which is good, because those scenes pretty much exclusively suck, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t need one or two of them, so we get a better idea of what in the living tarnation is going on in this plot. It’s conceptually vague. It’s full of people saying nonsense like “I remember her. If it was just a phase I wouldn’t remember.” The logistics are so foggy, one struggles mightily to intuit what Nick is capable of remembering, and when, and how, and why he can, or can’t, remember a certain thing, or how something might trigger a memory he’s forgotten, implying that he’s forgotten the first memory but hasn’t forgotten the subsequent memory about having to remember something. Seriously, screw this screenplay for tying us up in knots like this.

I believe Harvey expects us to push through the logical inconsistencies – you know, to paraphrase Ned Flanders, the stuff that contradicts the other stuff – and tap into the film’s emotional well, which he perhaps thinks is fathomless. How, Needle in a Timestack asks us, can one measure the depth of a man’s love? In this case, with a busted ruler: about 2.6 inches. Love is the energy that guides the universe, all universes, this movie insists, and then holds up as an example a character who is interminably glum, an empty vessel who’s impossibly obsessive, as shallow as a worm’s bathtub, and no fun whatsoever. Odom, previously proven to be a considerable screen presence (see: One Night in Miami), grits his teeth as the movie spirals into self-parody, landing at a climactic sequence that’s as dramatically inert as it is unintentionally hilarious.

The story moves at a pace somewhere between sluggish and inert. Tonally, when it’s not maudlin, it’s a full-on corpse. The characters live in empty, minimalist homes with so many sharp corners, I’m surprised they don’t full-time wear samurai armor to avoid being sliced wide open every time they open a drawer. The dialogue is almost uniformly fortune-cookiespeak: “I always thought you and I were timeless.” ��All the money in the world is no good for loneliness.” “Happiness is the only thing more fleeting than time.” I’ll add one: Even if you think you have plenty of time, don’t waste it. Say, by watching this movie.

Our Call: Time to watch almost anything else. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.