Décompte planétaire

A very nice Sci-Fi / Thriller / Comedy / TV film. It is a pity there is no DVD released so far. A time traveling extraterrestrial scientist, Travis Beck, from the future is sent back in time to put a quarter in a meter located in a small town on the edge of the Nevada desert to save the world. What looks like a simple job becomes very complicated. Right from the start things go wrong. Travis Beck materialize naked in front of June Kelly in the desert, twenty miles from the town where he has to be. And he gets unexpected protection by his ex-partner Bill Thermot for such a simple job. Of course there are some romantic / comedy moments between the time traveler and June Kelly and some over the top scenes between Travis Beck and the assassins. In the end, 'When Time Expires' is a very nice Sci-Fi comedy film worth at least a rent.

Watched this movie years ago. It is not that great of a stand alone film but for the sc-fi fan it is awesome Richard Grieco and Mark Hamill really make this movie work. Mark Hamill really did a few good low budget movies back in the 1990's.

I'm glad I read the positive reviews that caused me to give this movie a chance. It's not great in that the acting is mediocre, but the whole time travel beurocracy part and everyone's motivations made sense by the end of the movie, so that all worked for me. The movie also had some nice touches in it ghat I appreciated, like the assistants working through tv sets, the watches that beep when the time travelers are getting too close to doing something that woould adversely effect the future, and the bad guys in long coats and cowboy hats moving in slow motion. I also enjoyed the happy ending. Both I and my wife were glad we watched.

The film started out promising, but then got muddled and slow as it went on -- I'm not stupid but I could have sworn that the dialogue indicated that there wasn't any actual time travel involved, just highly sophisticated prediction of the future, and then suddenly at the end there was actual time travel -- ending in dumb shootouts in which a regular pistol in our hero's hand constantly trumped the bad guys' futuristic rayguns. The cast mostly does their best, especially the veterans like Tim Thomerson and Pat Corley (who only appears on a tv screen and I assume shot all his scenes in one or two days completely independently of the rest of the film's production), but there are reasons why Grieco was never a big star and that while Cynthia Geary has a lot of post-"Northern Exposure" credits none of them are very impressive. And the only way I can describe Mark Hamill's performance is as a combination of about 80% "Hey, I'm TRYING here!" and 20% "WHY am I trying here?"

Caught this movie on TV and it definitely held my attention. I appreciated the fact that what little violence there was mainly took the form of fistfights. I would have rated it 10, except for the gratuitous and really ridiculous taking of the Lord's name in vain so many times, considering that we're dealing with an organization of advanced planets. Certainly this "federation" of thousands of planets must know Who it is that created those planets. Probably the smarmy Showtime networks idea. So minus two for that. The few special effects there were just reminded me of the low budget original Star Trek. If the story is there, and it is, special effects used judiciously are fine. The beautiful Cynthia Geary is a plus.