Alistair1918: Just Right

Alistair1918 from 2016 is charming, special, altogether superb little feature movie (on Amazon Prime) with a frame on time travel you don't find very often if at all.  The Alistair in the title is a British soldier on the Western front in 1918, who gets blown into a wormhole and ends up in present-day Los Angeles.  There's no action at all in France.  It's all in LA, where Alistair is befriended by a wannabe documentary film maker - Poppy (played by director Annie K. McVey) - who works with her estranged and skeptical husband, a dedicated young camera man, and eventually a French scientist (Sophie, played by Amy Motta who appeared on Mad Men) who understands time travel, in an effort to get Alistair back to 1918 and his beloved wife.

Poppy may be a wannabe, but she shoots a good movie, and Annie McVey does the same with Alistair1918.  The time-travel part of it has the flavor of Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, updated with the barest trappings of science.  The general ambience reminded me of District 9 - the same kind of on-ground, low key but effective cinematography that we saw in that excellent aliens from outer space in South Africa 2009 movie.

There are two slight slip-ups regarding the public's knowledge of media in 1918 when Alistair says to one of his 21st century friends that they had telephone and radio back in 1918.  That's technically true, of course - telephone was invented in 1876 and radio in 1900 - but few people other than scientists and engineers knew about them until the 1920s.   Alistair did work for a newspaper before he went to war, so it's certainly possible that he had knowledge of those two inventions - but, if so, he should have said that he knew about them by virtue of his work at a newspaper, and not as knowledge that was generally known. (Radio was developed considerably during the First World War, but, again, most soldiers on the front likely had little knowledge of it.)  But this is a very minor point, and no one other than a persnickety about media-history professor like me would have spotted it.

Overall, McVey did a fine job directing, and Guy Birtwhistle some excellent writing as well as playing Alistair,  in a movie that I expect to be citing from now on as the way to do a soft-spoken, realistic movie about something almost certainly impossible but ever fascinating.


 

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