It’s time to do another “Why did I watch this?” video about a crappy Christian movie,
but I’m not sure which one to choose.
Last month I did Mr. Krueger’s Christmas, which is not a good movie, but is at least
kinda sweet, not all that heavy handed, and chock full of wall-to-wall Jimmy Stewart.
How do I follow that?
Do I even want to follow that?
I could just stop there.
Maybe I shouldn’t press my luck.
Then again, maybe that’s exactly what I should do.
Come on, come on, come on – STOP!
There’s no button down here.
So what did I just hit?
And why did it stop?
Anyway, looks like I got Time Changer.
Which I think I’ve seen before.
Unfortunately, I don’t really remember much about it, so I’ll have to watch it again
before we can move on.
Okay, then.
Time Changer it is!
Time Changer . . . is so bad.
It’s the story of Russell Carlisle, a professor at a bible seminary in 1890 who is about to
publish a book in which he argues that it’s important to teach people morals – so important
that it’s okay to give people moral lessons without mentioning Christ.
Most of his colleagues at the bible seminary are cool with this, they’re all like “Hey,
great book, Russell.”
But there’s this one colleague of Carlisle’s, played by the captain of the Love Boat, who’s
being a total dick about it.
He’s like, “Russell, you can’t teach people morals without beating them over the
head with the Jesus stuff, because if you do, they can just blow off the morals since
you haven’t given them any absolute standard to determine what is right and what is wrong.”
And Carlisle is like, “Yeah, well, I disagree.”
And Love Boat Guy is like, “You don’t get it, if we separate moral teaching from
smacking people in the face with the gospel of Jesus, it will result in a sinful and decadent
future society.”
And Carlisle is like, “How do you know?”
And Love Boat Guy is like, “Because I have a time machine.”
And the thing is, he does!
He does have a time machine!
And he uses that time machine to send Carlisle into the future – without his understanding
or consent – to show him how awful the early 21st century is, and how wrong he was to ever
dare to think that it was okay to teach someone morals without simultaneously crushing their
skull beneath a cinderblock on which the Sermon on the Mount has been inscribed.
Carlisle travels into the future – or the present, from the perspective of audiences
at the time of the film’s release, or the past, from the perspective of you and me right
now, but more recent than the part of the past Carlisle is from, look it’s complicated!
The point is, Carlisle travels from 1890 to sometime in the early 2000s and he learns
that Love Boat Guy is right, the world sucks and it’s all because children are being
taught morals without also being stabbed in the face with crucifixes by a mob of enraged
Sunday school teachers screaming the Lord’s Prayer.
Having realized the error of his ways, Carlisle returns to his own time and revises his book.
That’s it.
That’s the protagonist’s character arc.
He realizes he was wrong about this one thing he thought.
And the only thing that winds up different as a result of his journey into the future
is that he publishes a slightly altered version of his obscure academic theological text than
he would have otherwise.
Doesn’t that sound like a great movie?!
But you might be saying to yourselves, “Steve, surely the movie must be about something other
than that.
It’s over 90 minutes long – we know because of the title that accompanied the clock-wipe
a couple of minutes ago – there must be more to it than what you’re saying!”
And the truth is, there is more to it, and I’m gonna tell you about some of it because
I’ll be damned if I’m gonna just sit here alone and live with it!
But none of it really matters.
The dramatic arc of the film is just as I’ve described it: guy wants to write book, guy’s
friend tells him he’s wrong about a thing, guy’s friend sends guy a hundred years into
the future, guy sees that his friend was right, returns home from the future, revises book
accordingly, the end!
Doesn’t that sound like a great movie?!!
The problems with Time Changer begin with its lead character.
As written by Rich Christiano, who also directed, and played by D. David Morin – yes, that
D. David Morin, Kevin from Empty Nest, I’m excited, too, but let’s focus up!
What was I saying?
Right, problems with the lead character.
Russell Carlisle spends most of the film as a fish-out-of-water, a 19th century man in
a 21st century world.
But that doesn’t play as well as it should because when we see Carlisle in his own time,
he seems pretty out-of-step with everyone else there, too.
Writer-director Christiano seems to think the best way to write dialogue for 19th century
people is to eliminate contractions and have everyone address each other with stiff formality
at all times.
It’s a lazy, hacky technique, but some members of the cast handle it better than others.
For example, it’s not really a problem for the actors who portray Carlisle’s colleagues
at the seminary.
Hal Linden, who I presume dropped in for one day to pick up a paycheck, does just fine,
even managing to take his role of “old guy in charge who sits at a table” and create
somewhat of a character.
And Gavin MacLeod gives a solid performance as well, playing Carlisle’s time-machine-having
acquaintance.
You’ll never appreciate the acting chops of the guy who played Captain Stubing more
than when you see him sharing a scene with David Morin.
For whatever reason, Morin plays Carlisle like a well mannered but impossibly naive
android.
Is it a conscious performance choice that didn’t play?
Is he just a shitty actor?
I can’t really tell.
All I know is, it doesn’t work when Carlisle is in his own time where he supposedly belongs,
and it gets way worse when he jumps a hundred years into the future.
Carlisle reacts to almost everything he encounters in the modern world with either wide-eyed
befuddlement or hopeless confusion, even stuff that to a man from his time, of his education,
shouldn’t be so unfamiliar, like electric lights, or fountains, or the practice of tipping
the staff at a hotel.
Speaking of the hotel, look at the expression on his face as he watches . . . I don’t
know, something on TV in his room.
What could he possibly be watching in this shot?
Let’s see, this movie was made in 2002, so . . . I dunno, maybe that episode of CSI
where the rat crawls out of the dead woman’s mouth?
Also, I’m pretty sure this was my facial expression while I sat in the theater watching
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.
He also seems way too shocked by things like casual profanity, or teenagers planning to
party without telling their parents, or, I don’t know, the existence of religious hypocrisy.
It makes sense that a man like Carlisle, who is a conservative prude even by 19th century
standards, would be offended by things like that, but he reacts to them like he’s never
heard of such things before!
At the end of the film, after he returns to his own time, he actually says to his friend
Love Boat Guy, “The church seems to be filled with professing Christians who do not follow
the lord they claim to believe!”
Are we to believe churches have only developed that problem sometime in the last hundred
years or so?
Of course, I know what’s going on here.
Carlisle reacts this way to modern society because the message of the film is “modern
society is bad!”
Carlisle is aghast to hear a man say he’s not only divorced but happily so because Rich
Christiano wants all of us to be aghast at that.
Carlisle is shocked and appalled to learn that the two people kissing on TV aren’t
married – by the way, add “acting” to the list of things he’s apparently never
heard of – because we’re supposed to be shocked and appalled at our culture’s permissive
attitude toward sex, represented by two fully clothed people sharing a chaste smooch in
a TV show.
That strain of puritanical anti-modernism is what makes Time Changer bad in the very
particular way in which it is bad.
It’s also bad in the way most bad movies are bad – the acting mostly sucks, the pacing
is terrible – we spend half an hour watching Carlisle dick around worrying whether or not
Love Boat Guy is gonna endorse his book before he even gets in the time machine – the direction
is in the artless, impersonal style typical of, say, a Lifetime Original Movie circa 1995.
But its peculiar Time Changer badness is a result of its crude, reactionary moralism.
Russell Carlisle isn’t an uptight square who goes on an unexpected adventure and realizes
he needs to loosen up a little – he’s an uptight square who goes on an unexpected
adventure and realizes he wasn’t enough of an uptight square to begin with!
His character doesn’t experience an arc so much as a mild incline.
The lesson he learns – that 21st century society would be better if it were more like
late-19th century society – is an unusual one to be presenting to a 21st century audience.
It’s not unusual for the particular strain of evangelical Christianity that produced
this film to pander to its target audience by inviting them to join in longing for the
good old days.
It is a little weird that for the purposes of this film, “the good old days” are
“when your great-grandparents were kids.”
Speaking of things in the movie that are a little weird but also very revealing, there’s
this scene between Carlisle and a Christian woman he befriends, where she launches into
a sermon about how secular entertainment is a tool of Satan – I’m not paraphrasing,
she literally describes secular entertainment as a tool of Satan.
Not only is this alarmist, moral panic horseshit, it’s ultimately in the service of Christiano’s
shallow and silly theological conviction that moral instruction must not be separated from
Christianity, because if you teach someone right from wrong without also telling them
about Jesus Christ, they won’t respect the morals because the morals won’t have any
authority.
I’d list all the philosophical and empirical reasons to reject that argument – the existence
of moral behavior in pre-Christian and modern non-Christian societies, the fact that “because
so-and-so said so” doesn’t necessarily make a moral principle more compelling even
if the supposed “so-and-so” is a god, the ease with which the moral authority and/or
very existence of the Christian god or any other god can be disputed, those are just
a few – but I don’t think Christiano cared when he was making this movie and I don’t
think he’d care now.
He came up with what he thought was a clever and compelling way to use drama to justify
his narrow, retrograde worldview, and because he’s evidently not a very thoughtful or
curious person, he was satisfied when the fruit of his labor was Time Changer.
It’s a shame I wasn’t that satisfied when I watched it.
Though that does raise the question: why did I watch Time Changer?
I think I watched it to encourage myself to watch other, better, less theologically didactic
time travel movies, like Time Bandits, or Time After Time, or George Pal’s adaptation
of The Time Machine, or maybe even some that don’t have the world “time” in the titles.
There must be one or two.