Clockstoppers
(PG)Welp, there've been countless shows, movies, episodes of shows, books, comix, etc., about being able to stop time/slow down time/speed yourself up so it seems like time stopped/whatever. And of course, they always have little inconsistencies, impossibilities, whatever. But that doesn't stop it from being fun. And this is no exception. I definitely enjoyed this movie, though it'll probably be quite awhile before I feel any particular need to see it again. I'll hold onto the DVD though.
So... there's this teenager named Zak Gibbs, who wants to buy a car, but his father (a scientist/college professor who's always working on top secret projects) never seems to have time for Zak, who needs him to come look at the car he wants to buy, cosign for it or whatever. Zak resents that his dad seems more interested in his students than his own son. One of Dr. Gibbs' best (if eccentric) former students is Dr. Earl Dopler (French Stewart), who's been working on a top secret project of his own, developing "hyper time" for a corporation called Quantum Tech (QT, everyone calls it, which I suppose is rather amusing). QT is run by an evil guy named Henry Gates, who is upset when the government decides to put a stop to the project rather than continuing to fund it, and wants to collect all the data and equipment from QT. They're afraid something so powerful... is too big a risk of falling into enemy hands. But Gates is unwilling to give up his project.
Hyper time, you see, is like... well, there are these watches that accelerate the wearer's molecules so that everything around them seems super-slow. There is one problem, however: If you spend too much time in hyper time, you age too rapidly. The only person this has happened to, apparently, is Dr. Dopler, and it doesn't seem to me like you can even tell... I mean, he doesn't look that old, but... I guess when he started the project, he looked about 20 years younger, so I suppose he must've been barely out of college. Anyway, Gates has him working on developing a solution to the aging problem, though at one point he escaped from QT, and I suppose it must've been in the time before they recaptured him that he sent one of his watches to Dr. Gibbs.
Gibbs, meanwhile, has gone to a science conference, where he's supposed to meet Dopler. While he's away, Zak finds the watch in his dad's basement office/lab/whatever, and... puts it in his pocket. And um... he's got a friend named Danny Meeker, who wants to be a DJ. And earlier Zak had met a new foreign exchange student named Francesca, who rejected his advances. But later Zak and Francesca do get together... to rake leaves in her yard. And then Zak discovers that the watch... you know, does the whole hyper time thing. So he and Francesca use its power (anyone you touch when activating it also gets accelerated) to go out and have some of the sort of fun you'd expect people to have, if they have a watch that essentially freezes time. But then... eh, things get complicated, because of all the people who want to get the watch from Zak. I've said enough about the plot. Anyway, I thought the movie was pretty darn okay. Reasonably funny and cool, with some good music, decent special effects, not a bad story...