Six strangers find themselves transported to 2018 where the Earth's population has been wiped out.
Directed by: Jason Butler
Starring: Teresa Tavares, Jamie MacLachlan, Iain Robertson, Teresa Tavares
Five strangers from various parts of the world (though conveniently all fluent in English) find themselves in a mysterious building, which they learn is the CERN research institute in Switzerland. Joined by scientist Peter (Robertson), the strangers learn they've been transported to the year 2018, just after the fall of mankind. Peter informs the others that their only hope of returning to their previous lives is to help him activate the institute's famed Hadron Collider. The six must negotiate their way through the bowels of the institute, evading a race of shadow-dwelling mutants in the process.
When it comes to filming on a shoe-string budget, many film-makers opt for the "spam in a cabin" approach: secure an interesting location and keep your characters and action confined to it. With his time-travel movie, Collider, director Jason Butler has adopted the tried and trusted method that's worked favorably in films like Evil Dead, Reservoir Dogs and Buried, but unfavorably for countless others. In the case of Collider it's sadly the latter.
Thanks to the limits of its budget, Collider is a time travel movie with no time travelling, a monster movie that never reveals its monster and a horror movie where nobody dies onscreen. It would take a lot of ingenuity to make this work and Butler and writer Nuno Bernardo fail to make the limitations work in their favor.
The script suffers from poor characterization and an over reliance on expository dialogue. When Peter tells the others of their predicament they immediately accept his explanation and seem pretty relaxed about their situation. If the film's characters aren't upset by their predicament then how can you expect its audience to be? We learn that our protagonists can sacrifice themselves in 2018 in order to aid their return back to from whence they came, so immediately the stakes are lowered and the fear factor is removed. The mutants (a blatant Pitch Black ripoff) never actually make an appearance and are ultimately incidental at best to the plot.
The cast ranges from convincing (Robertson) to amateurish (MacLachlan), another major issue when you're relying so much on dialogue. If this were a show worth stealing, Teresa Tavares would swipe it as a feisty latin stereotype.
Collider began as a web series and, if I'm honest, this is the level its film incarnation belongs too.
3/10
Eric Hillis