The tiny time-travel movie Aporia answers Oppenheimer’s big questions, badly
Even though Shane Carruth’s 2004 micro-indie Primer, which was made on a $7,000 budget and looks it, found an equally micro fandom, it didn’t seem primed to change the world of cinema. It’s had its own small-scale followers, though: The idea of a tinkerer or two cobbling together a time-travel device in a garage, basement, or back room is a fascinating premise, mostly because it puts all the ethical and scientific problems of time travel into the hands of a few people with no oversight, following no rules but their own.
Movies like See You Yesterday, Project Almanac, Safety Not Guaranteed, and the new Aporia put a particularly personal spin on time travel. The question stops being “Is it right to risk the future in order to fix a problem in the past?” Instead, it’s more like “What right does a given random person have to make that decision for everyone else?”
The tiny sci-fi movie Aporia focuses more on those ethics than anything else, sometimes to a fault. It’s both a fascinating and frustrating little trolley problem of a film, one where emotions run high and logic sometimes runs thin. But while it looks and feels like a companion piece to Primer, complete with grubby, desaturated visuals and a home-cooked look, it’s just as much a companion piece to this year’s Oppenheimer, a much larger, shinier, and more strident movie about the morality of inventing the future. Like Oppenheimer, Aporia considers the fallout of new technology, and the ethical decision to use it. It just makes the stakes a lot smaller and more personal.
[Ed. note: This analysis avoids spoilers, but the trailer below gives away more of what happens in the film.]
The important action in Aporia is set off by American immigrant Jabir (Payman Maadi),
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