Clockstoppers (2002) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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This movie can stop a clock. Which is a good thing in this case.

A little lighter fare this week with the youth oriented Clockstoppers. It’s not quite time travel but provides an energetic, and entry level, sci-fi feature for all ages.

First Impressions

The trailer for this film lets audiences know it’s about some teenagers who find a watch that lets them access Hypertime, which slows the world around them. Of course, some bad guys want to get the watch back to the lab from which it was stolen. There’s a lot of moments of the kids enjoying being in Hypertime, and some of the cool visual effects associated with it. It looks to be made for younger audiences, but still be a fun time. It’s time for the Clockstoppers.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

Dr. Earl Dopler (French Stewart) attempts to leave the country in a very bad disguise. He is grabbed at the airport by Henry Gates (Michael Biehn), the CEO of QT Corporation, and his two goons Jay (Linda Kim) and Richard (Jason George). Zak Gibbs (Jesse Bradford), is an industrious teen who buys used items from a local thrift store and resells them on eBay to make money to buy a car. His father is a professor at a local college and insanely smart, but is out of touch with Zak. Zak attempts to get his Dad to help him cosign for a new convertible, but Dr. Gibbs is wrapped up in a project for QT labs called hypertime.

Zak visits his friend Meeker (Garikayi Mutambirwa) at the sporting goods store he works at, where they both gawk at the new female foreign exchange student, Francesca (Paula Garcés). She embarasses Zak as he tries to hustle her for a date. Meanwhile, an NSA agent (Ken Jenkins) needs the results of the QT Labs device by the next day or he’s shutting the project down. Gates has yet to inform the government he has succeeded in creating a watch that speeds the wearer up, allowing them to enter hypertime.

Gates is using Dopler in the Lab, accelerated into hypertime, in order to solve the aging glitch whereby a hypertime user will age if they stay using the device for too long. Dopler has aged years since he has been captured. Zak accidentally finds a hypertime watch that was sent to Dr. Gibbs.  Francesca offers to spend time with Zak after she sees him being bullied, and he accidentally activates the watch while at her house. The two use the device to have fun, including helping Meeker win a DJ competition, and embarrass the school bully.

When Zak returns home he notices Jay and Richard, in hypertime, ransacking his house looking for the watch. A van chase ensues in which he meets Dopler, tied up in the van. Dopler warns him not to get the watch wet, but Zak does accidentally. A crash sends Zak to the hospital where police don’t believe his story, since the wet watch refuses to work. He manages to escape the hospital before Gates’ goons show up. With Dopler having escaped as well, Gates kidnaps Dr. Gibbs to help him finish the device, and solve the aging problem.

Francesca decides to come with Zak to help him save his Dad. They are nabbed by Dopler, but he changes his mind (after Francesca kicks him in the head a couple times) and helps them infiltrate a local science convention where they gather the materials they need to fix the watch. After repairing it, they sneak into QT Labs with augmented paintball guns they got from Meeker’s work. Using liquid nitrogen injected paintballs, they can freeze anyone out of hypertime that they encounter. They come close to infiltrating the lab but are stopped by guards in hypertime with liquid nitrogen guns as well.

Zak sees his Dad, already aged a number of years, and is thrown into the hypertime Lab with him, Dopler, and Francesca, losing the watch in the process. Zak reveals he switched watches on Gates, who took a fake, and enters hypertime while already in hypertime. He phases through the Lab walls and opens a hydrogen spigot allowing his father to use a small blowtorch to destroy the lab. No one is killed, but the hypertime field is destroyed. Zak gives his watch to the NSA who have come to collect on the project. Returning home, it is revealed that Dopler accidentally deaged himself in the lab to become a teenager, and goes off with Zak, his sister, and Francesca, in Zak’s new convertible.

“My dad consults on these super-secret projects and I think this is one of them.” – Zak

History in the Making

For every science-fiction film like Blade Runner or 2001: A Space Odyssey there needs to be films that are more generic and easily accessible. Films that serve as entry portals to the genre for the young or uninitiated. Clockstoppers is just that film. It’s pretty apparent from the opening moments that this is a film for a younger crowd as the logo for Nickelodeon Movies pops up. This was a cable channel created primarily to air children’s cartoons but began airing live action comedy shows in the 90s like Keenan and Kel or The Amanda Show. Clockstoppers was the fourth live action film, and seventh overall from Nickelodeon Movies, after Harriet the Spy, Good Burger, and Snow Day. It also followed the successful Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius animated film based on the sci-fi inspired show about a boy genius and his robot dog.

The film was directed by Jonathan Frakes, who is best known for playing Commander William Riker in Star Trek: The Next Generation. This was his first non-Trek directorial film after Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek: Insurrection. He brought a sense of whimsy to a film that incorporated a lot of fun science-fiction elements, as well as including several nods to his Star Trek origins. The film cast Jesse Bradford, a young good looking actor who had previously appeared in Hackers and Bring It On, acting opposite Paula Garcés who had a few television and minor film roles to date. The adult cast includes Michael Biehn, perhaps the most well known of all the actors, having appeared in the James Cameron trifecta of The Terminator, Aliens, and The Abyss, and French Stewart equally well-known for his work on the comedy television series 3rd Rock From The Sun.

Clockstoppers doesn’t have any world-ending technology, and the events are contained within the small California town it’s set in, which only affect a small handful of people. There is the potential for a larger scope to the film, should the technology get out into the open, but the heroes stop the bad guys with time to spare. Mostly the film caters to the youth market, showing characters having fun bicycling, skateboarding, going to raves and DJ competitions, and having trouble communicating with their parents–as many teenagers seem to.

Genre-fication

The goal for Clockstoppers seemed to have been to make a small teen-oriented action film with a science-fiction twist. It’s the story of “regular people” that find extraordinary technology and how they use it. It’s the wish fulfillment trope, where audiences are linked to the characters in amazement of the “what ifs” that would happen if they received a fantastic device like the hypertime watch. The good guys and bad guys are all relatively clear cut, with the exception of Dr. Dopler, who is never quite what he appears to be–but mostly for comedic effect.

The hypertime watch is a relatively unique piece of sci-fi gear. It seems like it might be a time travel device, but instead accelerates the wearer to ludicrous speeds where the movements of honeybee’s are slowed to appear nearly stationary. There are not a lot of films that deal with hyper-acceleration or time stoppage, unless you’re talking about superhero films with speedsters in them. Usually these types of films involve some kind of fantasy or magical elements, such as the pocket watch in the 1980 TV movie The Girl, the Gold Watch & Everything, which starred Robert Hays and Pam Dawber. The plot of these two films are very similar in the sense that bad guys are out to get the time-stopping-watch from a man who has found a romantic interest. Low stakes, comedic, and fun.

Another film that features a watch that can control time is the 1984 film Trancers. Like the hypertime watch, the Long Second watch doesn’t actually stop time, but decelerates it–or accelerates the user–so they can move in between the seconds, expanding one second into ten. Why aren’t there more films with super-fantastical wristwatches? A few years later the comedy Click, with Adam Sandler, would create a slightly similar device with a television remote control that could also rewind time. Clockstoppers makes great use of special effects to show a number of cool things that can happen with the watch including getting revenge on bullies and also noticing the wonders of nature that often speed by. It doesn’t delve into any of the darker aspects of what one might be able to do with a watch that essentially makes you invisible. That’s for another director, and studio, to create.

Societal Commentary

The biggest theme for the film is about the approach Zak and his father have to living life. As a young boy, who wants to explore the world, date girls, and avoid bullies, Zak’s approach is, “if something’s right, you gotta close your eyes, grit your teeth and hang on.” While his father, a scientist, who is often too busy (or absent-minded) for his family (shades of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids), he has the opposite thoughts. He thinks, “you gotta step back, weigh the options and make a calculated choice.” And like all the best films, they are both correct. In the end Zak needs to weigh the options of how to stop the bad guys, and his father needs to hold on and make a move if they are going to get out of captivity alive.

In reality there’s no real device that can accelerate people, but the hypertime watch is a metaphor for enjoying the small things in life. It’s counterintuitive that Zak needs to speed up in order to be able to slow down, but that’s what he does. He, like many people, are focused on the next thing, that they seem to miss out on some of life’s more magical moments. By accelerating into hypertime, he actually slows the world down to be able to enjoy these smaller moments, and also find someone that he can share them with.

The Science in The Fiction

The faux science of the film never attempts to explain how hypertime works. Just that the watch, plus some parts stolen from a science convention, and a super smart PhD, can accelerate the wearer–and anyone touching them–into hypertime. Hypertime is compared to Einstein’s theory of relativity in which objects approaching the speed of light experience time in ways different than we do on Earth. And there’s none of that complex science regarding the user’s ability to see visible light in hypertime, since they’re accelerating near the speed of light. No friction, no worries (other than an aging effect), and no physical constraints.

Since the molecules have been accelerated, they can also be decelerated. The bad guys all carry QT-designed liquid nitrogen guns that blast anyone in hypertime with a jet of supercooled gas, which immediately drops them back into normal time. It’s painful, according to Dopler, as all your molecules slam on the brakes, so to speak. Zak and his friends build their own, cooler versions, of the devices with paintball guns using liquid nitrogen injected paintballs. No mention of how long these would last without warming back up to room temperature. It just gives the kids a chance to play shoot ‘em up, with the bad guys, without involving any actual firearms.

The Final Frontier

Jonathan Frakes definitely had fun directing the film. Included is a nod to his Star Trek characters’ relationship with Captain Picard, when Francesca tells Zak to “make it so, number one.” They both laugh as she mentions that they too got Star Trek in Colombia. Frakes even gave himself a small cameo as a character at the science convention, manning the Pro-Clone both in one of the shots.

Earl Dopler appears to have been named for physicist Christian Doppler, whose name gave way to the term the Doppler Effect. This is usually thought of as an auditory effect, but would also work with lightwaves if the person was accelerated fast enough. It’s too bad that there’s not more of these kinds of easter eggs for viewers to discover.

For fans of the major sci-fi films featured in the Sci-Fi Saturdays articles, Clockstoppers is not really on par. It’s meant to be a fun film for kids, with low-stakes, some relatively benign adventure and peril, and a touch of “cool” sci-fi thrown in for good measure. That seems to make it more of what watching a science-fiction movie on a Saturday is really about.

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