Beyond the Time Barrier

One of the TCM spotlights this month has been movies dealing with time travel. One that aired the first week of the month sounded vaguely interesting to me was Beyond the Time Barrier, so I recorded it and recently watched it.

The print that TCM showed looked like it had been panned-and-scanned, as the Star Wars-like credits receding toward a vanishing point seemed to be blocked for some sort of wide-screen format every time a new credit appeared at the bottom of the screen. But IMDb claims the original aspect ratio is in fact 1.37:1, even for a 1960 film. This might also be explained by the fact that, when we get to the end of the opening credits, the movie informs us it was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, a master of low-budget direction.

The action begins at an air force base just outside of Dallas, TX. Maj. William Allison (Robert Clarke) is a test pilot who is being prepared to make a test flight in the X-80, a rocket-powered airplane that has a top speed of a good 5,000 MPH or more (that would be Mach 7, IIRC), and will be flying to an altitude of 100 miles, which would have been higher than anyone had been before as Yuri Gagarin's flight into space was still a year away. The flight goes well, until....

Part of the flight is shown by low-budget models against a backdrop of the sky that has way too many stars. But in one of those images, we see the plane develop a second image, before the two images merge together. After that, Maj. Allison loses contact with ground control, although he's able to bring the plane in for a safe landing and what to him seems like a successful flight.

Except that, when Maj. Allison gets back to the air force base, he finds that it's terribly decayed, with nobody there and all of the buildings falling apart. (Amazingly, the runway was intact, a plot hole that's not mentioned.) Maj. Allison goes to several buildings, and finds nobody. But off in the distance he's able to see a low-budget matte backdrop of some sort of futuristic building with a shining beacon atop it, so he heads off for it.

There are actually people in that building, and one of them is watching a surveillance camera that has a couple of targets superimposed on the image. The man brings those targets together, zeroing in on Maj. Allison, and shoots Allison! Except that it's not some sort of gun that's going to kill Allison, just something that's going to knock him out and paralyze him so they can bring him into that building to pump him for information. That doesn't work, as Maj. Allison has a bunch of understandable questions of his own, so they stick Allison in an underground dungeon that has a lot of mutants who have lost all their hair.

Eventually, the ruler of this place dubbed "The Citadel", the Supreme (Vladimir Sokoloff), wants to see Allison, who is brought there by his original captor, the Captain. The Supreme has a granddaughter, Princess Trirene (Darlene Tompkins), who is a deaf-mute but also empathic, and she can tell that Maj. Allison is being honest in his questioning and confusion about how and why he ended up here. As a result, the Supreme decides to entrust Allison into the Princess' custody, although the Captain is still suspicious.

The Princess takes Allison to a prison laboratory where several scientists are being held, and they're finally able to tell Allison what's happened. Apparently, due to some sort of relativistic paradox, Allison was briefly able to send his plane 64 years into the future, as everybody is now in the year 2024. Also in the intervening years, mankind's above-ground nuclear testing destroyed the part of the atmosphere that kept cosmic radiation from bombarding earth, with the result that everbody wound up with some horrible plague that left people either bald like the mutants, deaf-mutes like almost everybody in the Citadel, sterile, or some combination of the three. Princess Trirene is the only one known to be fertile, and since Allison comes from before the plague and is obviously fertile too, the Supreme would like him to mate with Trirene.

As for the scientists in that prison lab, they also came from the past, although not as far in the past as Maj. Allison. They're from after the plague began, having figured out some way to get mankind to travel at near-light speeds without inducing relativistic time dilation, something used to get people off earth and onto colonies on other planets where they wouldn't have the plague. But these scientists wound up in the same sort of paradox as Allison and wound up in 2024. The Supreme and the Captain think they might be able to solve the problem of the plague, but all of them would like to get back to their own time. Allison, having an intact plane, could get back to his time and warn everybody about the plague, but will they believe him? And will the other scientists sabotage him to get to his plane themselves?

Watching movies from the past set in a future date that's rapidly approaching, or has already passed, is always interesting, to see what the filmmakers have gotten right and what they got wrong. In this case, I find it hard to believe that mankind would have forgotten about the entire past in just six decades, at least not if some subsection of them was able to create a citadel. I also can't believe they would have become this futuristic in just 60 years, not even considering that the 2024 setting of the movie is close to our present. I don't think mankind will have advanced that much by 2082.

All that aside, Beyond the Time Barrier isn't a bad movie for what it is, which is a low-budget B movie that was produced quickly with no pretentions of it being anything artistically important. If you're looking for a prestige film, skip over this one. But if you like the low-budget science fiction of the drive-in era, then Beyond the Time Barrier is certainly worth a watch.