Alistair1918 (2015)

directed by Annie McVey

USA

86 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Found-footage movies that are not horror are almost entirely foreign territory to me, even though I know the format has a lengthy history outside of the horror genre. There are some films like 84 Charlie MoPic and Punishment Park that have no genre elements at all, instead using found-footage to tell a firsthand account from a place and time where it would make more sense to have small, amateur cameras as opposed to a big film crew, but found-footage, to me, has always lent itself better to horror, and so sci-fi and other movies that utilize the format are rare enough to get my attention when I do find them.

Alistair1918 starts off as a student documentary about Hollywood's homeless population that very quickly turns into something far more interesting when the film crew encounters a roughed-up man in a WWI soldier's uniform who claims he was shot through a wormhole from 1918 after an explosion on the battlefield. He shows them how he's been living in Griffith Park, surviving on trash and squirrels he traps and eats, returning to his landing site every day in the hope that he'll randomly get teleported back to his wife. The woman doing the documentary takes him in, gives him a place to stay and gets him set up with new clothes, a job, a phone, et cetera while all of the people around her are skeptical-bordering on-hostile and assume Alistair is just some guy with delusions. That idea is never given any true weight by the film itself, though.

The best thing about this movie, to me, is the fact that Alistair is treated like a real person 100% of the time. I'm not just talking about how the documentarian takes him seriously and doesn't think he's delusional, I'm talking about how, after it's well established that he is from nearly 100 years ago, none of the patronizing and infantilizing that could easily come with talking to a person unfamiliar with nearly all everyday technology is there. I kept expecting the trappings of a typical "out of time" character, I kept thinking there'd be a scene where he's confused by cell phones or bewildered by TV or something, but there just isn't anything like that. The film gives Alistair total dignity, doesn't present him as a funny curiosity. He is written exactly the way any person in any new place would be written; the film doesn't belittle his intelligence so much as to assume he would be completely lost. He's a normal human being with the capacity to adapt to modern life. At one point the most obnoxious member of the film crew actually does tease him about being from the past and he gets very rightfully offended by it- I'm so glad that this moment was included, because even though "people who are from the past" is not really a marginalized category in real life, it showed that it's never okay to make fun of a person for what they don't know.

(The film is also respectful of Alistair enough to not make him a homophobe- another thing I really liked. There was no need to assume he'd be backwards and intolerant just because of when he was from.)

So Alistair himself is pretty much the best aspect of the film because of how well he's written with respect to his circumstances, but there is more to it than just following him around for 86 minutes. There is a lot of suspension of disbelief that has to be done on the viewer's part, not just on the part of the characters, and this is where the film almost falls apart. A good portion of the story involves trying to get Alistair back to his own time with the help of a scientist specializing in experimental physics that just straight up is not possible, but this is never presented as being outlandish in any way. They Google around and find a woman claiming with a straight face to be the world's leading expert on wormholes and time travel and she's just... accepted as such, as if every day, advances are made in the very real field of sending people back and forth through time in portals you can make with a bucket of water and some gazing balls. Why this troubled me while I was completely willing to accept the prospect of a guy from 1918 showing up in Griffith Park, I'm not sure. I think it was probably the ludicrously unnecessary fake accent the scientist had. But were this not such a charming and engaging film otherwise I would have been turned off quite a lot by the weird science.

I guess that's just the place this movie comes from, though- you can't really separate Alistair's story from the bizarro physics because the world of the film presents both as equally possible. If you can get past the need to believe everything and into a mindset where you want to believe it instead, this is a tremendously fun and rewarding movie.