Timecop (1994) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Get ready to blast to the past with Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Timecop is a fast paced and complex time travel/action film based on a comic book which presents a darker side to the possibilities of traveling through time. It was another vehicle for Jean-Claude Van Damme to kick and punch his way through, but also offered the actor some tender moments, when he wasn’t making witty quips after killing someone.

First Impressions

The trailer wants audiences to know that in 2004, time travel is a reality and some unscrupulous people are using it for personal financial gain. Jean-Claude Van Damme is an enforcer of the laws regarding time travel, known as a Timecop and he’s come back to stop some men from stealing some gold. Of course, nothing horrible will go wrong, right?

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

The film opens in 1863 as a group of Confederate soldiers moving gold bullion are robbed by a man with advanced, automatic machine guns. On October 10, 1994 in Washington DC, a Senate appropriations committee, which includes Senator McComb (Ron Silver), is informed by George Spota (Scott Lawrence) of the Justice Department, that Dr. Hans Kleindast has discovered time travel and that they are forming a new group to police it. The Time Enforcement Commission (TEC) is to be led by DC Police Captain Eugene Matuzak (Bruce McGill), and McComb volunteers to chair the committee. They believe that someone is already using the technology to steal gold from the past.

Officer Max Walker (Jean-Claude Van Damme) meets his wife, Melissa (Mia Sara), at a local Mall before returning home. That evening, Max lets Melissa know he’s accepting a position with a new Agency but gets called away by an emergency before she can share her news. On the way out of the house Max is attacked and shot in his bulletproof vest by a number of men just before their house explodes killing Melissa, still inside. Ten years later, Max is working for the TEC on a case involving his ex-partner, Lyle Atwood (Jason Schombing) traveling to October 30, 1929 (Black Friday) to make some financial investments. Max stops Atwood, who would rather kill himself than return and face the wrath of Senator McComb, who has at least “half the agency” on his payroll.

McComb arrives for a tour of the Agency, intent on shuttering the time enforcement group. He is introducing legislation to ban time travel, feeling it’s a waste of taxpayer money to police it. Max has strong suspicions that McComb was using Atwood, and others, to steal money from the past but unfortunately has no proof. This upsets Max even more, since he is prohibited from traveling back to save Melissa. Every trip creates ripples in the time stream, some being worse than others, and changing the past could be catastrophic. Instead, Max sits alone in his apartment watching a 10-year old video tape of Melissa trying to assemble a birdhouse. He is attacked by two men in his apartment which he quickly dispatches, realizing his investigation is on the right track.

The TEC tracks a level six ripple coming from Washington DC in 1994. Max is partnered with Internal Affairs investigator Sarah Fielding (Gloria Reuben) and sent back to 1994 using the Agency rocket sled. McComb has returned to October 9 to meet with his ex-business partner in a computer hardware company, Jack Parker (Kevin McNulty). Originally on this day, McComb resigned from the company that would eventually be the “next big thing” in computer systems, used by everyone in 2004. McComb meets his younger self, careful not to touch him–since that could be disastrous, and forces him to take the buyout money, before killing Parker. Fielding turns on Max, being one of McCombs Agents, but is injured in the firefight and later dies.

Max returns to 2004 finding the future has changed. The Senator has shuttered the TEC, and Matuzak risks his life to help Max return to 1994 to fix a problem that only Max is aware of. While Max is investigating, he trails two of McCombs hitmen to the local Mall, which he remembers from his past. Max sees 1994 Melissa and warns her that people are coming to kill her and younger Max. The events of the previous October 10th play out a little differently as Max-Prime is now on hand to help dispatch the bad guys. He realizes that this was all a setup by Future McComb to eliminate the officer that has become a thorn in his side, even prior to him joining the TEC.

The bad guys set the bomb in the house as McComb shows up to kill Melissa. Max-Prime is now able to intervene, having an ace in the hole. He has secretly sent a note to 1994 McComb pretending to be the future Senator, and tells him to meet at the Walker house. With the two McComb’s in close proximity, Max-Prime shoves the younger McComb into the older one causing them to merge horrifically and cease to exist. In the process, Melissa is shot. Max-Prime gets her onto the front lawn with younger Max, who was again shot, laying them together. Max-Prime returns to 2004, finding Matuzak alive and more. He returns home to find Melissa and his ten year old son waiting for him. He embraces them and walks into his non-exploded house, happy.

“Elections are won with television. You don’t need the press, endorsements. You don’t even need the truth.” – Senator McComb

History in the Making

Timecop is a more sophisticated take on the common time travel sci-fi film. It stands on the shoulders of the films that came before it utilizing many elements audiences would be familiar with, while also showing the down sides of time travel. It uses the common themes of fate versus free will to delineate the characters, with some choosing to accept the timestream, while others seek to bend it to their own schemes. And it presents another fun science-fiction action vehicle for star Jean-Claude Van Damme. The film was one of the first non-superhero comic book adaptations. Comics had been fodder for animated and live-action films alike since the birth of Superman in 1938. But very few titles that were not about buff men and women in spandex were ever optioned for television or film. Some of the most prevalent titles were the Archie books, and even the EC horror anthology Tales from The Crypt. Audiences may also be familiar with some other non-superhero comics that made it to film including Howard the Duck (1986), The Guyver, The Rocketeer (both 1991), and The Crow (1994). The Timecop story was created by writer Mark Verheiden and Dark Horse Comics publisher Mike Richardson, both of who ended up writing the story and screenplay of the film. It was a three-part tale published in late 1992 in the anthology series called Dark Horse Comics. It was not the first Dark Horse Comics property to make it to film, as the popular Jim Carrey film The Mask was released earlier in 1994.

Timecop was directed by Peter Hyams, who was no stranger to action films (The Presidio & Running Scared) or science-fiction films (Capricorn One, Outland, 2010: The Year We Make Contact). The film makes good use of the sci-fi aspects of time travel, as well as action merits and martial arts prowess of Jean-Claude Van Damme. Hyams seems like the perfect director for this story. It was the also first of three films that Hyams shot with Van Damme, the second one being Sudden Death (1995), a typical action flick set in during the Stanley Finals, followed by Enemies Closer (2013), involving eluding a drug cartel looking to kill JCVD and Tom Everett Scott. This film also has the name of Sam Raimi attached to it, as a producer. This was the second film produced by Renaissance Pictures, a production company formed by Raimi and partner Rob tapert, which starred Van Damme. The other was Hard Target, released about a year prior, which was the American directorial debut of Chinese director John Woo. Timecop was the third sci-fi film for Van Damme, and arguably his best one, following Cyborg and Universal Soldier. For a film about time travel, it seemed to have the most streamlined plot while still showing off Van Damme’s moves in a cinematic way.

Genre-fication

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, perhaps the best known time travel story, had been around for 99 years when Timecop was released.  Yet, it had only been 34 years since the film version of the same story was released, inviting audiences along on a fun ride. Since then, over three dozen films and television shows dealing with the premise of time travel had been released, and audiences were much more familiar with the possibilities and pitfalls of temporal transit. They had already experienced the wonder of time travel in various films, and had become adept at knowing the problems that could arise such as temporal paradox in The Terminator, or potentially willing yourself out of existence from Back to the Future. For this film, there’s no complex explanation of how things work, just some simple rules that get put forth for this particular story. The first of Timecop’s rules suggests that travelers cannot move into the future, since it has not been created yet. That is, you can’t move forward from the Now–your present with the time machine. Obviously traveling into the past allows the person to return “forward’ to their present. The film also warns repeatedly that going back and changing something (such as the infamous thought experiment of returning to the past to kill a young Adolph Hitler, a key plot point in the sequel Timecop 2: The Berlin Decision), which could be disastrous, altering the present in unknown ways. This is akin to ripples in a lake, and how the TEC monitors for changes to the time stream, similar to the timequakes from Millennium. The final and most gruesome rule is to avoid contact with your younger self. “The same matter can’t occupy the same space at the same time,” they are told, and of course the risks of meeting other version of Max or Senator McComb multiply for this story because ot this rule.

Most films avoid the paradoxical nature of characters encountering themselves. Characters either visit places or times that they don’t exist in (like Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann or Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home) or it never comes up. It was probably never conceived due to the limitations of special effects allowing for characters to meet. Back to the Future Part II made use of characters existing in the same space with the threat of them coming in contact with one another, while Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure used it for comedic effect. Timecop was the first film to show what could possibly happen if two of the same characters touched, as it was a horrific, body blending, painful merger of the two beings before they ceased to exist. The film also presented the immediate effects of changes to a character. A younger character, McComb in this case, has his face cut. Within seconds a scar appears on the face of the older version of that character. This change in the body of a time traveler would be used to greater effect in the 2012 time travel film Looper. While it is an effective demonstration of the power of time travel, it does break down on deeper examination. In this case, due to the conceited nature of Senator McComb who would probably not allow a large scar such as this to affect his visage. If it was not something that he had looked at immediately, he most likely would have had treatments to render it invisible in the intervening decade. However implausible, some of the aspects come off in the plot of the film, audiences now had a new visual lexicon of ways to imagine time travel.

Societal Commentary

Modern time travel stories always seem to be about the same thing, thematically: fate versus free will. Timecop uses that along with the added element of regret. Max loses his wife to a random explosion on the eve of joining the TEC but is not allowed to go back in time to save her. He regrets the fact that he cannot change the past, and takes it out on the criminals he stops, including his own partner, who wantonly disregards the rules to go back in time. Granted, the other time travelers we see, in 1863 and 1929, are going back to steal money–certainly a petty enough motive and one that is not as weighty as saving, or taking, a life. It’s within the course of his job that he discovers Melissa was also pregnant when she died, something that was somehow unknown to him after her death. That is the moment that tips him over the edge knowing that he needs to help save her, now that he has the ability to. Fate it seems has brought him to the same day and place where she died. Fate and the fact that her death was premeditated by McComb and his gang changing the past. The fact that McComb and Melissa’s lives were so intertwined was fortunate for Max, as he was able to save her and kill him at the same time. It also allows the filmmakers to show past events playing out slightly differently on the “next loop through.”

In time travel stories, when characters revisit events in the past, they usually play through exactly the same each time, just with a different perspective. Think of the scene in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkiban, where Harry and Hermione are about to be discovered in Hagrid’s hut until something gets their attention. Later, the two characters go back in time and become the distraction alerting their past selves to the forthcoming danger. Timecop works a bit differently. In the first go around in 1994, McComb and his thugs return to Max’s house, shoot the officer leaving him for dead and then blow up the house killing Melissa. The second time this sequence is shown, Max-Prime is now part of the moment, and all sorts of things happen differently. Younger Max is still shot, the house still explodes, but an additional adventure with Melissa, the death of McComb, and Max-Prime saving his younger wife all play out. Moments like this, that affect the future are why Fielding mentions her father believes the technology is more dangerous than a nuclear bomb. Which, if this is the case, it is also strange that the TEC is unable to find the other time machine, the original prototype, that McComb has been using. This may be part of the plot point that the Agency is really a tool of McComb’s and thus mostly ineffectual.

Timecop has much to say about politics, politicians, and the way they affect policy. McComb is one of the most unscrupulous and evil characters shown to date. He is all about capitalism and getting himself elected into a higher seat of power. He uses time travel as a completely personal means of stuffing his coffers for the next election cycle, killing those that stand in his way, such as his ex-partner, Parker. He has no morals, beats his assistant, turning him into a sniveling toady and basically does what he wants. He complains to Max that special interest groups are destroying the country and that once someone who is rich is in the White House, they won’t have to listen to anyone else. They can do what they want. In essence, not even the truth matters. McComb also says that his Presidency will be like the 80’s again, where the “top 10% will get richer, the rest can emigrate to Mexico, live a better life.” It’s eerie that Timecop sees these ideals as the politics of 2004, predicting something closer to our own future only ten years later. In the end, it does what the rules say shouldn’t be done. Max has effectively eliminated another Hitler from taking power, killing him in the past–which appears to make things work out OK, since the future doesn’t really exist beyond 2004 in this film.

The Science in The Fiction

Timecop also makes some other predictions about the future that are pretty close to the early 21st Century. The cars of 2004 are all self driving, autonomous vehicles that respond to voice control. While real cars from 2004 didn’t look that much different from 1994, here they are all suitably “futuristic,” probably due to the advancements of Parker Datalink systems, which would no longer exist in the final 2004 (probably since McComb killed Parker. But with both McComb’s dying, who knows? Paradoxes are weird). It was about a decade off, but we do have more voice activated features in our lives, and the self-driving cars, while not widespread, do exist in our timeline. The film also shows a character using wireless headphones. Something really weird to see in 1994, but nowadays, ubiquitous. Wireless technology is rampant in the early 21st Century, feeding internet, audio and video signals between computers, phones, and a myriad of other devices. It does also show the character using a DAT (or solid-state) type audio cartridge, which was sadly not the way things went, but all predictions can’t be correct.

The film also utilizes a unique time machine for the travel. In this case, it’s a rocket powered time sled, something that looks and acts much like the interdimensional transport from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension, straight down to the intimation that two characters are now bloodstains on the wall behind it when it didn’t work. The sled gets the characters up to speed (like the Delorean in Back to the Future) and they are flung through the temporal vortex. When they exit however, they are no longer in the vehicle and either walk, run, or fall into the assigned timeline. Upon pressing their track-and-return module, they arrive back in their present in the sled again. As with many other elements of time travel films, examining some of the concepts too deeply causes them to break down. Such as, where does the sled go? Or if a TEC can go into the past, which is still malleable, why does the TEC not have some protocol in place to alert them if the timeline has been changed. When Max returns from the mission where McComb has killed Parker, everything has changed. Not even Matuzak realizes the changes. This seems like a large technical issue that might have been discussed in the last 10 years. Though as said earlier, almost any plot hole can probably come down to the fact that McComb is running the show for the TEC without their knowledge.

The Final Frontier

Timecop should have been more popular than it was. It did spin off two direct to video sequels that both were critically panned, and a short lived (9 episode) 1997 television series with Ted King as Officer Jack Logan, which was canceled prematurely due to the ratings. No other comic books were ever produced with the character either. Perhaps audiences were just more interested in other sci-fi properties at the time. But regardless, the film has some good sci-fi elements and prescient thematic concerns (even if they might be too on-the-nose). It still stands as one of Van Damme’s best sci-fi films, featuring yet another third-act fight, at night, in the rain (see Cyborg and Universal Soldier for the others). Peter Hyams would return to the genre in 2005 with ​​A Sound of Thunder, which is based on the Ray Bradbury novel about time travelers making one small change in the distant past and altering the future irrevocably. Timecop showed that audiences were nimble and knowledgeable enough to understand more complex plots about time travel, and accept a darker version of the possibilities and pitfalls that come from altering time. Future time travel films would utilize elements from this film and continue the darker tone well into the 21st Century.

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