Termination Point (2007)

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) You don’t often see as big a difference between ambitions and execution as Termination Point. The script is not that good, but it’s insanely ambitious and would easily power (with a few tweaks) a big-budget blockbuster. The problem is that the film was executed in 2007 with bargain-basement TV-movie means: limitations are visible in nearly every frame. The premise is big, what with time-travel wormhole technology being put aboard a passenger plane and the US military doing its best to destroy it. The prologue alone is a banger, as it shows the debris of a plane appearing on a farm… the day before it crashed. The plot oscillates between a surprising number of characters (for a film in its budget class), including Lou Diamond Phillips as a fleeing scientist and Jason Priesley as a government investigator. The script features plenty of high-tech action, with military jets trying to shoot down the airliner and being sucked into the wormhole. But Termination Point sets itself up for failure with some slap-dash execution. (That mini-mall destruction sequence… yikes.) Limited by the means at its disposal, much of the film becomes an expressionist approximation of what a better-executed film would have looked like. For viewers, it can be difficult to reconcile the ambitions of the plot with the inadequate ways it’s put on screen. At least it’s more daring than the usual made-for-TV dreck of the time. The special effects have certainly improved since then, and it really would be interesting to see a more polished take on the same material.