Director/co-writer Will Martinko presents a mind-bending film, Inertia, where time and space are subject to the power of a young man named Roman (Brocagh Lynn). Cosmic peril begins when Roman’s mother, Mariya (Jelena Uchev), meets a dashing stranger named Dmitri (Aidan Everly) in a club in Russia. They wind up leaving together, and Mariya is pregnant after their one-night stand. Dmitri disappears, seemingly off the face of the Earth. Unbeknownst to Mariya, Dmitri is actually an agent from a future time patrol (like the TVA in Loki), and he’s come from the future to preserve the timeline. Mariya’s child, Roman, is thus born of two spacetime origins, which places him outside the normal rules, giving him the innate ability to damage the fabric of the universe at will.
Fast forward 15 years, and Roman meets Lennon (Reese Grove), a lovely girl working in a thrift shop. He immediately has a crush on her, and like Scott Pilgrim falling for Ramona Flowers, his pursuit of Lennon could change the universe. When Roman understands what has happened, he faces the most challenging decision of his young life, with his actions having Thanos-level impacts on all life. This situation is also reminiscent of an episode of the original Star Trek series called City on the Edge of Forever, in which Kirk was faced with a similarly impossible dilemma. Roman’s ability to fracture spacetime is very similar to the rifts between dimensions in Stranger Things.
Lennon (Reese Grove) embraces the moment with Roman (Brocagh Lynn) nearby in Inertia, a sci-fi coming-of-age tale.
“…time and space are subject to the power of a young man named Roman …”
Martinko provided a statement about the making of the film. “Inertia is a film based on a short film I had made back when I was in high school, and it was a truly difficult production. Following the film, I had reworked the story for my USC film school application, and it ended up getting me into USC. From there, I worked for another few years to get this off the ground. While basically made for no budget, the film is a story about family and being okay with letting go.”
Inertia sustains the enthusiastic, breathless vibe of the student film short, which forgives a multitude of production quality sins. The cinematography and sound are adequate. The performances are solid for the most part, but there are moments when the dialogue is clumsy and oddly paced. The timeline jumping is challenging to follow, and characters are introduced later in the film that are hard to place.
There are also questions of continuity in the plot… for example, given that Dmitri’s entire mission has to do with correcting and protecting the timeline, it seems that “rule one” of his protocol should be something about not impregnating women in the past, creating cosmos-shattering paradoxes. But that’s just OCD nitpicking. That line of inquiry is far too literal for a cross-time romance, producing a hormonal teenager with god-like powers. This is not a documentary about dimensional physics. The viewer is meant to trust the guiding hand of fate that things will turn out fine (somewhere, sometime). Like Dr. Strange looking ahead in time in Avengers: Infinity War, we are left to wonder how many timelines have positive outcomes. Flaws notwithstanding, Inertia has plentiful charm and energy to be enjoyed, while serving as a parable about the power of human emotion.
"…a parable about the power of human emotion..."
