Two men, Carter (T.C. DeWitt) and Knox (Chad Halvorsen), are chasing after another man (Jesse Stokdyk). It turns out the man has traveled back in time to disrupt some event, and Knox and Carter are there to make sure he doesn’t succeed, as that would cause a time ripple or something (which is bad). As time ticks down, Carter interrogates the man about what he has changed, and what he intends to change next, so that Carter and Knox can fix things before it is too late.
Significant pretty much jumps into it and runs, with little setup. If you’ve got familiarity with other time travel films, then you’ll do far better with enjoying what’s going on than those who might be less knowledgeable, because it doesn’t hold anyone’s hand in walking them through the story; you pretty much just have to accept that Carter and Knox know what they’re doing. That said, can you imagine the exposition-crazy insanity that could’ve ensued otherwise? I can, and I appreciated this route more… even if I didn’t always understand it.
For me, time travel films are constant opportunities to twist your mind up, and in the end, this is no different. It’s another story, albeit a shorter one, where someone has traveled back in time to change the future, and how even in the seemingly most innocuous cases, this is still something that can end badly for everyone and everything. The novelty for this tale, however, comes in what that significant event winds up being. Once you know why the man is trying to disrupt the past, it brings a level of sentiment that is otherwise usually missing in the cold rules of time travel.
The short wraps up with credits that point to this being “Episode 1”; I don’t know if that means it’s a setup for a web series, or a series of short films, or what. Regardless, if Significant is the first tale in a collection of more stories in a larger narrative, I think the manner in which it jumps in and out truly works. Flesh the entire thing out over more films if it makes for a more powerful story, and sure beats cramming it all into one less-assured film. I’d be interested in seeing what the larger story is, and where all this is heading.
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