Keanen's Film Blog

Enter a better time: a vision of the future from the past. 1980s grunge meets pseudo-cyberpunk. It is the future foretold by video games, whose sensibilities are industrial brutalism of metal and stone, a world where might makes right and even Klingon weaponry cannot compete with the ultimate weapon from the great halls of science: time. Yes, time, the final frontier.

Trancers is an interesting artifact. It comes from Empire Pictures (Full Moon Video’s theatrical predecessor), which Chuck Band sold to MGM in 2020. This means MGM owns Trancers. All business aside, the chemistry between stars Tim Thomerson and Helen Hunt is so beautiful that even the questionable sequels have sublime moments. No matter how stupid the scripts got, the above-average cast always gave it their all. The series as a whole is highly recommended.

Here’s my theory on how the time travel stuff works:

The protagonists use various technologies to control time, but it is clear that time travel takes a tremendous amount of energy, thus it only works for small objects. This conceit may be based on research into the energy required to open a stable wormhole or push an object past the speed of light, which is only conceivable for something the size of a marble, making information the only viable FTL payload. However, characters in the film somehow send a space gun to the past, so I guess they have a battery the size of Jupiter in the future. (Or it’s a tiny nanotech replicator and the gun is an approximation. The time travel drugs inside could be the same molecule replicated a bunch of times. Anything can be compressed, though quality varies.)

Current technology is stretched a bit, but there is definitely effort in the plot. There is a hint of “science” which doesn’t sour the film, which is saying something as there are plenty of dumb sci-fi movies.

Tim Thomerson looks like Tim Thomerson in both his future and ancestral form (which his future self infects). The future Tim is called Jack Deth, and the 1980s Tim is called Phil Dethton. The villain Whistler’s ’80s counterpart is called Weisling, also a dead ringer (same actor), and Helen Hunt exists only in the ’80s.

I know so many guys who did amazing work in their youth but couldn’t relive their glory days and put on weight mid-life. Thomerson has grey hair in Trancers, a good ten years older than his co-stars, yet he moves with such vigor and has impeccable comedic timing. His glory days never ended. Chuck and company were lucky to find him.

At least one critic has used the term “efficient exploitation”, which sounds like a description of a gas station burrito. Let’s not sell it short, this film is a masterpiece. It’s a vision of the future, of the present, and of ourselves. The film was co-written by Danny Bilson and the late Paul De Meo, and directed by Band. The product of three minds. A singular vision is usually better, but in rare cases like this, an exploitation schlock collab can produce magic. It’s magic to me.