A Plan Beyond the Time Review
A Plan Beyond the Time is a 2020 short film directed by Chirag Gopiyani and Parth Pandya.
A short film that is teeming with ambition, but also littered with just as many faults that don’t allow for much depth, A Plan Beyond the Time bites off just a bit more than it can chew.
One of the easiest pieces of praise that could be set at this short film is the ambition in the story. Trying to encapsulate a tale of time travel, intrigue, and betrayal in a 20-minute runtime is quite a big feat. To its credit as well it gets the broad strokes of the story across pretty effectively.
However, the technical hiccups start things off on the wrong foot. The biggest pet peeve personally here is the use of 60fps for the filming frame rate. Anytime a film is going for a narrative approach, not in the found footage style this should not be used. Seeing the piece maintaining that technique while trying to tell a story with normal editing and acting will always break any suspension of disbelief here.
The choice to dub over the dialogue was more than likely a necessary one as either proper on set audio recording was not an option or the audio captured just proved to be too noisy. With that choice though there is a constant popping in and out of the recorded audio sections which again take the viewer out of the experience altogether.
Lastly, the acting too at times was more than a bit stiff, and the big emotional moments lacked any kind of on-screen punch from the players in the film.
It is nice to see indie creators dreaming big, and this is a story that rife for expansion, but it is the myriad of issues that keep things from being more enjoyable.
A Plan Beyond the Time has a lot of elements going for it but twice as many holding it back. If you are coming solely for the story and don’t care about any of the actual film pieces, then there is something here. For the film itself though, there is a lot that can be improved upon for future entries into this series or films made by this team.
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Cheers!
Daniel Hess
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