CROSSWORLDS
USA. 1996. Director - Krishna Rao, Screenplay - Krishna & Raman Rao, Producers - Rupert Harvey & Lloyd Segan, Photography - Christopher Walling, Music - Christophe Beck, Visual Effects Supervisor - Wendy Grossberg, Visual Effects - Todd-AO Digital Images (Supervisor - Brian Jennings), Digital Effects - Digital Drama Inc (3D Animation Supervisor - Mark J. Smith) & Pure Light Images Inc (Supervisor - Mike Fernster), Digital Visual Effects - Shockwave Entertainment Inc (Supervisor - Jody Levine), Mechanical Effects Supervisor - Frank Ceglia, Production Design - Aaron Osborne. Production Company - Trimark Pictures. Josh Charles (Joe Talbot), Rutger Hauer (A.T.), Andrea Roth (Laura), Stuart Wilson (Ferris), Perry Anzilotti (Rebo), Jack Black (Steve), Richard McGregor (Stu), Ellen Geer (Mrs Talbot)
Plot: After meeting a beautiful girl at a party, average business student Joe Talbot is suddenly dragged into aiding a resistance movement trying to prevent an invading warlord who is intent on conquering a multiverse of alternate realities. Joe becomes a key player in the struggle when it is discovered that a crystal left by his father is really a valuable artifact capable of opening doorways between worlds.
`Crossworlds' from the face-value look of it seems to be nothing more than another direct-to-video action film but instead confounds expectation to become a surprisingly worthwhile effort. Director Krishna Rao takes a newly familiar theme - parallel world hopping - one that has been slaughtered in the most unimaginative way possible by tv's `Sliders' - but conducts it in an original and interesting way. Straight into the film one's attention is immediately captured by a dizzying series of spins - hero Charles meets a beautiful girl at a party who happens to know his name; wakes to find her in his bedroom sitting over him with a knife and runs only to open his bedroom door and find he is looking out across a desert plain with an approaching rider; they are pursued and shot at with still no idea what is meant to be happening; seek refuge with Rutger Hauer at a seedy motel where an ordinary motel room mysteriously opens into a building the size of an airplane hangar; followed by a subtle attempt by villain Stuart Wilson to take over Roth's mind at a museum. Rao is capable of quite effectively suggesting the immediately otherworldly by a subtly disquiet shifting of the everyday - Roth vanishing at the party in the moment Charles turns his back; the sense of eerieness that is created in a perfectly ordinary museum garden when Hauer suggests that people are watching them.
Unfortunately it becomes a less effective film once it explains what is going on and all the building mystery is brought out into the open. Here the ordinariness that Rao is trying to suggest as being otherworldly becomes a little too apparent - a corridor between worlds is simply a desert canyon filmed through a blurred lens, the movement between worlds is conducted by people simply turning their backs in the desert. Nor, bar a brief visit to a rebel camp at the end, do we get to see anything of the other worlds talked about. Here sadly the film's medium budget has gotten in the way of the clear scope of imagination that the film promises - it would have been a far better film on an A budget. Nevertheless despite this there are still a number of highly effective scenes in the latter half - a last minute salvation from a fall from a skyscraper by shifting between worlds; an excellent scene where the protagonists are caught in an illusion where it appears the lift they are descending in is by pieces disappearing around them until they are left hanging from one another's shoes. Josh Charles gives a rather good performance as an ordinary average guy propelled into bewildering circumstances.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1998
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