Time Trap
2022 · 8m
Directed by Michael Shanks
Genres: adventure, comedy, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
A bumbling interstellar time-traveler marooned on a post-apocalyptic Earth must delve into the dead planet's history to find his way home.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a premise that *should* be a tired mashup—time travel meets post-apocalypse meets bumbling sidekick—but Shanks weaponizes the incompetence angle hard enough that it becomes genuinely weird, not just winking at the tropes.
The film sits comfortably in adventure-comedy lineage, and there's craft in how it balances the absurdist tone against the archaeological mystery structure, though it doesn't quite achieve the formal innovation that would elevate it beyond its genre house.
The single choice that cracks this open is how Shanks treats the marooned protagonist's stumbling as genuine problem-solving—every fumble through the dead world is a *decision* to play confusion as resourcefulness, which transforms what could've been slapstick into something almost tender and earned.