It has been a great year for fictional time travel. With characters traveling from the future in "Future's Choice" and visiting the past in "Nine," time-travel was a trendy kdrama topic. It's also the theme of a current kmovie, the sci-fi thriller "11 a.m." starring Jung Jae Young, Daniel Choi and Kim Ok Bin. The film began showing at CGV theaters in Los Angeles this week and so far the American reviews have been positive.
The story of "11 a.m." takes place in the near future at a deep-sea research facility. The man in charge, Woo Suk, played by Jung Jae Young has crafted a time travel machine that he names Trotsky. His desire to create a time machine is personal, as wants to meet his deceased wife again. But before he can meet her, he finds out that the experiment will lose funding and must be abandoned within two days. To prove that his machine works and to get the funding he needs, he decides to try out the machine and travel through time. One of his colleagues travels with him. To minimize complications, he sets the time machine not for the far future but for 11 a.m. the next day. Not a lot can happen in a day, right? Wrong.
As anyone who has seen a time travel story knows, there is no way to avoid creating serious complications if you travel even a day through time. When Jung Jae Young reaches the next day a lot has happened. His fellow scientists are missing and the research lab is destroyed. What could possibly have happened in the space of a day? When he returns to the past, he must figure out what happened and how he can prevent it from taking place. Also, he has left his colleague trapped in the future and must now find a way to rescue her.
The Los Angeles Times gave the film a good review and called it "a winning gambit." They described the characters as well defined and without the often-annoying quirks that characters are prone to have in disaster movies. They also called the film as a character-driven exploration of human folly.
"When making a movie with the theme of time travel, the script has to be very well written," said actress Kim Ok Bin at a press conference for the film. "This script was well written so the film is entertaining."
Daniel Choi plays Woo Suk's second in command.
Check out the trailer below for a glimpse of "11 a.m."
