Enlarge / Oscar nominees Leslie Odom, Jr. and Cynthia Erivo co-star as a husband and wife who fear being separated by a warped time line in Needle in a Timestack, a new film from director John Ridley. (credit: Lionsgate)
A happily married couple finds their life together threatened by a romantic rival who travels back in time to alter their shared past in Needle in a Timestack , a new science fiction film directed by John Ridley. Sure, it’s not the most compelling title, but Ridley has created a flawed but thought-provoking love story—featuring moving performances by two Oscar nominated actors, Leslie Odom, Jr. and Cynthia Erivo—that poses an existential question: how can love endure when time itself is constantly in flux?
(Some spoilers below for the short story and the film, but no major reveals. )
The film is based on a 1966 short story of the same name by Hugo and Nebula award-winning science fiction author Robert Silverberg . Time travel is a common theme in Silverberg’s work, most notably in novels like House of Bones and Hawksbill Station . The story goes that Silverberg’s inspiration for “Needle in a Timestack” came during a science fiction convention, when a friend tried to rebuff a would-be interloper by telling him, “Go away, kid, or I’ll change your future. ” Silverberg thought his friend should have threatened to change the interloper’s past, and realized he had a terrific premise for a story.
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