By: Taylor Rigney

German director Robert Schwentke proves in his latest movie, The Time Traveler’s Wife, that time traveling isn’t only for Zac Efron and Star Trek fans. With the help of screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin, who also wrote the screenplay for “Ghost,” Schwentke puts a fresh perspective on an otherwise overly-used plot.

The movie, which is based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Audrey Niffenegger, follows Henry DeTamble (Bana), a librarian from Chicago who is cursed with a fictional genetic abnormality that causes him to be involuntarily whisked back and forth through time to important events in his life. As you can imagine, life for Mr. DeTamble can be pretty burdensome, having to live with a constant fear of being plucked away from his daily activities and dropped into a different time period. However, just when Henry thinks he can no longer carry this unfortunate burden alone, cue Clare Abshire.

Clare (McAdams) has known Henry since she was six years old when he showed up stark naked (did I mention that when Henry time travels, he leaves his clothes behind?) in the meadow she played in behind her parents’ house. This next part gets kind of confusing: Henry doesn’t actually meet Clare until much later, when they are both adults, because he hasn’t yet traveled back in time to meet her as a child…. Just go with it…. The movie can explain it much better than I can.

Somehow, the two get past all the confusion of their meet-cute and fall in love with each other. The story hardly ends there, though. They eventually get married and go on to inevitably face some pretty troubling obstacles, because marriage is complicated enough without your spouse being some sort of time traveling freak. As Henry says to Clare in the novel, “I sometimes end up in dangerous situations, and I come back to you broken and messed up, and you worry about me when I’m gone. It’s like marrying a policeman.” Nonetheless, Clare is determined to make their marriage work, regardless of Henry’s nude clock surfing hobby.

As I see it, there are three very different types of people who will have three very different opinions of this movie. Critics, who tend to analyze every little aspect of films, will see an unrealistic and confusing story about a creepy, not to mention, naked, time-traveling stalker who lures in an unsuspecting young girl while she is playing in her back yard. They’ll also probably point out all of the many logical fallacies in the movie. For instance, the fact that there’s no such thing as time traveling, and that it’s certainly against the odds that you will ever encounter a male librarian as nice looking as Eric Bana.

Hopeless romantics, on the other hand, will be captivated by Henry and Clare’s heartwarming romance, the movie’s bittersweet ending, the journey that brings the characters there, and, of course, the lovely Eric Bana.
The third group of viewers will just be left confused and scratching their heads by the back-and-forth chronology of this movie, and these people would probably better enjoy something like “G-Force” or anything else Disney Digital 3D has to offer.

Because I fall into the hopeless romantic category, and I think Eric Bana is gorgeous, I give The Time Traveler’s Wife four stars. In spite of the confusing chronology and the nudity, language, and violence that earned it a rating of PG-13, this is one movie that is destined to become a classic.

Some advice before you go to the theater to see this movie: have some tissues on hand, and a little waterproof mascara probably wouldn’t be a bad idea either.