IN this debut feature by director Dean Israelite and writer Andrew Deutschman, five Georgia high-school kids led by David (Jonny Weston) playing around with stuff like mobile phones, camcorders, rechargeable batteries and various chemicals, crack the technical problems that hitherto have confounded hopeful time travellers.

That’s a fair-enough premise for a lightweight movie about an unachievable fiction that might have been more impressive if it had been better recorded. It carries the five back a relatively brief distance in time. It acknowledges the ripple effect that time travel would encounter if it were practical. It makes somebody pay for screwing up the world’s events.

But the physiological effect on the viewer of cinematographer Matthew Lloyd using a hand-held camera to record time changes and their events is discomforting to the edge of nausea. Lloyd deserves some credit for holding focus during camera gyrations that must have given intestinal ab-dabs to editors Martin Bernfeld and Julian Clarke. As they did me, damaging whatever small goodwill I might otherwise have found toward the film.

At Dendy, Capitol 6, Hoyts and Limelight