Time travel stories have a lot of gotchas. Madelines manages to trip over every one of them.

Brea Grant and Parry Shen play Madeline and Owen, married scientists who are trying to build a time machine. Richard Riehle plays an investor hounding them for results. They have some success with an orange, but the first time they try a live mouse, it explodes.

Madeline works alone trying to figure out what went wrong with the mouse. She finds and fixes a bug in her code. In the grand tradition of Seth Brundle, she decides to test the time machine on herself. Boom, she blows herself to bits, roll credits. Just kidding. It works, but of course there's a caveat.

The next day, Madeline unexpectedly attacks Owen in their backyard, and she dies in the ensuing melee. It turns out to have been a clone of Madeline. Her new code had an errant loop in it, which caused the machine to try to send Madeline into the future repeatedly. As a result, another clone of Madeline is going to arrive once per day for the next few thousand days.

Uh...what?

This movie's portrayals of science and technology are painful. Technical ignorance is annoying enough in TV cop shows where the resident geek talks about writing Visual Basic scripts to download encrypted firewall motherboards. In science fiction, it destroys the entire narrative. When Madeline explains the loop bug to Owen, he sketches a triangle and starts scrawling equations around it. What mathematical conundrum is he trying to brainstorm? How many seconds are in an hour. What the hell did he need a triangle for?

They namedrop the Novikov principle to explain why multiple Madelines can't interact with each other (aka the Timecop rules of time travel). This is a slight misinterpretation of the principle, but hey, it's not like the premise was on solid ground beforehand. Later, one of the solutions Madeline suggests is to go back in time and fix the code before she tries the machine, which I'm pretty sure is an actual direct violation of the Novikov principle. Then they violate their own misinterpretation of the principle by having Madeline start killing her own clones. In one of the script's few instances of sound logic, murdering a clone a day for ten years straight turns out not to be a sustainable strategy. Toward the end of the movie, a dozen or so Madelines are bickering with each other and Owen is tied to a chair.

The future where all the Madelines appear is a vast desert with a single abandoned camper. Okay, let's summarize. We have a time machine that cloned Madeline once per second for an hour; the clones arrive in the future at an undetermined interval; and they return to the present at the rate of one per day. After a while the desert is littered with Madeline clones waiting for their return trip to happen. This sounds like a problem that will eventually solve itself. Those Madelines are going to start dying of dehydration way before they have a chance to get sent back to the present. A simple solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this. The point of this movie isn't to explore theories about time. It's to explore various ways to kill clones of Brea Grant ad nauseam. In that respect, I guess Madelines deserves credit for not taking itself too seriously. I just couldn't get over the nonsensical premise enough to enjoy it. While Madeline and Owen were devising increasingly ridiculous ways to dispatch the clones, I was still trying to figure out how Madeline's code glitch could have even caused this bullshit. I'm pretty sure one of the screenwriters heard somewhere that computer programs can contain something called a "loop" and dreamed up this concept without thinking about it real hard.

The climax doesn't make any more sense than the premise, but the point is already moot. Let's just move on.

4 out of 10.

Seen on Tubi.