FREQUENCY
2000 - USA

Director: Gregory Hoblit
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Jim Caviezel, Andre Braugher, Elizabeth Mitchell, Noah Emmerich, Shawn Doyle, Jordan Bridges, Melissa Errico

- Reviewed by Tom

FrequencyI found out that this movie was based on a strange ham radio contact, and being one of those ham radio operators myself, I figured I had to see this one. The movie is about John Sullivan (Jim Caviezel) who seems to have never moved out of his parents' house. One day his best friend's (or was it is brother??) kid is looking through his closets and finds John's dad's old ham radio gear in a box under the stairs. Just for fun, they hook the radio up to see if it still works (funny how his dad even left the antenna still up on the roof—my stuff all got ripped down after I moved out!). Suddenly, John hears a guy that has the same call sign and calls himself Frank Sullivan (Dennis Quaid). After talking a bit, he finds that he is really talking to his dad on October 10, 1969—exactly 30 years in the past. There is also a massive solar flare on both of those nights 30 years apart and that allows them to talk through time.

The movie goes on in the usual time-travel kind of way where John will save his dad's life from a fire, lung cancer, and of course a serial killer! As he changes the past, the present also changes in good and bad ways. (This always happens in time travel movies.) Being that John is a cop, he also solves a 30-year-old murder mystery but only after history was twisted around a bit and more people were killed, almost including his... [SPOILER—See the movie!]. With his knowledge of the future, John also hints to his friend in the past, "Yahoo... Yahoo... write that down and remember it!"

I did like the movie, it had an interesting start to it, but the plot then followed the standard "mess with the past and you'll screw up the future" kind of plots. So I had to subtract a pie slice for that. The movie was kind of a mix of Contact, any cop movie with a serial killer, and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise—one of the coolest episodes of the show ever, and still one of my favorites!

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