included · Mechanical
Terror from the Year 5000
Prof. Erling and his financial backer Victor build a prototype time machine to snatch objects from the past. Latest find, a statuette, radiometrically dates to 5200 AD! When this draws colleague Richard Hedges to the island lab, Erling reveals that 20th-century objects put in the machine seem to be "traded" for analogous future objects by intelligent life. And on the sly, Victor's been trying to get a living visitor. Does the future need help, or is the present in danger?
Science Fiction
Before you choose
What kind of time-travel story is this?
Time travel drives much of the story.
Meets the archive’s time-travel criteria. The mechanism is classified as Mechanical.
Why the archive makes this assessment (spoilers)
Experiments bring objects and then a human from the future; the woman only appears in the last third, so active temporal conflict is less pervasive than an 8 suggests.
A laboratory time machine exchanges present-day objects with objects and beings from the future.
Check the supporting sources ↓An editorial assessment based on the archive’s documented plot research.
Explore other films in this classification →Scale, legacy & time
The scores
Weighted archive score
high confidence
Aggregate source ratings
How Titan works
Titan combines the archive’s quality, audience and legacy base with the significance of time travel. It is an index, not a score out of 100, and is distinct from the FMV archive’s scoring model.
Titan = base × [0.20 + 0.80 × (time-travel score ÷ 10)²]
This film: 35.09 base × 59.2% weighting.
Partial inputs flag incomplete source metadata. Provisional weighting flags a time-travel assessment that remains uncertain; it receives no additional confidence penalty.
The evidence
Research & sources
Research notes may reveal plot details.
These sources support the plot facts and catalog research. The numerical scores are the archive’s judgments, not ratings supplied by these sources.
Cast: Ward Costello, Joyce Holden, Frederic Downs, John Stratton, Salome Jens
Edition by edition
Releases & formats
0 cataloged editions. Narrow by format, then check region, audio and subtitles. Missing specifications mean unknown, not absent.
No release editions are cataloged for this film yet. This does not mean that no release exists.