In the aftermath of Event 16’s premiere at the 2006 Wellington International Film Festival, some were over-eager to compare Derek Pearson’s efforts to fellow Wellingtonian Peter Jackson’s no-budget debut feature Bad Taste (1988). Alas, Event 16 lacks the sheer No. 8 fencing wire ingenuity that came in Jackson’s debut. Certainly Event 16 is put together with a fair editorial polish and all the performances are up to a professional standard. There is no denying that Derek Pearson has done a highly professional job with the digital effects that create a Wellington of 1893 and of 2026, along with various bodily morphings. On the minus side, the digital effects are nothing truly outstanding – certainly nothing that wows on the level that the home-made effects of Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning did.

But the biggest disappointment about Event 16 is simply that there is nothing exceptional about it as a science-fiction film. Pearson has opted to tell a time travel story using the notion of temporal police fighting to protect the integrity of the timeline. This is an idea that has been done imaginatively in science-fiction literature and occasionally on film – Timecop (1994) or tv’s hyper-enigmatic Sapphire and Steel (1979-82). Alas having introduced such themes, Pearson does almost nothing with them in any interesting way. Contrast Event 16 with some of the other fine examples of the time paradox story – the likes of Twelve Monkeys (1995), The Lake House (2006) and Timecrimes (2007). There is nothing similar here – no conceptual joy in watching pieces of an ingenious temporal jigsaw puzzle falling into place; not even any surprise twists and turns, excepting some rather improbably contrived identity bending revelations at the end. In fact, strip away the digital effects and Event 16 would really be nothing more than a cops-and-robbers story with various people chasing each other around.