Nerds That Geek Movie Review: 'Idaho Transfer'

Written by Scott Edwards

It is impossible to know what the future holds, especially when it comes to natural disasters. While we have systems in place to try and help predict events such as earthquakes and volcano eruptions, they are far from perfect and can only give us a ventured guess as to when they will happen. With so much that we do not understand about our planet and it’s resources being used more heavily than ever before, what will happen when they run out. Looking to the stars to find a habitable planet for the population has come to the forefront, but will we have time to do so, as we do not know what will happen to our planet as we continue our search. 
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Arriving back from her latest assignment, Isa is happy to hear that her little sister is in the building.  Being told to brief her on the secret project that George Branden has devised under the nose of the government, he wants his daughters to help save the world together. Getting to see her little sister for the first time in years, Isa takes Karen on a little road trip to show her where they will be stationed.  With the landscape changing drastically in the future, it is time for the two to take a trip the likes of which nobody has ever seen.

Getting set up in the time travel station, Isa quickly shows Karen the process of how to set up the machine and the two arrive in a lava garden fifty years in the future. Seeing how calm it is, the sisters agree that this might be the place for them, without a worry in the world. While taking a look around the abandoned landscape, Isa slips and hits her head. Dragging her sister back to the machine, Karen is able to get the two back to their own time, but there is nobody around to help the young women. Watching her sister die, Karen is left believing that it is her fault and retreats to the only place she feels comfortable, the future.

With the other time traveling kids keeping her fed, Karen will not even try to go back home, since it reminds her of her sister’s death. But there is something brewing when the government comes into the compound and the other time travelers hear that a shutdown is eminent. Knowing that the machine will continue to work many years after the compound is shut down, they decide to take refuge in the future where nobody can hurt them. Being able to travel back and forth in time to get supplies from the past to keep them alive is working well, but after Karen takes a silly trip back to get toilet paper, she and the group find out that the machine has died and are forced to explore the future more diligently than ever before.

This is quite the older little movie that has to deal with so much more than just time travel as you get into the story and find out the difficulties in trying to repopulate the species after the so-called Apocalypse takes place, when the group comes clean about not being able to reproduce because of the machine and find that life has not ended altogether but has regressed under the living conditions. It was interesting to watch as their attitudes towards the future start to change and thanks to Karen’s need to find help one way or another, she becomes the target of one of the members of her own group who will not let anyone come between herself and survival. With all of the changes that the group is forced to go through, it is amazing that they were able to keep it together as long as they did. With a time travel device, a chance to repopulate, a pregnancy scare, friendships torn apart, a silly plan to head to the coast and a future where people are fuel, this movie is really eye opening and forces you to think of what might happen once we are not able to keep using the world’s resources, along with what it might be like being forced to live underground.  

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