It took me two tries to finish this film. I'll explain.

In the 1940's John W Campbell's Science Fiction magazine ASTOUNDING was in its Golden Age. It seemed that every issue contained material that moved the genre forward in some way. Anthologies of classic SF are crowded with stories from around that time. Among those stories was September 1946's VINTAGE SEASON, attributed to Lawrence O'Donnell but actually written by the husband and wife team of Henry Kuttner and Catherine L Moore.

VINTAGE SEASON is really a mood piece, rather than a hard-plotted story. It has an atmosphere of decadence and languid eroticism that probably pushed the limits of what could be printed at that time in a magazine that was mainly read by children and young adults. Just as Hollywood at that time had to portray sex by implication rather than in explicit detail, so a more subtle approach was also required in print.

So the first time I saw this film I threw the remote at the screen after 15 minutes. This wasn't the VINTAGE SEASON I knew and loved; this was just some crummy TV movie leeching off a classic original idea. I forgot about it – literally. That's why I taped it when it came around again, based on a decent write-up in the TV guide.

This time around I must have been feeling a bit more mellow, as the remote stayed safely on the sofa. I reflected – could anyone actually film VINTAGE SEASON as it was written? And show it to an audience that had seen the BACK TO THE FUTURE films? I considered what I would do if I were the writer charged with developing the original story into a script that could be filmed with an adequate but not enormous budget and actors with mostly TV movie credentials.

Taken on these terms, TIMESCAPE (its title in the UK) has to be judged a success. There is more sentimentality than I like and the plot elements are not handled with the rigour demanded by genre Science Fiction. But the story and characters that have been wrapped around Kuttner and Moore's original idea are sufficiently interesting and involving to compensate and the acting, production standards and effects work are more than good enough for a TV film.

In summary, TIMESCAPE is a decent SF-based drama that viewers expecting a slam-bang FX epic will probably find dull but which will appeal to those who appreciate its more human-scale charms.