Directed by Mark Dennis and Ben Foster, “Time Trap” tells the story of a group of friends who find themselves stuck in a very strange situation. As far as the storyline is concerned, “Time Trap” does not bring anything unique to the plate and serves the same old wine in different bottles. Taylor, Cara, and Jackie embark on a mission to find their missing professor, but they are unaware of the kinds of anomalies that exist in the world. Time-dilation as a concept was something that they had heard of in the films, but they had never imagined that they would witness it firsthand in their lifetime. So, let’s find out what was happening in the cave and if there was a fountain of youth or was it just a baseless rumor that had been passed on from one generation to another.
Spoilers Ahead
‘Time Trap’ Plot Summary: What Is The Film About?
Hopper, a professor of archaeology, had been searching for some hippies who had gone missing in the late 1970s while they were searching for the fountain of youth. Hopper often used to take expeditions to search for the missing hippies, but he was never able to make any kind of discovery. Hopper’s eyes lit up when he saw a caravan, which he believed belonged to the hippies. He called one of his students, Jackie, and asked her to prepare his climbing kit as he was going on a hike. Jackie and Taylor were together in the archaeology program, and they were teaching assistants for Hopper. Because all three of them were so close, they often used to talk about the case of the missing hippies, and after Hopper’s recent findings, Taylor was more than excited to accompany him on the expedition. But this time, Hopper wanted to go alone, and he told Taylor and Jackie that he couldn’t risk their lives as he didn’t know what kind of perils he would have to face there.
Taylor got worried when there was no communication from Hopper’s end for two days, and he decided that he would have to go there and find out for himself what had exactly transpired. Taylor and Jackie didn’t have a vehicle, so they had to include Cara in their plan. Cara had a crush on Taylor, and her father owned a sports utility vehicle that Taylor knew he could borrow. Cara’s little sister Veeves and her best friend Furby also accompanied them on their mission, and the five of them reached the place where the caravan of the missing hippies was parked. Taylor and Jackie found a journal kept inside the caravan, and they realized they were not just random people but Hopper’s parents. It all started to make sense to Taylor and Jackie as to why their professor had become so obsessed over the years with finding the hippies. Furby tripped over a rope, and the group found out that it led to a nearby cave.
The group found a steep cliff inside the cave, and they decided that they would have to make the descent and see if Hopper was stuck in what looked like a bottomless pit. Cara noticed something very weird when she was making the descent; she felt like they were passing through an invisible boundary, something that even Hopper had felt when he was going inside the cave. The group reached the bottom and found out that there were multiple tunnels in there. They heard strange voices coming out of the tunnel, and they stood in horror, not knowing if some kind of predator was hiding there or if there was another human being stuck there just like them. They decided that they would have to escape immediately, but as Jackie was making the climb, somebody cut the rope, and she fell and hurt her ankle. Taylor believed that Furby, who had decided to stay up, was trying to pull a prank, and he tried contacting him through the radio. But nobody responded from the other end, and the group came to the realization that they were stranded inside the cave and would have to find a way out as soon as possible.
Cara Makes a Horrifying Discovery
Hopper had also heard similar screams when he was going inside the cave and following a man who seemed to have frozen in his place. Hopper tried to escape, but when he came out of the cave, he noticed that the entire surroundings had changed. The place where he had parked his vehicle had a negligible amount of vegetation, but the entire area was now covered with dense foliage. Hopper also found Jackie’s car, and looking at its condition, it felt like it had been standing there for years. Hopper didn’t understand what was happening, but he realized that he would have to go back inside the cave once again to find Jackie and Taylor.
Meanwhile, Taylor heard the voice of a grown man on the radio asking for help, but the strange thing was that the man said that he was Furby. Everyone knew that Furby was only 13 years old and that it couldn’t be his voice, and once again they presumed that somebody was playing tricks on them. They went further inside the tunnel and found Furby’s dead body lying on the floor. The group realized that Furby had not cut the rope, and either he had fallen accidentally, or somebody had pushed him down the cliff. The group checked Furby’s camera, which was still in working condition, and the recordings they saw there blew their minds. Furby had waited for them for several days before he made the descent, and the group couldn’t understand how that was possible when it had been only an hour or so since they had come inside the cave.
Cara knew rock climbing, so she decided to climb up and check if she could find any signal or kind of rope or equipment that the others could also use to come up. Just like Hopper, Cara also noticed that the entire landscape had changed and that the air had also become dense and unbreathable. Cara came down, and the others thought that she was bluffing as it had been only a couple of seconds since she had started climbing. Cara had luckily turned on the video recorder, and she showed that it had taken her a good 30 minutes to go up and come down. Taylor realized that they were probably stuck in some kind of “time trap,” where, due to time dilation or some other unprecedented force, the time inside the cave passed slowly as compared to that on the outside. Jackie figured out that maybe that is why the people believed that there was a fountain of youth inside the cave since time passed slowly there. Taylor also figured out that when Furby fell down, he was still alive, and somebody had come and killed him. The group knew that there were some unknown people inside the cave and that they needed to escape as soon as possible.
‘Time Trap’ Ending Explained: What Did Hopper Find Out About The Magical Cave?
The mystery thickened after the group realized that they were stuck in a “time trap,” and they were still trying to gulp down the information and make peace with it when a man from the future came down the cave. As soon as that man stepped foot in the cave, he was attacked by humans who seemed like they belonged to a pre-Neolithic age. Cara found the body of Hopper’s mother, who had been missing since the 1970s, and the group encountered a number of stone-age men who charged at them on their four limbs. Taylor was severely injured, and it felt like he wouldn’t be able to survive. The man from the future came and took him into a pool of water that immediately cured him. The group realized that the water had some magical healing powers, and they were relieved to know that the masked man from the future was on their side.
The stone-age men attacked once again, but the masked man was able to fight them off. That man wasn’t able to breathe once his headgear was taken off, but before dying, he showed the group what had happened on the outside while they were stuck inside the cave. Thousands of years had passed in the outside world, and humans had made technological progress by leaps and bounds. It was possible to go to other planets and stay there, and planet Earth probably no longer supported life as it once did.
Towards the end of “Time Trap,” Taylor finally found a gravely injured Hopper, who was on the verge of dying and who had figured out what was really happening inside the cave. The cave was like a fortress, with multiple layers of security checks designed to protect the fountain of youth. The time kept getting slower as one moved inside the cave. Taylor, Cara, Veeves, and Jackie were able to escape from the cave, and though they were not able to go back to their world, they reached inside a spaceship that was hovering around the planet Earth. Hopper and Furby were also rescued and taken aboard the spaceship.
Furby had died, but Cara, Jackie, and Taylor put his body inside the healing pool, and that is how he was revived and brought back to the spaceship alive. Hopper’s sister had never died as she was trapped inside the innermost layer of the cave and was the same age as she was when she had come to the cave with her parents back in the 1970s. Though it was not possible for any human to penetrate that boundary, we realized that whoever was on the spaceship had some advanced technology at his disposal that was able to release the little girl from the trap and bring her back to life.
Even Hopper’s parents were brought back from the dead, and they, too, were the same age as they had been in the 1970s. “Time Trap” never tells us exactly how they all were revived, though it could be speculated that the healing water, time dilation, and technology cumulatively had a role to play in the entire scheme of things. Hopper saw his parents in front of him, and he couldn’t process what he was seeing. Though there was a lot left for all of them to decipher, one thing was certain that the technology had become so advanced that it had the power to reverse the laws of nature. The group headed to another planet probably to demystify the unknown and divulge the secrets of the universe.
