The Door into Summer is a Japanese film that’s available on Netflix. It’s based on a Robert Heinlein novel of the same name, written in 1956 about a scientist in 1970 who gets cryogenically frozen and wakes up in 2000 (I read the book in December 1999 as a farewell to the 20th). This new film takes place in 1995 and ends up in 2025.

The basic gist is that a robotics engineer loses everything and decides to take a thirty year cryo sleep. When he wakes, he realizes he has still lost everything (he made investments to ensure he’d have money when he woke up) and has to figure out what went wrong.

The idea of the original story was partially a look at what the 50s thought the turn of the century might be like. But since this movie only flashes forward slightly (from our perspective in 2021) we just get our world with the occasional alt-present razzmatazz like humanoid robots. Otherwise our 90s time traveler spends a few second being confused by smart phones.

The movie is more focused on the mechanics of the time loops and paradoxes instead of predicting a future. And that’s fine too since there’s a decent mystery at the heart of the film and seeing how it’s resolved and explained is fairly entertaining, in a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey kind of way.

The film is generally pretty decent but a little glacially paced for its run-time. I was kind of drumming my fingers on the arm of my recliner, waiting for it to get around to the plot. They were building the story and characters, but at just short of two hours, things are just a little too sluggish.

I wish I could recommend it more since it’s so faithful to a pretty decent book. But I think only Heinlein fans and maybe people who dig time travel stories and have patience will enjoy it. Maybe moon-eyed romantics too since there’s a decent love story embedded in there too. Or people who might love a cool pet cat.

Score: 74