On Somewhere in Time

I can't even tell you now when the first time was I saw Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour fall in love on my TV screen. I'd guess late 90s, early 2000s. If you haven't seen it before, please excuse all the spoilers below.

I didn't realize at first that the movie was based on a book, and after reading the book, the magic, mystery, and romance of the film began to fade quickly. This is the first and only example in my life of a science fiction novel having such a heavy romance theme in its film adaptation. The closest thing I can think of is Phantom of the Opera being portrayed as a romance on screen when the novel is clearly thriller. Anyway...

I'll admit that 20 some odd years after my first viewing, the film has me on the hook right up until Richard actually makes it to the past and sets eyes on the real younger version of Elise for the first time. Where that scene used to feel so romantic, seeing it in my local theater for the first time on a big screen, the way he looks at Elise as he walks up to her is borderline predatory. Granted, from his perspective, he's completing a journey of epic magnitude. Let's look at things from Elise's perspective:

Elise is walking along the water's edge, trying to decompress (or keep herself awake since women of her time had very little to do to keep themselves entertained) and up walks this random dude in an outfit that's a decade out of style, looking at her like she's a steak dinner. If it was me, I'd have felt creeped out too. She proceeds to rightfully push him away, as does her manager, and Collier persists like she owes him something because he put himself through mental anguish in order to time travel in the first place.

Probably the most uncomfortable part is when he convinces her to let him into her room, and then she tells him 'no' when he goes to kiss her. He completely disregards how nervous she still is, and that's when she finally caves because she likes how it feels to be kissed.

Within a couple of hours she's convinced she's in love, partially out of an act of defiance against her manager. As a result, her life takes a sharp turn when she decides to abandon her theater company and becomes a recluse trying to come to terms with what happened to her.

Over the course of 60 years, she keeps herself convinced that what happened was a love that no one else could understand, and she eventually realizes that in order to get it to happen in the first place, she has to be the catalyst that sends Collier to the past.

The weird lighting in some of the scenes always threw me off (it looks like day when it's supposed to be night,) and the mysterious origin of the pocket watch still messes with my head to this day. The real question is whether or not this all actually happened or if it really was the fever dream of a man who had a brain tumor the whole time.