326. Idaho Transfer

326. Idaho Transfer (1973)
Director: Peter Fonda
Writer: Thomas Matthiesen
From: Cult Cinema

A group of scientists secretly develop a way to travel through time and start sending young people to a post-disaster future to start a new world.

Yes, directed by the Peter Fonda. I think the only reason the movie is on this set is that some people think it’s in the public domain. I don’t believe it is. Instead, the movie is a curiously low-key sci-fi time travel story.

Isa returns from a trip to the future to lead her sister Karen through orientation. Their dad is running the project so they’re both going to be involved with transferring to the post-disaster world. No one knows what the nature of the disaster was, only that 56 years in the future, everyone is gone. On Karen’s first trip, Isa slips and hits her head. They go home and Isa dies while Karen is looking for help.

Some time later, Karen is just living at the camp site in the future, ignoring all correspondence from her dad. Government agents raid the facility and the teens involved in the project load what they can into the machines and transfer to the future. Shortly thereafter, the transfer machines on the future side stop working, implying that they’ve been disconnected in the past. They’s stuck.

The teens split into groups and head to a common point, encountering various things along the way. When they meet back up, Karen announces that she’s pregnant, but the others tell her that’s impossible since using the transfer devices renders them all sterile. This begs the question, why send young people, or anyone, at all? The plan seems to be to start a new civilization post-apocalypse, but they won’t, in any way, be able to perpetuate the species. So what is the end goal here?

Karen gets up early, heads back to the original camp on her own, and finds the people their dead. One of their number went nuts, murdered them, and then attacks Karen. Karen manages to hide in the transfer station which starts to power up. She returns to the present, finds the guards, and flees back to the future after changing the settings on the machine. She walks around a bit, grows faint, and then is picked up by people driving a futuristic car. They load her into the trunk where she’s consumed as fuel for the vehicle. A little girl riding inside asks how long before they, the people arriving from the past, run out and how long before they start using each other to run their cars.

Final text at the end of the credits: “Esto Perpetua” which, roughly translated, means “Let it be perpetual" or "It is forever." THE END

So, yeah, that’s a flick. Content aside, the movie has a strange tone. The acting is all naturalistic to the point of seemingly being done by non-actors. The result is most of the movie is communicated in a low monotone. Until Isa dies, it’s difficult to tell her voice from Karen’s. Also the nature of the future world and the horror that the characters are encountering is alluded to more than shown. One of the groups finds a tribe of humans who survived whatever disaster, but they’re all mentally impaired, living short lives like dumb beasts. We don’t see this group. Instead we’re told about it after all the travelers meet up to explain the new person they’ve found. Another character finds an abandoned train filled with people in body bags. We don’t see the body bags, we just see him opening the door to the boxcar and then returning to Karen.

Normally a movie dealing with a post-apocalypse, when not concerned with the apocalypse, leans on the “post” part, showing us the world the characters find, face, or try to create. Idaho Transfer doesn’t do that either, though. Instead it’s a lot of the characters just walking across the badlands and not seeing anyone. In other words, I don’t really get it.

I did kind of like it, though. Except for the very final end point (which is a cheap way of trying to make this a message movie), it’s quietly meditative in an interesting way. Everyone on the expedition, except Karen, is really excited about it and about how they’ll set things up to create the new world. They tend to treat Karen as naive if not a bit of a whiner, but Karen is the only one that seems to have a clear understanding of what’s going on and what’s at stake. Because her sister dies during Karen’s introduction to the situation, she’s the only one that sees how much everything they’re doing is tied to death—the death of the world and the attempt to counteract that. Only the project is futile. A group of a dozen or so kids can’t recreate society or the population. It’s just not possible. And once Karen learns about all of them being sterile, she sees how futile it’s been on every level. She’s treated as immature, but she’s the only one that recognizes that this is all a kids’ game.

And then she gets eaten by a car.

I think this would make for an interesting double feature with Virus, another post-apocalyptic movie that focuses on there just not being any people left. Virus is a little more focused on the world ending, but both do a good job of telling a different kind of apocalypse story than I’m used to seeing. With that in mind, I’d give this a recommend. The ending is just garbage, but the whole low-key approach to everything kind of works and lets the movie follow some interesting character choices.

And then she gets eaten by a car.