Dr. Scott McKenzie William Devane is a college professor in 1986 who holds a deep fascination with the gunslinger myth of the Old West. A year prior, tragedy struck when his wife and young son died in a car crash caused by a drunk driver fleeing the police. In an effort to cope, he teams up with his friend and ally, General Joe Brodsky John Ratzenberger, and the two attend an auction of Wild West memorabilia with a plan to bid on a pair of steamer trunks and split whatever contents they win. As the auction unfolds, the film moves between present-day bidding and vivid flashbacks that reveal the items’ histories across the 19th century, weaving a tale that blurs the line between memory and myth.
In the backstory, a man named Joseph Cole Klaus Kinski roams toward Crossfire, California, on the hunt for a legendary gunslinger who wields a pair of ebony-handled pistols marked with stars. In Crossfire’s saloon, Cole is hounded by a trio of local troublemakers; a desperate confrontation erupts, and one shot ends up hitting one of the trunks McKenzie is bidding on in the present. Cole dispatches the would-be aggressors with swift, fatal precision, an event that a local photographer later memorializes. These scenes provide a counterpoint to the auction’s calm, hinting at a larger, time-spanning puzzle at work.
Back in the present, McKenzie and Brodsky win the trunks, and McKenzie begins sorting through their contents. He notices a photograph of the men Cole killed, and through enhanced imaging, spots Cole appearing in the background and recognizes the pistol as a modern .357 Magnum. Yet chemical and spectroscopic tests stubbornly insist the photo is at least a hundred years old, a paradox that convinces McKenzie that Cole may be a time traveler.
Soon a woman named Georgia Crawford Lauren Hutton approaches, claiming to be pursuing the same idea from a different angle. The two set out to locate Crossfire in the present day, and when they split up to search, Georgia steals into an old barn and unveils a crystalline device capable of moving through time, sending her back to the 1880s. There she hunts for Cole near a river, but her horse is frightened by a rattlesnake; she fends off the creature with a futuristic-looking gun and hurries back to town. Cole, who had been watching her from afar, follows and arrives just in time to learn the time-traveling truth, using his own device to pinpoint the moment she traveled to.
Upon her return, McKenzie confronts Georgia in his home, and she confirms that she is one of several time travelers from a distant future (the 26th century). She explains that Cole is a renegade scientist from her time who has been sent back to stop him, because Cole’s work could unravel history itself. Through careful research, the pair deduce that Cole’s target is Matthew Crawford John Considine, an adviser to President Grover Cleveland, and that killing Crawford would erase Georgia’s own family line—her father had opposed Cole’s obsession with continuing the time-travel project.
To thwart the plan, McKenzie and Georgia recruit General Joe Brodsky to help trace President Cleveland’s movements, but tragedy strikes when Cole murders the general and escapes into the past. The duo uncovers a copy of the critical information and learns that Cole is traveling back to July 11, 1886—the day the mysterious Star-Handled Stranger once helped save the President from a bandit attack. Traveling back to that era, Georgia and McKenzie witness the attack as the Stranger arrives to intervene, only to be shot dead by Cole. McKenzie seizes the Stranger’s signature pistols and charges into the conflict himself, pursuing Cole as the battle erupts.
McKenzie successfully fends off the bandits and shoots Cole, who retaliates by shooting Matthew Crawford. In a climactic duel, McKenzie kills Cole and ends the immediate threat to Crawford’s life. Returning to the present, Georgia reveals that Crawford was only wounded in the past, and she offers McKenzie a token gift before fading back to her own time. Most crucially, she manages to transmit the knowledge of the deaths that haunted McKenzie’s earlier self—his wife and child—so that he can alter the past and keep them alive.
The story blends grief, science fiction, and frontier myth to explore how acts of memory and courage can ripple across time. Through the intertwined fates of McKenzie, Georgia Crawford, and their enemies, the film constructs a meditation on what it means to guard history while still allowing room for personal healing. The past and present collide in vivid, kinetic sequences that place ordinary longing against an extraordinary cosmic backdrop, inviting viewers to ponder whether we truly control time—or if time, in turn, controls us.
