BEFORE: Today's the big eclipse day, and I don't mean to alarm anyone, but it's been a freaky year already, and now this? We had Valentine's Day intersecting with Ash Wednesday, and then Easter right up against April Fool's Day. I know, I know, Easter moves around but still, this just didn't feel normal - not every one has to worry about lining up their movies with holidays, sure, so maybe it's just been a challenging year FOR ME. But think about this, we had a couple years of a pandemic, or a plague of sorts, and then we get an earthquake followed by an eclipse (darkness) and then there's a bumper crop of cicadas (locusts) coming next week? And all right over Passover? It seems almost biblical, reminiscent of the plagues that Moses allegedly summoned or predicted, or they happened and he just took advantage of them. But if get frogs falling from the sky in a few weeks, or the rivers start turning red, then I'm going to run for the hills before the boils and the killing of the firstborn.
Look, I'm not that religious, I'm just saying if you were ever thinking of starting a religious cult or trying to predict the end-times, this might be your time to shine. Sure, we've been through this with Y2K and 2012 and every time we get more than a foot of snow, but one of those times, the prophets will be right. Remember what Oppenheimer said about the sun, one day that big nuclear furnace is going to explode and we'll die, or it will run out of fuel and collapse and we'll die. It may take thousands of years, but it's going to happen, it's entropy and it's inevitable. We should be working on getting off this planet and taking root somewhere else, just in case. We're using up Earth's resources, anyway so that clock is ticking, and if we wait too long we'll lose our chance. Just saying.
As things stand, I'm expecting the apocalypse to kick in and maybe coincide with Election Day, that's where I maybe see this going. Myra Lucretia Taylor carries over from "American Fiction".
THE PLOT: Two Brooklyn teen prodigies, C.J. and Sebastian, build makeshift time machines to save C.J.'s brother from being wrongfully killed by a police officer.
AFTER: There's another common confluence, we go through it every year, Black History Month coincides with other February events like Valentine's Day, President's Day and Super Bowl Sunday, which was always in January when I was growing up, and they just kept making that NFL season longer and longer, until they had to move it to the next month. But I never seem to get around to celebrating Black History in February because I devote my movie-watching to romantic films. Can I make up for it now? This week's films (after "Fair Play", anyway) all seem to have something in common, look, we can maybe think of this as "Black Lives Matter" week-and-a-half or something.
I'm a fan of time-travel movies for sure, but they are notoriously hard to link to, worse than any other genre. There are so many romances and horror films that I have to keep separate lists of those, but at least I GET TO those movies. I've had the same 7 or 8 time-travel movies on my watchlist for YEARS and it's so rare when I can link to one, I feel I have to take the opportunity. Sure, I could probably link TO "Project Almanac", but then how will I link back to other movies? And I keep saying I'll just work them in to the regular line-up in the other non-holiday months, but then I rarely ever get around to watching them, it's a damn shame. Oh, I've seen "Looper" and "Safety Not Guaranteed" and "The Tomorrow War" and such, I just don't think I'll ever be in a position to clear this category.
The production values and special effects on this film are, well, not great - but the film is also asking you to believe that two teens could build two individual time machines - or temporal displacement units, OK - and carry them in two backpacks, almost like they're Ghostbusters proton-packs or something. And sure, we don't REALLY need to know how the science works, because time travel's not real, come on, it's a movie and we can cut it some slack here. BUT their science teacher is played by Michael J. Fox in a cameo, so they've got that going for them. He only wants to give them a B+ for their efforts, but hey, he's hoping they can really get their time machines working before the big Science Expo (in the summer? isn't there no school in July, usually?). He also wants them to consider the ramifications of time travel, what can it be used for? And who better to ask this question, than Marty McFly himself?
Well, I guess we need a reason for these two geniuses to not be in school, so they can test out their chronal relocation packs, which open up wormholes that will take them back exactly 24 hours, and they can only stay 10 minutes before they have to go back. Hey, they're beta testing, maybe the next model will let them travel back further or stay longer. But on their FIRST trip back to yesterday, C.J. tries to get revenge on her ex-boyfriend Jared by dumping slushess on him, and they inadvertently cause him to get hit by a car and break his arm.
There are further complications when Jared complains about C.J. to her brother Calvin, and this causes him to leave a party earlier than he did originally, and therefore in the new changed reality, he and his friend are walking down a street at the wrong time, the police mistake them for two bodega robbers who ran by them, and Calvin ends up getting shot dead by the police.
After the funeral, C.J. sets on improving the time-backpacks so they can travel back further, because she wants to go back and save her brother's life, however there is a chance that C.J. and Sebastian will encounter their former selves and cause a time paradox, or worse, bump into the versions of themselves that changed the timeline - so they have to avoid themselves, much like Marty McFly in "Back to the Future 2". And they do manage to save Calvin on the next trip, but then something much worse happens.
The story doesn't really resolve, we just see C.J. continually traveling back to try to correct her mistakes, and at first this bothered me, that we don't get to see her succeed, but I suppose this is a metaphor for how hard what she's doing is. She's trying to stop a police shooting, and that means finding a way to defuse a difficult situation, or somehow preventing it in the first place by stopping the robbery, or maybe she could accomplish this by ending racism. Any way you look at it, it's a tall order, and it's maybe going to take a lot of tries to solve this puzzle - so what started out as a simple premise then ended up as something more akin to "Groundhog Day".
Hey, at least they resisted the temptation to title the film "Black to the Future".
Also starring Eden Duncan-Smith, Dante Crichlow, Astro (Brian Stro Bradley) (last seen in "A Walk Among the Tombstones"), Marsha Stephanie Blake (last seen in "Person to Person"), Johnathan Nieves, Michael J. Fox (last seen in "Framing DeLorean"), Wavyy Jonez, Rayshawn Richardson, Khail Bryant, Ejyp Johnson (last seen in "Like Father"), Barrington Walters Jr. (last seen in "Run All Night"), Muhammad Cunningham, Carlos Arce Jr., Rony Clanton (last seen in "Being Flynn"), Yvette Mercedes (last seen in "Night Falls on Manhattan"), Courtney Noel, Manny Urena (last seen in "The Kitchen"), Brett G. Smith (last seen in "Man on a Ledge"), Michael A. Fearon, Damaris Lewis (last seen in "Fatale"), Ron Bobb Semple, Jeanine Ramirez (last seen in "Ghostbusters" (2016)), Patrice Bell, Frank Harts (last seen in "Paterson"), Jonathan Wilde (last seen in "You Were Never Really Here"), Tuffy Questell (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Tremaine Brown Jr., Monique Robinson, Waliek Crandall, Taliyah Whitaker (last seen in "Marry Me"), Samuel Smith (last seen in "Cadillac Records"), Donna Hayes, Allen Holloway,
RATING: 5 out of 10 ways to play dominoes
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