K-SCORE: 57
Writer/Director: Richard Curtis
Starring: Rachel McAdams, Domhnall Gleeson, Bill Nighy, Margot Robbie
Spoiler Level: Major
The premise of About Time is simply that the protagonist, Tim, and all of the men in his family line before him, can go back in time. Uh oh. Time travel taken lightly…
The first hour is fine; it’s a story of Tim meeting and falling in love with Mary, Rachel McAdams’s character. Their scenes are heartwarming and funny, and the time travel just gives an excuse to replay them over and over with different results. Though, if you think about it for more than a minute it actually is fairly disturbing. There’s a scene where Tim wants to have the perfect first sexual encounter with Mary and so after each attempt he gets some feedback and tries again. While we were watching, Katie said, “Wait, is he just going to keep going back in time so he can have sex with her over and over?” Yep. Yes he is, Katie. But if you don’t find that creepy, then I guess it’s kind of a sweet love story.
“get out your graph paper”
Bill Nighy's character is especially wonderful. He uses time travel in his life to read as many books as he wants without losing the hours it takes to read them. This is, literally, exactly, what I would want to do if I had the power to time travel.
The problem with the story is that after the first hour, Tim and Mary are together and their relationship isn’t challenged again for the rest of the film, so it necessitates a serious conflict shift resulting in a thematic blurring that obscures the entire thing.
And of course, Richard Curtis, like so many storytellers before him, completely fails to overcome even the most rudimentary of time travel paradoxes, thereby accidentally making his plot confusing, inconsistent, or downright impossible. At the end, About Time tries to be about all of life itself, marriage, family, death, and yet earns none of its moments because it constantly begs questions like: “wait, if he can do that why doesn’t he just travel back and change this whole thing?” Mostly he goes back in relatively short intervals to relive brief, meaningful chunks of his life, never bouncing forward, but that simplicity is abandoned because the writer, Curtis, couldn’t resist the temptation to have his protagonist travel all the way back to when he’s a child to relive a fond memory of being with his father when he’s a little boy. By the rules previously established, Tim should then have to relive most of his entire life. Yet, if he takes his memories of future events with him into the past (essential for the time travel to have any meaning) then he has a thirty-year-old mind in a five-year-old body. That would really alter his life. And he has knowledge of time travel stored in that young-boy brain of his. So that just throws all kinds of stones into the river of possibilities, so to speak. That means Tim knows about time travel before his father teaches him time travel, which cannot be rationalized. Get out your graph paper because now you’re dealing with the mess of the multiverse. Read my Bioshock: Infinite review. I’m pretty sure About Time necessitates a set of realities that annihilate themselves.
My mother told me I thought about it too much.