K-SCORE: 39
Director: Ari Sandel
Writer: John Whittington
Starring: Adam DeVine, Alexandra Daddario, Shelley Hennig, Andrew Bachelor, Robbie Amell
“I considered it my duty to shred the chronomystical photobooth”
Spoiler Level: Moderate
I just watched an Adam DeVine film too. And what’s more, my brother warned me that the actor should be put on a list of sorts, the kind of list with Mark Ruffalo and Zach Galifianakis and Paul Giamatti, the kind of list that has Adam Sandler’s and Martin Lawrence’s names in all caps and bold letters at the top. At the very least I should have docked him a film or two, swift strict punishments as I seem to have to with Seth Rogen every time I see one of his films. But I jumped right back in with this rom-com, When We First Met, because I am the world’s premier time travel narrative journalist and I considered it my duty to shred the chronomystical photobooth at the heart of this premise.
So, it’s a little bit like About Time, the film with Rachel McAdams where the new age Grand Moff Tarkin keeps going back in time a few hours or sometimes days so that he can sleep with women over and over and over again, the one that doesn’t work at all and gives up on its core idea halfway through - like that but dumber. In When We First Met, (I think they pick these rom com titles out of a hat now) Adam DeVine’s character Noah is a mess because the girl he knows with the biggest breasts is getting married to some other guy and that guy’s not an evil guy, but kind of a nice dude tool. He got friend-zoned. But, he discovers that he can sit in a photobooth and travel back in time to the Halloween bash where they first met and tweak that night so that it sends his life on a very different path. Now if only he can find the exact right combination of costume party antics and jazz club charm to win her over. Ugh. I know. Let’s get to why we’re here before you fall asleep.
This photobooth sends him back in time AND place to an exact date three years in the past, preserving his memories, and (for the most part) his mind exactly as it was before he entered it. This is actually a workable time travel concept, easier than a lot of others. Here’s how they fucked it up beyond repair:
For one, they made the wrong choice of having Noah only live one day in the past, exactly that Halloween party, and then he goes to bed and he wakes up and it’s the same date three years in the future. This might have seemed like a good idea to the writer because he wouldn’t have to deal with the weirdness of Noah living the same three year span over and over again, which would have been draining for the man, and simultaneously opened up a world of weird possibilities involving playing the stock market, preventing great tragedies, etc. etc. But the problem is that in every future, Noah has changed the circumstances of his life and presumably the entire universe in ways that he doesn’t understand. He has no idea what butterfly effect shit his Halloween party tweaks wrought upon the unsuspecting world. So sometimes he wakes up a blonde-haired, leather-pant-wearing douchebag who bangs the girl of his dreams semi-regularly and sometimes he wakes up a corporate titan who has lost the respect of his token black friend. But the important thing is, he doesn’t know. So he has to spend this new day going around awkwardly asking everyone in his life how they fit into his life and what he’s doing with himself. It’s horrible. This is actually what makes up most of the scenes, Noah asking other people what has happened in the past three years. All futures with such ignorance are unusable, unless he wanted to basically start from scratch with a three year hole in his memory bank, which is unlikely. Even the wealthy version of Noah who was promoted at his generic corporate job doing generic corporate things has gotten rather fat and is generally hated, so he rightly scraps it. Yet he tries a few times, always changing his behavior on Halloween, always waking up surprised at the world he finds. It actually would have been a simpler story if he had to relive that three years, or relive however much he wanted to, and then went back in the photobooth to reset back to that baseline point if he messed things up too badly.
“So he’s not aging.”
See Noah should be absolutely terrified. As soon as he resets his life once, those three years are completely gone from his existence. Anything he does at the party sets in motion a vastly different future than the one that he envisioned, and he, presumably being a normal guy, likely only has a vague recollection of the original movements he made and things he said. He should never be able to set it back to the way it was originally. The only thing going for him is that he’s becoming slowly richer for the experience, understanding better what he likes and what he doesn’t, what has a positive effect on his life, and what doesn’t. In the film, he resets time to the party five or six times. Then they cheat and allow things to go back to how they were at the start. He should have reset it five or six million times. His body isn’t transported, only his soul, his mind - we know because of the fatness thing or the blonde hair thing. So he’s not aging. Most of the time he resets, he shouldn’t even go to the party. He should just be reading books, studying things that take a long time to learn, doing crazy amounts of research on the world. That it’s only one day he gets to live is irrelevant. He can also pull that trick from About Time and sleep with women over and over again, knowing what to say and do. He could also do drugs without consequence, commit crimes for fun, get good at painting or woodworking or olympic sports. As long as he can get back to the photobooth, he’s fine. By the time he decides to allow his existence to continue forward from the three-years-in-the-future date, he should know exactly what to do to get a positive outcome and he should be a god amongst men for what he has learned about the world, for he was given the gift of endless time. Then, when he’s old and gray and dying, if he feels he can still get more out of life in the twenty-first century, he can go back again and pick a new path and live a whole new existence, again even smarter and better than before.
I applaud the premise a little bit because it completely resets the circumstances of the universe to exactly the same point and time every time he travels back and he can only go one way, but even in this simplistic, rule-bound time travel idea, the writer creates a complete impossible inconsistency. This comes when Noah discovers that an alternate future he’s created for himself has him as the senior vice president of his company and he has a meeting with a Chinese businessman. Spontaneously, he just starts speaking Chinese because presumably he learned Chinese in the three years that existed that he skipped over when travelling forward. Whoa? His mind can’t simultaneously retain knowledge from a timeline it didn’t live through and forget everything that happened in that timeline, all while remembering the original timeline and a series of alternates that he tested out. That’s nonsense. If it were true that he secretly knew Chinese, then he’d have, even in the few resets done in this film, about eighteen years worth of locked away memories and knowledge hidden in the depths of his mind. If he was able to reach in there somehow and pull out knowledge of a new language, he should be able to pull the rest out. And then to discover that he’s forgotten how to play the piano?! What is the photobooth doing to his poor brain? How can it preserve memories and not knowledge? Does it pick and choose things to lose with each journey through time? If that’s the case, his brain is going to be addled beyond all reason because there’s no way this pudgy-faced, unfunny, moron can keep track of that web of complications.
With all this, who really cares about the rest of the film? “When We First Met, I discovered time travel, so our petty relationship problems took a backseat to my serious paradox ones.” I guess… if you consider the movie without time travel… it’s a romantic comedy that’s never funny, but only severely, horribly, awkward once, and has a semi-nice message about not getting hung up on the girl you think you’re in love with because her tits are so big it's ridiculous.