By the looks of the previews for the new movie “About Time,” it seemed to be just another dried up romantic comedy, and that’s exactly what it proved to be. Not only did the entire plot resemble the popular romance movie “Time Traveler’s Wife,” which Rachel McAdams also starred in, but it also had so many plot holes that contradicted a lot of scenes in the movie. Personally, I think the idea of time travel is so over-done and only takes away from the actual romance of the movie, so when I found out I was being dragged along to see it, I can’t say I was overly excited at all.
The movie began with a small, semi-normal Brittish family with a 21-year-old red-headed bachelor named Tim, whose primary goal in life was to find a girlfriend, while his secondary goal was to become a lawyer (practical, I know). So, he told his father about his interest in finding a girlfriend and, naturally, his dad tells him that the men in the family have the ability to travel in time. Personally, I thought it was quite odd that it took the father this long to tell his son, and that Tim was perfectly okay with the fact that his dad never said a word.
This brings me to my first point in deciding this movie was not worth seeing: throughout the movie there is so much dishonesty, that actually makes it hard for me to trust the main character, Tim as well as his father. Throughout all of the years they have had this gift, only the men in the family know about it, and all of the women live completely in the dark of their extraordinary gift. What offends me is that the women seem like puppets throughout the entire film, while the men are manipulating their lives in order to get what they want. Maybe, just maybe, they weren’t supposed to meet, or maybe there might even be a slight chance the women just don’t want to talk to a guy simply because they don’t want to. To me, it felt like the movie was based on cheating the system in order to get a girl you might not even deserve.
Second, the movie had huge holes in the plot that took away from the great love story that it had. There is no doubt in my mind that no sci-fi time travel lovers are going to go see this movie because they would be completely mindblown to how stupidly it was set up. The first problem was the fact that the rules that went along with time traveling weren’t established at all until something went wrong and then the dad would say, “Oops, I forgot,” so it seemed as though he was making them up as he went along. So when Tim didn’t know one of the rules he was still able to break it as he pleased. The rules were as follows:
1.Only male members of the family can travel in time.
2.Only backwards travel in time is possible.
3.Traveling back to a time before your child is born will cause a different child to be born and the original child will be lost.
At one point in the movie, Tim broke the third rule, but magically he was still able to go back to the child he had before. It made absolutely no sense at all. Basically, the movie was constantly over-seeing and/or contradicting the entire idea of time travel.
Lastly, I probably should have checked the ratings before I saw this movie, because many of them were not that great. Most of the critiques were based upon the dry but confusing concept of time travel, and/or the creepy similarity to “Time Traveler’s Wife.” According to The Independent, they also thought that the movie’s idea of time travel was “shockingly inadequate.” Surprisingly, the movie got a 68% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but no good rating on this movie would prompt me to see it again.
Erin King is a first-year student majoring in communication studies. She can be reached at EK 800454@wcupa.edu.
Fri. Apr 26th, 2024
