★★★
Best friends CJ and Sebastian build a pair of time machines and use them in order to save the life of CJ’s brother.
Classification: 15
See You Yesterday mixes classic science fiction tropes with more modern societal themes in this blend of teen comedy and interesting drama. Director Stefon Bristol crafts a story with fleshed out characters and both predictable and unpredictable story beats that takes the subject matter seriously and explore the consequences of time travel appropriately. With a marvellous performance by Eden Duncan-Smith as time traveler CJ, See You Yesterday keeps you on your toes with its mix of realism, fantasy and tragedy.
The film puts its reality into its character development and world building while asking you to suspend your disbelief about how time travel works. Per usual the explanations for time travel are made believable from the passionate performance from the time traveler, Duncan-Smith gives that passion to her character. CJ is a flawed character, whose emotions get the better of her logic which creates believable conflicts between her and other characters in the film. When the film gets heavy, it is this performance from Duncan-Smith that keeps the film grounded and never lets the science fiction detract from the weight of the story. Bristol finds a fine balance between these two elements of the film that makes the story all the more satisfying.
While Duncan-Smith is the highlight, the whole cast delivers especially Dante Crichlow as Sebastian, CJ’s best friend and Astro as Calvin, CJ’s older brother. These two characters are lynchpins to CJ’s journey as a character and scientist, and their respective performances add a lot to the successes of the story. The themes of society and community laid throughout See You Yesterday address the serious issue of police brutality against people of colour and how those react to that violence. The screenplay and Bristol’s direction really can catch you off guard with the portrayal of emotion in the film by how the actors can blend wacky science fiction with intense character drama almost seamlessly.
Bristol utilises various iconography from science fiction films of the 1980’s especially Back to the Future and Ghostbusters along with thematic similarities to films that explored African American communities such as Do The Right Thing and Boyz in the Hood. Now while all those films are better than See You Yesterday, Stefan Bristol does find a tangible way to balance these unique ideas but the obvious inspirations leaves something to be desired from the overall product. While all the pieces seem to be in place, See You Yesterday just seems to be missing something. Cinematography and production design for the most part aren’t particularly impressive which hurts the immersion of the time travelling mechanics.
By the time See You Yesterday concludes, you will feel like you’ve been on a rollercoaster of emotion, not all of those emotions will be good ones but you take what you can get. While the ending appears ambiguous, the film is very definitive in its character arcs and resolutions to the stories conflicts. Obviously the main highlights of the film rest in its lead performers and the confident direction from Stefon Bristol, while elements of the film are disappointing there is so much already working in its favour. In the end, See You Yesterday takes itself seriously at all the right moments and offers surprisingly fresh takes on both time travel stories and stories about our own culture.
Director: Stefon Bristol
Cast: Eden Duncan-Smith, Dante Crichlow, Astro, Michael J. Fox
Release Date: May 17th 2019
Available exclusively on Netflix.
Trailer:
Written review copyright ©CoreyBullochReviews
Images and Synopsis from the Internet Movie Database
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