Time Travel

Lili’s Pick: Safety Not Guaranteed

Lanie’s Pick: Edge of Tomorrow

After a year of tremendous loss and unwavering uncertainty, we’re spending the last dreaded day of 2020 watching movies that revolve around time travel: the dreamy and dangerous concept that holds endless possibilities of redemption, realization, and transformation. Films that deal in the business of time travel often have some moral lesson to be learned, ie: “any change made in the past can drastically alter the present” or “everything I needed was in front of me all along” , but what I enjoyed about both of these films is the fact that neither of them were terribly concerned with teaching a lesson, or with operating within the regular, established rules of time travel. Given how avoidant I am of strictly action-y films, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Edge of Tomorrow. It was surprisingly funny—funny in a self-aware way, which is oh-so rare in action movies (and in Tom Cruise movies). If action movies spent more time developing their characters instead of building arbitrary sets of rules only to eventually, clumsily break them, then maybe I would be more inclined to see them, Christopher Nolan. Ahem, anyway. Safety Not Guaranteed also subverted the rules of time travel films through a more realistic, even skeptical lens. I was so worried that it was going to be sad but it was just the right amount of poignant. It’s a simple story, but it’s also just very special. Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass were both charming, and dare I say made their characters believable. I really rooted for these people, apart from Jake Johnson’s unnecessary character, which is impressive considering the short length of this movie. I felt my heart grow three times its size (in a Grinch way, not a heart disease way) as I watched this, and miraculously, it ended just as it needed to. If you’re anti-sci-fi then I highly recommend Safety Not Guaranteed, as it takes an almost slice-of-life approach to the idea of time travel, casually eschewing the belief that stories of this nature must strictly be taken seriously. Whether you’re living in the past, living for the now, or looking toward the future, this wholesome film is capable of lifting your spirits—that is guaranteed.