Yet, in chronicling the strange courtship of a magazine intern (Aubrey Plaza) and the potentially delusional teddy bear (Mark Duplass) who claims he’s built a machine that will take the two back in time, director Colin Trevorrow slyly crafts an ode to the impulses that make time travel such an important part of pop culture. Granted, (spoiler alert) time travel really only shows up in the film’s closing minutes. If you ask us, Happy Death Day seems more like a one-and-done proposition, best left to stand on its own. It’s hard not to question whether a sequel (already filmed, as of spring 2018) is really warranted or narratively feasible, given the time-looping nature of the original story, but that isn’t stopping director Christopher Landon from giving it the old college try. It’s an easygoing, not-too-gory entry into the smart-alecky slasher canon, but not a bad way to kill a weekend afternoon. Jessica Rothe is charming as protagonist “Tree” the film is by and large a bit funnier than it needs to be and it does a good job of drawing the audience in with the promise of an expected conclusion before pulling the rug out from beneath them in the last few minutes. Happy Death Day is the sort of film that is both propped up and constrained by its high-concept premise-you know within moments that it was pitched in a boardroom as “ Groundhog Day meets Scream,” and that a bunch of middle-aged white executives nodded accordingly and began appropriating funds and looking at headshots of attractive young women. Whether characters spend the whole film traveling to multiple times, or just talking about it, these films give insight into the fascinating facets of being human that drive us to believe in the impossible.Īlso, it’s worth noting: So many spoilers ahead.

Is it possible to travel back through time and fix the wrongs we’ve wrought before-or will we just create more wrongs by messing with something we’re not meant to? With one of the all-time great time travel movies, Time Bandits celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, there is no better time (natch) to consider the genre’s formative films.

But in the case of popular media, the weird koan holds true: No matter how society progresses, or to what extent our technology matures, human beings are destined to repeat the same mistakes. “Time is a flat circle,” said Rust Cohle, talking about the fourth dimension-or something.

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