See You Yesterday is a 2019 adventure film about best friends who build a pair of time machines and use them in order to save a life.
There’s a kind of lyrical quality to director Stefon Bristol‘s latest Netflix-produced film See You Yesterday, the way it pulses and moves from moment to moment, finding beats along the way that help mix the comedy and drama well. It’s a creative little film with energy and passion that does a lot just right, even as it might be not able to wrap it up as strongly as it starts.
Claudette ‘CJ’ Walker (Eden Duncan-Smith) is a genius, a high school student with great enthusiasm for science. Her best friend is Sebastian Thomas (Dante Crichlow), he equally invested in her interests, the two working a secret tech-repair business from his garage while also inventing time travel. Yup, with backpacks full of gadgets and whatnots, the are able to jump back one full day, believing their work will win them scholarships and more. However, when CJ’s big brother Calvin (Astro) is fatally shot by police, she thinks her new contraption can save his life, learning though that time and fate are forever connected.
To start, there is a wondrous cameo in an early scene of See You Yesterday that is almost magical in setting the right tone, a name I dare not say but is intrinsically embedded in the genre and the appearance is perfectly spun in establishing where we should be in watching the rest. Bristol’s film doesn’t quite capture the lightning in a bottle that person’s contribution to time travel did, but it’s not for a lack of trying. These are different times and as such, with the setting and atmosphere of these characters, feels like a good place to try.
Where it swings and hits for the fences is in the leads with the young cast truly get in step, both Duncan-Smith and Crichlow fun to watch with terrific chemistry between them. They look straight from Disney central casting but in Bristol’s hands, manage to be smart and innovative rather than the typical snarky teen we see too often in film. In a smaller role but far more impactful is Astro, who has terrific presence throughout.
What’s disappointing about See You Yesterday is its failure to do more with what it’s got on tap, with the police for example portrayed with no depth whatsoever, caricatures that from their first moments on screen are cartoonish and hollow, leaving their actions not just obvious but without any opportunity for exploration. Certainly, saving the life a murdered brother is a noble reason enough to use time travel, the movie doing its best to bring racism and violence at the front of the pack, but it can’t somehow bring that together with all the juggling going on elsewhere in the movie.
While the time jumps get caught in their own diminishing returns, a lesson that few time travel movies get right when returning over and over to the same moment, the cast helps greatly in keeping it all upright. If anything, this should be a leaping off point for many of these young actors, and it’s worth it to watch them all take to this with as much enthusiasm as the do.