I wonder about the intended audience: the atmosphere being very childish, adults get bored chop-chop, probably right from the start; the dialogues being hardly refined and sometimes ridiculous, the children are therefore proscribed. Moreover, the script is messy and repetitious. Finally, the ending (if you ever get there!) rhymes with bitterness. I nevertheless appreciated the reference to Back to the Future (1985), with the furtive presence of Michael J. Fox as a science teacher.

OK, pardon the pun, but I do believe that this film was hurt by two things. One, it was produced - and not directed or written - by Spike Lee. Now people expect an anti racist film or some propagandistic half documentary movie. This is compounded by the poster and trailer, which do show black kids and a police shooting and a preacher doing preacher things and a dramatic soundtrack. Second, the film starts like a fun sci-fi, with kids, some scientific mumbo-jumbo that is clearly made up and with the cameo of Michael J. Fox, as a science teacher, who will read time travel/slave narrative book Kindred by Octavia Butler in class and even exclaim "Great Scott!". This makes you think that, wait, it's not a film about police shootings and systemic racism, but a fun sci-fi with kids.

And the truth is somewhere in the middle. If you want to compare it with anything, it's more like "Run Lola Run" than anything else. Then it is with people of color, but in a natural environment, doing what people do. And then the action is centered around a police killing, but it's not *about* it. It's just something that happens to people who are time travelling. The anti racism message is strong, but an organic part of the story, not the entire subject.

As such, it is an interesting, if not very original, plot. Unfortunately the main character is almost impossible to like and the actress isn't much better either. Her copartner is almost the same. Almost every other actor in the film was better. Also the natural progression of watching the film is getting high hopes, then falling into depression, then going "what? Is that it?!". It is not a bad film, though, and I do believe, yes, that it got a bad rap for creating false expectations. If Lola Rennt is 7.6 on Imdb, See You Yesterday surely should be rated higher than 5.6.

I like time-traveling movies; there's something inherently cinematic about them. They involve rewriting a narrative, forcing a linear perspective--usually through the POV of the time-traveling protagonists--on the continuum of events, and do so through the elemental cinematic technique of editing, as well as the visual effects, which is mostly CGI nowadays. The "Back to the Future" trilogy is exemplary of this, and this movie, "See You Yesterday," aptly pays homage to those films with its cameo from Michael J. Fox. Partially, "See You Yesterday" follows the formula of that series with a light--often kiddie--treatment of its science-y subject. Other movies where time travel works also tend to be those that aren't taken very seriously to begin with, such as action and comic-book movies--say, "The Terminator" series or "X-Men: Days of Future Past" (2014). Although not my cup of tea, time travel also doesn't seem out of place, if albeit entirely wasted, in a raunchy comedy ("Hot Tub Time Machine" (2010)) or a rom-com ("About Time" (2013)). The point is that all of these pictures are fantastic in the first place; that is, they are far removed from reality.

That's why "See You Yesterday" is so jarring. It mixes the fantastic time-travel genre (that is, not the actual science of it--and, no, reading Hawking's pop-physics book and wearing a NASA shirt doesn't change that) with the social-issue genre, which is heavily steeped in our real world. Often, as here with the humorless topic of black men being murdered by police and criminals, this is very heavy-handed. Thus, one moment in time, our teenage time travelers are throwing Slurpees at another kid (its variation on Marty's confrontations with Biff, I suppose, although, ironically, this may've been the initial cause necessitating further time traveling),and the next point on the continuum, they're trying to save lives from the violence of gun-toting police and convenience-store thieves (something seemingly more appropriately placed in a documentary or social-realism drama). Simultaneously, it tends to ruin the fun of the time traveling and undermine the sincerity of the social message. I thought "Widows" (2018) suffered from a similar problem, although there the social message seemed tacked on to an otherwise-ordinary heist movie. And the social issue was better ingrained throughout "The Hate U Give" (2018),although its melodramatics--repackaged as "young adult fiction"--likewise undercut the fidelity.

It doesn't help that the garish cinematography makes this look like a TV movie, either, or that the visual effects are equally poor, and the editing and pictorializing of time travel perfunctory and derivative of "Back to the Future" (1985)--e.g. the photograph fading and the Coca-Cola can shaking and trash rumbling. Sure, the acting, as others have praised, isn't particularly bad, but I do find there, too, that the tone is all over the place, with some playing caricatures (all of the potentially romantic relationships and most of the adults are played this way),others uncomplicated and unstoppable monsters (cops and robbers),and a few sometimes aiming for realism. To me, only Calvin Walker, as the older brother, manages to come across as naturalistic, but the young actors, Eden Duncan-Smith and Dante Crichlow, playing the two time travelers do OK, as well. Any deficiencies in acting or production could've more easily been overlooked, too, had the narrative rewriting better excised the tonal inconsistencies. The much-maligned ending is merely a symptom of this inability to resolve that dichotomy. It's just bad timing.