See You Yesterday (Netflix)
I kept hearing I should watch this movie….
I watched this movie….
I was not super impressed with this movie, LOL.
Don’t get me wrong… hella DOPE seeing a black girl invent time travel and try to correct an inconceivable mishap that happens to black men everyday in our country. The message and plot is absolutely amazing and I loved the concept of the film. The execution, however, fell a little short.
If you haven’t seen it yet and don’t want spoilers before viewing… here’s your warning: spoilers ahead.
CJ and Sebastian are two young black geniuses on a mission to do what nobody has ever done before… make a scientific break through in the realm of time travel. We don’t often get to see black kids play the smartest kids in school, but here we not only experience the intellect that a multitude of black youth possess, we also get to see the drive that we all have to save our community from black stereotypes and police brutality. The two geniuses find their break through when CJ’s brother, Calvin, is killed after being miss-identified as one of the black boys running from a few white cops after a corner store robbery they’ve just committed.
Determined to save her big brother from his traumatic and fatal shooting, CJ cracks the time travel formula and jumps back in time with Sebastian to start their journey to save Calvin. In the midst of their heroic conquest, CJ and Sebastian run into a few hiccups with the time restraints of the wormhole they travel back through, from getting an annoying ex boyfriend, Jared, hit by a car to getting Sebastian’s past self fatally shot incidentally erasing him from the present and returning Calvin to their timeline. After numerous attempts to fix the errors they created in their jumps to the past, CJ winds up with one last try to save both her best friend and her brother, ending in Calvin sacrificing himself to save Sebastian correcting the timeline and returning things to how they were before any jumps ever occurred. The story ends with CJ leaving Sebastian behind in one last independent attempt to save her brother. She jumps back in time… the credits roll…
ANNOYED!
I get it… cliff hanger. Anticipation for a sequel? Leaving it up to personal artistic interpretation…?
Like I said… ANNOYED!
I appreciate the visual representation of black kids doing things that nobody has ever done before. I can even appreciate the art in how the movie ended; you know, everything doesn’t need to be concluded on screen. I just wasn’t impressed by it. CJ progressively gets annoying throughout the movie, making decisions that not only affect her, but ultimately are the reasons why Sebastian gets shot and is erased from their current time line and needs to be saved in the first place. Then, here she is running back in time again without him? I would have found more solace in her dying in an attempt to save her brother and left it at that… if you play with fire you get burnt.
I think it all just seemed a little rushed without a concrete execution at the end. The garage blowing up and credits rolling as we see her running to the rescue just didn’t do it for me.
Shout out to Spike Lee on the production. He’s an acquired taste, which I already knew when I realized this was one of his movies, but I appreciate him for all of the ground work he’s done for blacks in cinema, he’s definitely an identifiable artist in the industry and has opened many doors for us as blacks. Definitely a D.O.P.E. representation for black kids that want to be notable scientist and make major contributions to the scientific community. He also gave them a great lesson, which most time-travel films do, on the truth in our inability to fix things that are out of our control. He left a little hope for them at the end there with CJ running… like I said, I get it. Just wasn’t super crazy about it, LOL.
Time travel films always leave me confused, anyway! Like:
What were the repercussions of getting Jared, hit by that car?
Technically, it erased itself because Sebastian is intercepted before he gets shot in that one jump, but shouldn’t there be some type back fire from his past self seeing his future self?
How’d CJ and Sebastian get away from the cops after Calvin gets shot the last time? They were all cornered by the cops when Calvin sacrifices himself in place of Sebastian, how’d they realistically make it back to the wormhole before it closed? Better yet… why didn’t the cops shoot at them for running away?
All questions I need answered, but of course they can’t be realistically answered because time-travel doesn’t exist and hasn’t been tested… or has it…
Welp! Be D.O.P.E. black folk and go check out this Spike Lee Netflix Production.
Release Date: May 3, 2019
Where I watched: Netflix