Jeremy’s Tophunder №94: About Time

7 min readJun 3, 2020

The thing that I love most about movies involving time travel is the way that they set up the rules and provide a framework for how people are moving through time, and why they choose to do it. Usually there’s some kind of time machine involved, but using the machine involves considerable risks. This usually leads to one of the two most common time travel tropes. Either the world is at stake and we’re using the time machine to go back in time to save the world (Avengers: Endgame, 12 Monkeys, The Terminator series) and the conflict resides in whether or not they’re successful, or there’s a person who kinda accidentally discovers how to travel through time, and while they don’t have a compelling reason to, the conflict resides in how they accidentally screw things up or try to avoid screwing things up (Back to the Future, Hot Tub Time Machine, Primer). Regardless, the conflict of the movie is central to the time travel itself.

About Time shirks all of this. In an -incredibly- hand-wave-y fashion, they establish that, first, certain characters can travel in time (although they’re restricted to places and moments that they themselves were there for), second, we don’t really know why they’re able to do this, we just accept that they are, and third, that there are somehow no life-altering risks involved.

They basically establish the movie’s rules for time travel in one two-minute scene, and it’s astounding.

I don’t mean to say that the scene is particularly well written or well shot or well acted, I just mean it’s astounding how little they care about introducing an extraordinarily fantastic element into an otherwise very ordinary movie. They just go “Yup, time travel is a thing, we good? Good. Let’s move on,” and then they just trudge forward with the rest of the movie. There’s no finesse here. I’m really, genuinely impressed.

And from there, the characters are using time travel to do what, exactly? Gain immeasurable wealth? Become famous? Right all the wrongs of modern society? Nope. Bill Nighy is going to go back to read more and spend more time with his kids, and Domnhall Gleeson is going to manipulate time in order to compensate for his own awkwardness and land himself a girlfriend.

Like, seriously? You’re going to make a movie with something as unheard-of cool as time travel, and you’re going to have your main characters use it to do… nothing of consequence beyond their own personal life? Again, I’m not even mad. I’m kind of amazed. It’s like writing a movie where a few characters are able to perform literal magic with nearly limitless possibilities, but they only thing they use it for is cleaning up around the house and making laundry fold itself.

By all rights, I should absolutely despise this movie. It spends almost no time introducing the time travel, they use the god-like power to do nothing all that cool, and then on top of that, it’s written and directed by the same guy that made all of the piece of trash British rom-coms that I outwardly hate and genuinely wish had never existed (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’ Diary, and Love Actually). It follows the recipe for a movie I would ordinarily hate to a T, and yet, I don’t hate it. I’m not sure whether I love to hate it or I actually just like it for it’s own merit, but it’s a movie I’ve seen a half-dozen times and I’ve enjoyed it every time.

I really enjoy Domhnall Gleeson. I guess he played a bit part in the Harry Potter series, but obviously nothing large enough for anyone to get attached to him. The first time I remember really seeing him was in Unbroken (the movie kinda sucked but I thought Gleeson was good), and then he rattled off About Time (which technically came before Unbroken but I didn’t see it until later), Ex Machina, Brooklyn, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and The Revenant, all between 2013 and 2015. None were particularly high-profile roles (it’s not like he landed Oscar or Golden Globe nominations), but I thought he showed some truly impressive range. I’m not saying that I’ll go see any Domhnall Gleeson movie sight unseen, but he’s certainly on the list of actors that move the needle for me if I’m on the fence about watching something.

Bill Nighy is another actor that I always seem to enjoy (as mentioned above, I hate Love Actually with an all-consuming passion, but his character was one of the few that actually got me invested rather than hoping they got run over by a bus so the movie would be over). He’s perhaps at his Bill Nighy-est here, putting together a few genuinely great scenes and for a quick second making me wish he was my dad. I think he’s a fantastic actor, and while I don’t quite understand how he chooses his roles (I can only assume a dartboard is involved), I always find myself pleasantly surprised by his work.

I’ve mentioned my affinity for Rachel McAdams a few times in this space over the last few months, but I’ll just mention again that I think she’s one of the best female actors working today. I think she’s good (but not great) in About Time, and while she doesn’t really stand out for this performance, reading up on her career recently reminded me of some really interesting choices that she’s made. For example, she turned down Anne Hathaway’s role in The Devil Wears Prada multiple times, as well as Eva Green’s role from Casino Royale. Both came during the period following Mean Girls and Wedding Crashers where she was specifically avoiding mainstream movies. She later said in 2013, “Truthfully, I never really wanted to be a big movie star. I never even wanted to work outside of Canada, or outside of the theater.” I had never really thought of McAdams that way — I had always kind of assumed that she just kind of fell by the wayside and the “it girl” roles of the late 2000s went towards Anne Hathaway and Scarlett Johansson just because that’s the direction the industry went. It never occurred to me that it was an intentional choice on McAdams’ part. I thought that was really interesting.

I’m not entirely sure why I like this movie so much. Some of the time travel stuff honestly drives me batty. For one glaring and stupid example, Gleeson goes to a Dans le Noir dinner, where he meets McAdams, and they hit it off perfectly. He gets her number, but loses it when he goes back in time to help fix his roommate’s disastrous play premier. But in doing so, he loses McAdams’ number (because he never went to the dinner where he got it), and has to find a new way to serendipitously meet her. But like, isn’t his whole motivation to find a girl he likes? Doesn’t meeting the love of his life matter more than whether or not his roommate’s premier goes well? Keep in mind that he doesn’t even really seem to like his roommate (who is very objectively an asshole) and he has expressly stated to other characters that what he wants most in the world is to fall in love.

And trust me, there are -dozens- of similar plot holes. The internal logic of the movie is spotty at best and willfully ignored at worst.

But I still like this movie. Maybe. Ultimately, I don’t really care why. Some movies just hit you in a certain way that can’t fully be explained or understood, and maybe this is one of those movies. There’s a laundry list of reasons why I should hate it, and somehow I don’t. And at the end of the day, that’s the biggest reason why it landed on my list. Because I should hate it and don’t understand why I don’t. Clearly there’s something that has attached this movie to my psyche in an involuntary way. It’s not a great movie (and maybe not even a good one), but I like it enough for it to be №94 on my list.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

8. The Departed

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring