Rarely does a movie come out of the blue to surprise me anymore. There’s plenty of blogs about movie festivals, and movie release dates for big films are usually pre determined months in advance, giving anyone who cares ample opportunity to figure out what a movie is going to be. Netflix and streaming applications have thrown a wrinkle into that process, since they drop lots of content each weekend that doesn’t have built in buzz. This is my long winded way of saying See You Yesterday is truly a great surprise, marrying a smart script to a great premise and delivering more than an enjoyable result. See You Yesterday is the reason I like to write movie reviews.
CJ (Eden Duncan-Smith) and Sebastian (Dante Crichlow) are brilliant high school students attending a renowned science academy in the Bronx. In preparation for an upcoming science fair, the two kids stumble upon time travel, successfully going back 1 day in time. That truly amazing discovery gets shunted to the side almost immediately, because CJ’s dangerous living situation leads to her brother Calvin (Astro) getting shot by police in a case of mistaken identity from a robbery. Desponded, CJ enlists Sebastian to help boost the power of their time machine to go back 1 week in time to the day of the shooting, to prevent Calvin’s murder. However, due to their previous experiments in time travel, CJ might not be fully aware of the implications of messing with space time.
It’s pretty amazing the feat writer/director Stefon Bristol has pulled off. Time travel stories are pretty well established at this point: even the Avengers can be added to that genre most recently. A good time travel movie has to set up the rules of the world and not break them while keeping the audience from thinking too hard about the scientific nonsense speak. This balance is tricky, but See You Yesterday pulls it off. Bristol keeps the story tight and simple: every jump back is a time reset, eliminating the scope spiraling out of control, and he minimizes the amount of jumps, explaining each one so the audience knows what is happening and what the stakes of that jump are. While this is going on, Bristol under the radar sets up the world CJ and Sebastian live in. This version of the Bronx is a place that is many things at once: a haven for loving families, a place where learning is encourage, a place of high school drama, a place where a bodega can be robbed at any moment, and a place where policing injustice happens on the regular. As a result of Bristol’s world building, CJ turns into one of the more fascinating characters in recent memory: a brilliant student of science who’s as tough as nails because of her upbringing. The world building and storytelling help service the character development, and vice versa.
Bristol keeps the time travel stakes personal to make it easy for the audience to invest in the story he’s trying to tell. There’s no time travel in the first 30 minutes of the movie, we just learn about the lives of each of our 3 leads: CJ, Sebastian, and Calvin. Eden Duncan-Smith is the lynchpin of the story, easily establishing connections with Astro and Dante Chrichlow that make you believe they really care about one another. Caring is not just being empathetic to someone in pain after a shooting, it’s Sebastian calling out CJ on her stubborn jealous behavior which almost threatened a time jump and caused serious ethical and real world implications CJ didn’t contemplate. By setting up all 3 characters fully, Bristol then examines what they all mean to one another, and how the loss of one affects the main and supporting cast differently, and how it affects the main trio as they have to experience trauma over and over again in hopes of stopping Calvin’s murder. See You Yesterday’s smartest addition to the time travel storytelling is how each time jump leaves a mark on at least 1 of the main characters, letting them evolve separately from one another, but growing nonetheless.
One chance. That’s what CJ and Sebastian want to try to save their brother Calvin from being just another name on the police brutality “accidental deaths” ever growing list. See You Yesterday also deserves that one chance from all you Netflix subscribers, especially the ones like me, who glossed over it because it looked like a tie-dyed kids movie. Another person who believes this movie deserves one chance is an actor from one of the great time travel movies of all time. Which one is it? You’ll have to watch to find out.