Double Dose: Netflix original sci-fi, but with kids

See You Yesterday - 2019, d. Stefon Bristol
Rim of the World - 2019, d. McG

Back in the mid-1980s, there was a tremendous boom in science fiction-adventure films starring kids and young adults.  The Explorers, Flight of the Navigator, The Last Starfighter, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Back to the Future.... Post-Star Wars there was a void that needed filling and Stephen Spielberg showed the way to box office and critical success with E.T.  By the mid-90's, however, these live-action movies with a kid/teen focus were deemed too narrow for mass appeal.  Jurassic Park had proven that you could make big budget entertainment for the whole family... and then Toy Story came along, making CGI-animation pretty much the only successful source of family entertainment for the next 20 years.  Sci-fi adventure that is tailored towards a younger audience has been largely relegated to Disney TV movies in recent years (and even then mainly low-budg live-action adaptations of their popular cartoons).

In the past year, though, there seems to be a resurgence of live action sci-fi adventure (and fantasy) films that try to return to the high-spirited template of the 1980's.  A Wrinkle in Time last spring, Bumblebee in December, The Kid Who Would Be King in February, and these two recent stealth drops on Netflix: See You Yesterday and Rim of the World.

See You Yesterday is based off the award-winning short of the same name.  It's the story of two Brooklyn Academy of Science students -- CJ and her best friend Sebastian -- who develop time-travel technology but wrestle with the ethics of using it.  This comes even further into question when CJ's brother is murdered by a police officer.  CJ's grief leads to plotting to save her brother, only the attempts become more and more complicated.



It's a delicate balancing act writer-director Stefon Bristol (with co-writer Fredrica Bailey) have to negotiate in making a high-spirited sci-fi story with such a grounded, painful, real-world tragedy that is the characters' call-to-adventure. They largely accomplish it, using the first half of the film to set up CJ and Sebastian's trials, and setting the rules for their time travel (how they avoid paradoxes and the fact that they can only be back in time for roughly 10 minutes).  The first half also sets up CJ's relationship with her brother, Calvin, and the supporting cast of friends, family and adversaries.  This time spent is meaningful and purposeful world building, to show family and social life in a predominantly black neighbourhood as something other than what we so often see in mass media.  But from the first pointed moment of police harassment about 20 minutes in, the current of tranquil normalcy is completely undercut by the threat of unintended violence from a public service that doesn't serve the entire public.

That simmering threat eventually explodes when Calvin is killed by trigger-happy cops mistaking him and his friend for the two black youth who just robbed a bodega. CJ convinces Sebastian they're smart enough to jump back in time and save him without causing any negative repercussions but she is wrong.  The first jump is clumsy, the second disasterous.  More jumps are needed to correct the second jump but it's all mucked up, but CJ is undeterred from her initial goal.

See You Yesterday does tread a very fine balance between entertainment and social commentary.  The cast of characters (and performers) are fantastic, and the events of the film have real emotional heft.  There are Ghostbusters and Back To The Future nods (in the form of funky backpacks and a Michael J. Fox cameo, respectively) but the purpose isn't to replicate or reimagine 80's young-adult genre films but to establish a new baseline of what they can be.  The score by Michael Abels recalls the wist and bombast of 80's cinema and does an subtly huge amount of the legwork in making the film feel adventurous and not life-and-death dramatic.  Likewise Eden Duncan-Smith as CJ navigates the balance between grief, determination and hopefulness to make her time travel adventures more fun than intense.  CJ is a strong willed, determined character who owns herself and for better or worse is undeterred from her objective, no matter what mistakes she makes along the way.  Learning and growing from mistakes, and endeavoring to try again, these are heroic qualities, while sometimes her inability to collaborate or heed advice  over her single mindedness are traits that challenge her in her quest for success.

The film is quite successful at everything it sets out to do, and yet, it fails somewhat to structurally tell a fully satisfying story on a few different fronts.  The scope of the film remains intentionally small.  It focuses on CJ and Sebastian and their Brooklyn pocket.  The potentially catastrophic effects of time travel stay very intentionally in this pocket of the world.   Any fallout from this reality-changing technology still remains mostly character focused, centered on CJ and the community around her.  There's no wormholes threatening to suck up reality, no government agents after their technology, and time travel paradox workarounds are provided.  It's not necessarily a bad thing keeping the cause-and-effect so small (the threat is almost always the police and gun violence here, not anything time/space or extra-governmental) but it does keep the film relatively small by relation.  I'm not sure if having larger consequences would make for a better film, or only distract from the indented message.

(:::SOME SPOILERS BELOW:::)

The thrust of the film is the death of CJ's brother, leading to her time travel journeys to save him.  This is what every article on the movie reveals almost immediately, but these events happen so deep in the film that it winds up with a lack of satisfaction to the amount of time travel that happens as a result, especially when the film ends on such an uncertain note as it does.  Which is my biggest issue with the film... it just ends.  It doesn't feel like it should end where it does, with CJ making yet another trip (and 10 minutes left on the running time), and yet that's where it ends.  I was expecting a 10-minute real-time sequence of CJ expertly navigating the past to accomplish her goal, but it just ends with her jumping and a cut to credits.  It's not like Back to the Future -- which ends with Doc and Marty heading off on the promise of another adventure -- this ends with CJ's mission unfulfilled and the question as to whether she's ever successful at it?  The film's final moments posit that she essentially has one more chance to get it right but it denies us the opportunity to see it.

It's a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too type ending, whereby the filmmakers get to still have the social resonance of a black youth murdered by the police but with the hopefulness of a personal victory for CJ in undoing it.  It's part of the problem with dealing with such heavy real-world issues in a light science fiction story, anything the characters do isn't going to solve the larger societal problem, it's just going to fix one outcome from it.  As satisfying as that might be for the character and the family, it still leaves the lingering dissatisfaction of the societal problem still existing and having no direct answers for it.  By leaving both the personal victory uncertain, it creates less of a disparity against the quite entrenched social issue.  There's really no way for a satisfying conclusion here, but they could have tried to give us the personal with the awareness that the other still exists (with Spike Lee as producer, he knows how to give a happy ending but counter that with a gutpunch of reality, per BlacKKKlansman).  Calvin could be saved, with CJ returning to today only to see that a day later another black youth is killed by the cops.  Personal victory but not a social one.

(:::END SPOILERS:::)

Rim of the World doesn't have any high minded goals beyond telling a retro kids sci-fi adventure film.  This one takes pains to be inclusive, with a multicultural leading cast, but it has trouble breaking out of stereotypes and cliches.  I'm sure it could be argued it's playing into them, but we'll get to that.



The film opens almost exactly the same way as Rampage, as we pan in on a modern-day space station in distress in orbit above Earth, everyone inside is dead with only one female astronaut surviving.  It's very strange the parallels between this and Rampage.  We then meet three kids on their way to first day of camp (which shares the same name as the movie's title).  There's Zach, the timid, loner, NASA nerd whose dad died in a fire.  There's ZhenZhen, the quiet, aggressive, resourceful one who seems to have made her way from China on her own (the thinness of ZhenZhen's backstory [reduced to basically one line: "Let's just say dad wanted a boy"]- as well as making her into a love interest is doubly problematic).  And there's Dariush, a loud-mouthed rich kid with attitude (whose foul-mouthed, sexually charged dialogue is delivered with Nickelodeon-style sit-com rhythm by  Benjamin Flores Jr., who is, unsurprisingly, a Nickelodeon staple).  Camp's not going particularly well for any of them when they take a divergent path where they encounter tuff kid with a heart of gold and a learning disability, Gabriel, just as they witness the first signs of an alien invasion.  They see EMP bombs go off in the sky, they see jets dogfighting alien spacecraft, and they find the crash landed scientist from the space station who gives them the key to possibly stopping the whole thing.  Plus they meet an unstoppable alien, and its less-unstoppable dog-thing.

Effects technology is better, and foul language is more permissible, but otherwise this film runs pretty much on the same template as most 80's adventure films.  The kids are from different background, with different anxieties, and are forced to confront their fears in the process forming a close-knit bond by going on a journey to save the world.  It's not without its charms, but at the same time it also finds itself resting too comfortably with well worn tropes and character archetypes.  At one point as a scene transitions away, two black side characters ask why they're talking like black men from the '80's.  This little meta inflection is meant to hammer home how aware the film is of its cliches, but beyond that one moment it just seems to rest on them, rather than confront them.  Also, it literally sticks a 90-second Adidas commercial smack in the middle of the film.

The young performers are all good, relaxing comfortably into roles that don't challenge them too much.  McG, as a director, is action oriented and does put them (or their body doubles) through their paces.  There's some well composed shots that show how small and out of their depth the kids are, against the backdrop of aerial dogfights or a devastated Los Angeles.  Likewise, McG drops some pretty impressive, and impactful, explosions and crashes involving these kids that are very convincing (and concerning).  But at the same time there's a couple alien creatures prominently on display and they are ugly, goopy, first-generation CGI multi-legged messes that look like they're trying to replicate stop-motion animation and vintage bluescreen effects.  I'm not sure why they wouldn't create something cleaner, more appealing, or take the Attack The Block route and hide the creatures as much as possible (it's very much like this film wants to be Attack the Block, but can never figure out the line between homage and formulaic).

I didn't hate Rim of the World... it feels comfortable, but within that familiarity one only wishes for something new, and it provides very little newness.  People reference how this film is trying to be Stranger Things but that (and It) are very successful at recreating the horror-suspense genre for an adult audience that yanks hard at nostalgia strings while also not making it they're raison-d'etre.  Making this type of adventure for a pre-teen/teen audience but with an all-ages accessibility in mind is much trickier, when there's no nostalgia buttons to trigger. See You Yesterday does dare to do something different, but unfortunately it miscalculates its final moments disastrously, taking the film's reputation down with it.

Looking back on the recent entries of live-action young-adult entertainment, both A Wrinkle in Time and Bumblebee underperformed at the box office and The Kid Who Would Be King tanked.  With these two have barely made a scratch in the realm of online film conversation, I'm guessing these types of films are going to disappear for a while again, which is too bad.  The formula is an enjoyable one, it just requires a willingness to do something creative with it.