As a fan of time travel and anything related to time travel, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. From the back to the future cameo, in the beginning, I was already hooked. I had never really watched films produced by Spike Lee, so I wasn’t sure what kind of film it was going to be. After finishing the film I was emotionally processing everything I had just witnessed from police shootings to a bodega robbery. I had to think a lot afterward about what I had just watched and the direct impact it has on the world we are living in today.
The film follows two brilliant young black kids in high school trying to discover the technology that would allow them to time travel or in this movie they refer to it as temporal relocation. CJ or Claudette is the female lead and her temper and ambition have a lot of repercussions as seen throughout the film. Bash or Sebastian is the other lead and he has a more grounded personality and helps CJ through some of the tough times. The driving force of the plot is that CJ’s brother is shot by police when he was unarmed, so CJ and Bash use their technology to try to go back and change the past. In doing so, instead of her brother dying, bash is the one that gets shot trying to stop the robbery that leads to Cj’s brother’s death.
As the movie progresses after Bash’s death, the movie shows CJ trying to grapple with the loss and deal with the repercussions of her actions. Eventually, she figures out a plan with Bash’s good friend to go back in time to try to fix things, but in the end, her brother still dies. I feel that this was done intentionally to show that there are certain things in life that can’t be changed and how sometimes changing something or trying to fix it can lead to an even worse consequence. This movie emphasizes the problems of police brutality and the targeting of certain communities. The movie also focuses on how the police deal with situations in certain communities. CJ tried to call the police on the robbery, but because the police knew it was a certain neighborhood, they took their time to get there, and that ultimately lead to Sebastian’s death.
Overall, I feel that the film was created to reinforce the problem of police brutality and how it takes a toll on not just the families of the victims, but also the communities of those victims. Her brother wasn’t doing anything wrong, but the situation like many other situations in the U.S. lead to the cop feeling that discharging their weapon is the right choice. I also think that this film uses time travel as a mechanism to show that going back and changing one moment won’t fix the overlying problem. Sebastian was there to lay down the dangers of traveling through time and the major implications it could have on the future and the dangers it posed to them.
