Time travel has always been one of those subject that no one truly knows how to handle, because of how difficult it is to comprehend. Travelling through time, if even only by a couple minutes can lead to all sorts of unforeseen consequences. One minor change in the timeline could lead to a catastrophic shift in the original timeline, and here we see that deliberately changing something can always lead to something else going wrong.
See You Yesterday is a Sci-Fi film that depicts the struggle of young girl desperately trying to do something that seems impossible. It all starts with the unjust shooting of her older brother. At first what seemed like a massive scientific achievement was turned and twisted into a grueling journey of two teens trying to change an unavoidable event.
Watching See You Yesterday made me question the possibility of what Science could and couldn’t fix. Even with all the power of a time machine at their disposal, Claudette and Sebastian couldn’t stop the death of Claudette’s brother no matter how many times they tried. It begs the question of if these events that happen in life are fated to play out a certain way.
A question that doesn’t cross Claudette’s mind throughout the movie. There has to be some way she can save him, or at least that’s what she thinks. Here we see the general conflict of Person vs Fate. Claudette refuses to believe that there’s nothing she can do to prevent the unjust murder of her brother by the hands of the police. So she repeatedly goes back to try and stop it, despite the grave consequences of her failures that always appear in each jump.
But Claudette isn’t the only one to notice these failures, which further reinforces the strange unavoidability of her brother’s death. During one of the jumps, the past version of her best friend and Companion Sebastian get shot by a pair of robbers. Upon this happening, the present version of Sebastian dies and everything shifted from her brother being killed to Sebastian being killed.
This was obviously a drastic change, so drastic that Claudette’s brother Calvin, who was now alive and well, felt like he should’ve been the one to die. Even the past version of Calvin, from when Sebastian is saved, starts acting off and feeling different because of how many times the day has come and he has been killed in the shooting.
Science is a dangerous concept that all of humanity has explored one way or another. It has cured things, and it has helped plan for things, but there is always the question of how far Science can go in terms of otherworldly things like Time Travel or interfering with time. Can science really fix any problem that humans have? Will Claudette ever find a true way to save her brother without sacrificing someone?
Was her brother’s fate sealed the day it happened, or is this thing we call fate unavoidable with every action we take?
The world may never know.
