Netflix’s Our Times is smart about breaking time travel movie rules

From The Flash to Avengers: Endgame to 2002’s The Time Machine, time travel movies usually comply with characters hoping to stop a gift private tragedy or bigger calamity by tweaking some occasion previously. The sweetly humorous Our Occasions, now streaming on Netflix, breaks that mildew by sending its characters to the longer term and specializing in how they benefit from their current — a novel, forward-looking reframing of the style’s obsession with private development that might have been improved with a barely deeper examination of its central theme about gender parity.

Multi-platinum singer and common Latin Grammy Awards host Lucero stars as Nora Esquivel, a physics professor in 1966 Mexico engaged on constructing a time machine along with her loving husband Héctor (Benny Ibarra). Whereas Héctor views her as a real associate, everybody else on the Nationwide Autonomous College of Mexico sees her extra as Héctor’s assistant. When the dean comes over for dinner to speak in regards to the standing of their mission, he makes it clear he enjoys Nora’s cooking, however doesn’t care about her opinions. And Héctor doesn’t struggle him on the matter for worry of endangering their funding.

That dynamic comes with historic precedent: Rosalind Franklin paved the way in which for the invention of DNA, however didn’t share in James Watson and Francis Crick’s Nobel Prize. Chien-Shiung Wu made a vital contribution to the Manhattan Mission, however whereas she and her male colleagues carried out experiments collectively, they received a 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for these research, whereas she was neglected. Albert Einstein’s spouse Mileva Marić was also a physicist and mathematician, and there’s speculation that she contributed to a few of his theories. The CW’s time journey sequence Legends of Tomorrow devoted a season 2 episode to that story, with the characters breaking their standard guidelines about altering the previous to as an alternative guarantee Marić acquired credit score for her work.

Our Occasions writers Juan Carlos Garzón and Angélica Gudiño embrace an analogous ethos. When the Esquivels’ time journey machine by chance strands them in 2025, they search assist from the college the place Nora’s former scholar Julia (Carolina Villamil in 1966, Ofelia Medina in 2025) has turn out to be dean. Julia is blissful to supply no matter help she will, however can also be desirous to see her former idol get to indicate off her skills in 2025.

Lucero and Ibarra are charmingly goofy as they navigate the trendy world, from fumbling round with 2020s know-how to dubiously assessing present fashions. However their awe on the miracles of the web and electrical toothbrushes is overshadowed by their consciousness of how a lot the foundations of gender and intercourse have modified. Their awakening is sort of an inversion of the one Ken and Barbie expertise in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, as Héctor shortly involves be seen because the lesser expertise within the couple’s partnership.

Our Occasions is, nonetheless, lacking the energy of Barbie’s thesis that conventional gender roles entice everybody, not simply ladies. Lucero and Ibarra have a simple chemistry, although director Chava Cartas develops it extra convincingly in tender moments — like after they intertangle their arms earlier than bracing themselves to shatter Einstein’s theories — than within the extra drawn-out demonstrations of their affection, like dance sequences or their use of the periodic desk to spell out “I really like you.”

That makes it a bit onerous to simply accept how shortly their marriage breaks down, as Héctor longs to return to the established order of the previous, whereas Nora focuses on what her life might be like if she stayed within the current. It’s an agonizing rift of their in any other case passionate and extremely supportive relationship, as Héctor grapples with the reality that what made him a very good husband and celebrated scientist in 1966 won’t be sufficient in 2025.

At a time when politicians and teachers have turn out to be involved about men falling behind women by way of schooling {and professional} success, Our Occasions isn’t particularly delicate in siding with Nora and Julia as symbols of the way in which ladies within the 2020s have extra alternatives to be acknowledged in STEM fields, as an alternative of being constantly missed in favor of mediocre males. Garzón and Gudiño may have completed extra to develop the way in which Héctor finds a sympathetic viewers for his new emotions of inadequacy and injustice. However that arc is proscribed to a painfully awkward scene at an Worldwide Ladies’s Day panel and a drunken social media rant.

Likewise, it might need helped to have the 2020s characters reacting to Héctor’s inappropriate feedback about ladies’s roles, or his makes an attempt to speak over Nora, with the identical disgusted befuddlement they present when he tries to gentle a cigarette indoors. On the opposite aspect of the equation, just some strains from one of many sympathetic male scientists Julia recruits to assist the Esquivels may have helped soothe Héctor’s anxieties, stored him from coming off as such a jerk, and even offered commentary on the opposite gendered panic of the second: the loss of male friendships.

Like The Time Traveler’s Spouse and About Time, Our Time isn’t invested within the mechanics or paradoxical nature of time journey a lot because it’s targeted on the way in which entry to a different period impacts its protagonists’ romantic lives. The script’s imprecise clarification about their janky time machine being powered by tachyons and wormholes initially gives a technobabble cause why they will’t instantly flip again time, then creates a definitive deadline by which the Esquivels need to determine whether or not they need to return to 1966. Likewise, nothing ever comes of their considerations about holding the science a secret from the individuals within the current, and the film by no means addresses their actual targets for time journey, past incomes acknowledgement of their genius.

Whereas there isn’t a lot depth to the science on this science fiction, the intimate, private strategy to the influence of time journey turns Our Occasions into an examination of how ladies are sometimes pushed to prioritize relationships above their very own targets. Nora’s grandniece Alondra (Renata Vaca), a physics scholar herself, delights in shattering Nora’s worldview as they speak about sexuality. The outcomes of their journey to a intercourse retailer present an entertaining option to showcase Nora and Héctor’s ardour for every one another, earlier than the story veers into one other struggle that pits his extra conservative mindset in opposition to her spirit for journey. However extra considerably Alondra guides Nora away from her impulse to return to the household she left behind previously, and tries to get her to embrace the brand new connections she’s discovered within the current.

Time journey tales are sometimes about dealing with regrets and discovering a option to transfer ahead within the face of errors or loss, regardless of the issues we are able to’t change. Our Occasions presents a really completely different spin on those self same themes by pushing the central couple ahead in time, not again. That uncommon angle lets the filmmakers concentrate on the perfect methods for individuals can sort out emotions of remorse in linear time, by deciding to make adjustments in their very own lives to construct a greater future. Moderately than obsessing over the thought of fixing the previous, Our Time is a bittersweet meditation about private development and the way in which relationships shift with circumstances.

Our Occasions is streaming on Netflix now.