Review: About Time (2013)

★★★★☆
Director: Richard Curtis
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams, Bill Nighy    

About Time is the story of Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleeson) and his attempts to find love and understand the way he can use his gift of Time Travel to aid this. On Tim’s 21st birthday, his dad (Bill Nighy) reveals a family secret to his son: all the men in his family can time travel. After verifying this seemingly ludicrous information, Tim is asked what he wants to achieve with this ability. Quite a profound question by all means. Tim answers in an equally profound way: he wants to find love. This is by all accounts a very Richard Curtis movie. As I sat there and the end credits started rolling, I realised I felt every emotion possible during the picture and even though I was still in tears, I was completely uplifted. This is film focuses on relationships in all forms, even though it is predominantly a love story.  

The main subplot focuses on Tim and his dad and is just as beautiful and uplifting as the main plotline. All of the relationships in this film feel like they are filtered with rose tinted glasses, but they work within the world the story allows. My only qualm with this film is related to the time travel aspect. Going into this film I was prepared to be let down by the tiny loopholes that all time travel movies have been victim to. It didn’t succumb to the usual time paradoxes, which was an incredible relief. It battled the usual loopholes by only allowing the time traveller to travel to past events that he was actually a part of. The only real hurdle was failed right at the end of the movie.  A technicality that was outlined during the movie was breached for an emotional ending. The movie was so enjoyable though that I barely realised until after the movie. So for all the good, plus the tiny bit of bad I would give this movie a 4 out of 5.