Movie Preview: About Time – a film about love and life
MANILA, Philippines – Just minutes after watching “About Time”, I realized London just might be the ideal place to fall in love. The quaint bookshops, museums and even subways are all good ingredients for falling in love.
Directed by Richard Curtis, About Time is a romcom-slash-scifi film set in modern London. The movie focuses on Tim (Domhal Gleeson), a practicing lawyer who wants to find his true love. He discovers that he may just be able to find it thanks to a family secret. On New Year’s Day, he learns that everyone in his family is capable of going back in time, with his dad (Bill Nighy) teaching him how to do it. Tim simply has to go to a dark place, clench his fist and close his eyes. And just like that, poof–magic happens and Tim gets to travel back in time.
He meets the love of his life, Mary (Rachel McAdams) in two different occasions. First, it was during a blind date but his action of going back to a not so distant past to reverse something changes the course of events. Tim then goes to that time when Mary meets her boyfriend. Tim reverses the order of events, allowing them to meet again for the second time.
About Time is not your ordinary feel-good movie. It revolves around life, love and events that will make you think about the essence of time in every relationship that you may have. Of course, the conflicts of turning back time have effects on the future, which may be sweet or bitter. As Tim’s dad puts it, “I never said you could fix everything, not without consequences.”
There are lots of funny antics, punch lines, and lovely dialogues in the movie, like Tim saying “try to live everyday as if it was the final day of (your) extraordinary ordinary life.” The movie also effectively makes you want to go to the places where they shot the scenes and just experience love yourself. Brace yourself for those heart-wrenching scenes that will truly make you value the things that have more importance in your life.
About Time, a United International Pictures movie released through Solar Entertainment, will be shown in theaters on September 18.
