#Civil right issues a time to kill movie movie#

and Sebastian work out the fantastical science of time travel in a garage, it feels practical, grounded in the reality of black American life.

#Civil right issues a time to kill movie movie#

Though the movie encounters some of the usual pitfalls of time-travel plots (predictability, muddled rules) and sports some hokey, eighties-style special effects, what it offers in terms of diversity and messaging is a treasure. When C.J.’s older brother is shot dead by police, she decides to go back in time to prevent his murder. and Sebastian, are black teen-age geniuses who figure out the secret to time travel for a science expo at school.

“See You Yesterday,” which was produced by Spike Lee, takes a different approach. (As for forward time-travelling, the future tends to be surprisingly post-racial, as evinced in “ Star Trek” and “ Doctor Who.”) On the other hand, in stories like “12 Monkeys,” “The Terminator,” and “Timecop,” the central conflict is so large-apocalypse, dystopias, national or global disasters-that the narrative can easily sweep past issues of race. In stories like “Back to the Future,” “ The Time Traveler’s Wife,” and “The Butterfly Effect,” the scale is that of a personal narrative, with a white protagonist comfortably insulated from a larger racial history. Time-travel shows and movies tend to fall into one of two categories: quaint personal journeys and heroic quests. Colonial times? Let’s make it a three-day weekend.

It’s a practical choice on the part of writers. The new Netflix movie “See You Yesterday” makes an unusual contribution to the time-travel canon while highlighting one of its most prominent flaws: the racial privilege baked into these stories, or the dangers of time-travelling while black.įrom Marty McFly to James Cole and even Wolverine, time travellers are almost always white and frequently male. Loopholes, resurrected characters, plot resets, ever-branching arcs: time travel is an infinitely flexible conceit, limited only to its own pseudoscientific rules of causality.