Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel (2009)

Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel arrives from 2009, a year when a British comedy could still be about three men in a pub and nothing else. Two science fiction enthusiasts and their caustic friend bicker over lager, wander into a time leak in the men's toilet, and meet a traveller from the future. The stakes are temporal. The register is laddish. Gareth Carrivick directs with the energy of a stretched television pilot, and the screenplay by Jamie Mathieson cares only about paradox mechanics and the correct way to mock Hollywood.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a near-vacuum. The cast is a white British ensemble with Anna Faris imported as the lone American, and no inclusive intent is visible in the arrangement. Cassie and Millie are competent women who repair timelines and threaten assassinations, yet the film advances no thesis about gender, and the pub banter keeps its laddish footing throughout. The Letter to Hollywood and the Editors who police cultural standards amount to a showbiz in-joke, a complaint about bad movies, not an economic argument about who owns what. Race, climate, body image, neurodivergence and history are simply absent. The geeks are geeks because they like spaceships, not because the film has anything to say about how minds work.

The film never lectures. It has no sermon to deliver and no moral to press upon a captive audience, and in that narrow sense it is almost restful. The residue is a modest comic curio, amiable, disposable, untroubled by the questions that would soon dominate the culture. We classify it accordingly, and we move on.