Published by Mason Oldridge, 4 November 2024
CONTAINS SPOILERS!
The number one rule of time travel is don’t change the past, but this rule is ignored in Netflix’s new sci-fi film.
In 2003, high school student Summer Fields is murdered by a serial killer as the final victim of a three-day rampage, the previous victims having been Summer’s friends. The town continued to be devastated by the horrors, though Summer’s parents eventually had another daughter: Lucy. In 2024, Lucy is unhappy as her life is defined by her sister’s murder, until she stumbles upon a time machine and travels back to 2003.
Meeting physics prodigy Quinn, he initially warns Lucy of the dangers of altering the past, but she ultimately intervenes in the first night’s double murder. Shouting the security guard for help, he ends up being murdered too as Lucy’s attempt results in an additional casualty, cleverly highlighting how dangerous changing the past can be.
However, as Lucy, Summer and Quinn grow close, they decide to prevent the next murders. They save Emmy which allows Summer to confess her love for her and finally Lucy and Quinn save Summer. They retrieve the fuel for the time machine so Lucy can return to her current life but, realising she won’t be born in the new timeline where Summer survives, she opts to stay in 2003 where she has a better quality of life with her sister and friends. It is refreshing to see a time travel film reject the norm and actually see the characters rewrite history for the greater good instead of focusing on preserving the original timeline.
Finally, the film keeps the audience in suspense as to who the masked killer is before it is revealed to be Quinn from the future who committed the murders in retaliation after his classmates pranked him and Summer rejected him. This is not a particularly unpredictable reveal but also not disappointing.
Overall, Time Cut is a decent sci-fi film. Although nothing groundbreaking, favouring editing the past is a nice deviation from the standard protocol.
6/10