Trying to make things right with Time Travel!
See You Yesterday is a 2019 film about Claudette & Sebastian, two teenagers that try to stop her brother from being murdered by cops due to a misunderstanding. Their solution? Time Travel!See You Yesterday provides examples of:
- Acceptable Breaks from Reality: Time travel (at least of this sort) is impossible but since that drives the plot forward it doesn't matter.
- Actor Allusion: CJ and Sebastian’s teacher, Mr. Lockhart is an experienced time traveller himself.
- Big Brother Mentor: Calvin is this to Claudette till the day he gets shot dead by police.
- Big Heroic Run: Claudette does this at the end of the film to try and save her brother once more, though it's not shown if she succeeds or not.
- Black and Nerdy: Claudette and to a degree Sebastian.
- Bolivian Army Ending: Claudette tries yet again to save her brother from the shooting without anyone else dying either and the outcome isn't shown.
- Cool Big Bro: Calvin to Claudette. He's a caring protective brother who looks out for and stands up for her.
- Determinator: Claudette considering catastrophic failure after failure won't give up until her brother is saved without anyone else dying. Though the final outcome isn't shown.
- Didn't Think This Through: Claudette's Fatal Flaw. Claudette's Hair-Trigger Temper and inability to fully consider the consequences of her actions causes many problems. In particular, she often escalates a situation from bad to worse. Sebastian and her brother both point this out: messing with Time Travel can cause negative consequences and two teenagers involving themselves with a bank robbery and a police shooting where many parties have guns can easily get more people killed. Sebastian actually dies because of her plan and would have died again had her brother not interfered.
- Foreshadowing:
- In an argument Claudette has with her brother Calvin he says "I'm the only older brother you've got." alluding to his demise.
- In an early scene, Calvin gets in a tense standoff with two police officers that ends peacefully. Later on, he's not so lucky.
- God Test: Claudette and Sebastian struggle to convince her brother and his friend that they're here to stop one of them from getting killed... It doesn't work.
- Hair-Trigger Temper:
- Claudette has a massive temper which often gets her into trouble. She is easily provoked into starting a fight in a bodega with a man twice her size and had to be bailed out by her brother.
- Less obviously this is her brother's flaw. Calvin will not back down when he is provoked and he is easily provoked by any injustice especially when he's morally right. While this is normally an admirable trait, due to the state of race relations in America, it can be deadly. It's implied that Calvin initially died because he refused to back down from the cops. In a later scene due to Claudette's presence, he quietly hands over his id and almost makes it out unscathed.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Claudette's brother does this when he sees his funeral portrait change to Sebastian's and then realizes all of what they were saying was true. He stands up and provokes the cop to shoot him rather than Sebastian.
- Meaningful Funeral: One is held for Claudette's brother after he gets killed by police, then for Sebastian when he gets killed by the robbers due to them interfering with the robbery in that iteration.
- No Ending: The film ends with Claudette doing another time jump and we never see the result of it
- Police Brutality: A pair of police officers shoot Claudette's brother after mistaking them for the pair that robbed the convenience store.
- Running Gag: The guy camping who gets startled every time the duo time travels and pop ups into the past.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The whole point of the film is to stop Claudette's brother from being murdered by police due to being mistaken for a robber.
- Shoot Him, He Has a Wallet!: Calvin provokes the cops into shooting him by pulling out a phone. It's implied that that's what happened initially.
- Shout-Out:
- “Time Travel, great scott” - and delivered by none other than Marty McFly himself.
- The film's title is a quote from Déjà Vu (2006).
- Similar time-travel apparatus to Project Almanac.
- Teen Genius: Claudette and Sebastian inventing time travel qualifies them for sure. They also provide repair services as a source of income.
- Temporal Duplication: Claudette and Sebastian try really hard to avoid any mishaps that could happen due to this.
- Time Is Dangerous: Claudette and Sebastian take into account they have only 10 minutes to fix the past due to the time machines getting unstable afterwards.
- Time Machine: A rig on a backpack, one per person is what Claudette and Sebastian use to Time Travel.
- Time Travel: Claudette and Sebastian try to time travel to stop her brother from being shot by cops due to being mistaken for a robber.
- Trust Password: Calvin hands over his dog tags reasoning that his will convince past him. Subverted however as past Calvin sees it as some sort of sick prank.
- You Have to Believe Me!: Claudette and Sebastian try in vain to warn her brother and her friend of the incoming cops who will mistake one of them for a robber about to reach for his gun and kill him... It doesn't work.
