REVIEW: ‘Our Times’ Wastes A Good Premise On A Bad Plot

Directed by Chava Cartas and written by Juan Carlos Garzón and Angélica Gudiño, the Netflix Original Spanish-language movie Our Times (Nuestros Tiempos) starts with a promising premise. Married scientists Nora (Lucero) and Héctor (Benny Ibarra) are building a time machine in the 1960s. They’re madly in love and equally competent, but it’s the 60s. Nora can neither get the respect nor the resources she needs because she is a woman. When the couple finally cracks their experiment and manages to travel into the future, they accidentally wind up in the year 2025, where things are, expectantly, different.

At first, Our Times is a sweet, if somewhat cheesy, exploration of what would happen if two adults suddenly found themselves sixty years in the future. They meet Nora’s future family, which is totally lovely. They discover the internet and smartphones, try on modern clothes, and hear modern music, all of which is a little overplayed but still chuckleworthy.

These parts of time travel are perhaps remarked upon elsewhere, but the way the movie singularly focuses on it, scene after scene, is actually a bit charming. The score is over the top every time they make a new discovery, but Nora and Héctor’s reactions are genuine. Their passionate love for one another always mingles with these discoveries, making them all the more interesting to watch.

The setup for Our Times is good, but the plot is just quite bad.

From the beginning, the science of time travel makes no sense and is totally disregarded. Nora and Héctor’s time machine broke upon their arrival, and their goal is to fix it and return to their time, no matter the consequences for the future they’re currently inhabiting.

They keep their time travel a secret from almost everyone except for their family and certain colleagues at the university who are helping them get back. The nonsense of their time travel is waved off in dialogue, but it still nags at you the whole time. Nonetheless, the consequences of time travel itself aren’t the focal point of Our Times, and ultimately, the movie has much worse problems to contend with.

From the moment Nora and Héctor set foot in 2025, they are confronted with evidence that men’s and women’s positions in the world have shifted in the past sixty years. As Nora spends time with her niece, Alondra (Renata Vaca), and her former student, Julia (Ofelia Medina), who is now the Dean of the university, she discovers that women are no longer reliant on men for basically anything. She can go to parties without a male chaperone, she can present at conferences on her own without a male co-author. At a party she even learns that some women date each other, no men involved whatsoever.

This doesn’t diminish her love for Héctor by any means; it just changes her sense of self and how she wants to exist in the world. For Héctor, though, it apparently means a full-on crisis of confidence and a dive into the world of men’s rights activists. In an embarrassingly out-of-touch and out-of-place series of scenes after Nora has done all this self-discovery, Héctor suddenly starts throwing a fit, falls into a gross crowd of male professors who hate women, and turns into a caricature of a misogynist from the 60s.

Our Times’ sudden dive into men’s rights ruins everything.

The sudden change in his personality is bad enough, but the subject matter is completely aggravating. In trying to prove that Nora is and should be a strong and independent woman, Héctor’s outbursts take all of the attention away from Nora as a character, so we can watch this man whine about feeling left out of his experiments and not getting enough credit.

The decisions the two eventually make about their time travel are wildly unsatisfying in this context, when perhaps any single circumstance that could have led to the same choices would have been magnitudes more impactful. Instead, the movie ends on a completely sour note, leaving you wondering what could have been if the plot had taken a different turn.

Had Our Times had a stronger story and perhaps a bigger budget, it could have been a great time-traveling love story. Between the family discovery and the fish-out-of-water antics, there are so many elements that set it up for success. Instead, the movie apologizes for an especially heinous view of the world, labeling it merely “outdated” rather than entirely wrong. It ruins the relationship at the center of the movie that had made the whole thing worth starting in the first place.

Our Times (Nuestros Tiempos) is streaming now on Netflix.