by Scott Batchelor, Contributing Writer
Time travel stories are amazing. It’s exciting to fantasize; what would you do if you could go back and change something? Or explore the future? Who doesn’t want to know what our destiny holds? Press Play explores time travel in limited amounts. It tells the story of a woman trying to save her boyfriend through the power of music. Press Play hits all the right notes for a romance flick, but has trouble finding its footing when it comes to science fiction. The two leads go through all of the right motions to make us feel attached to them as a couple, but it unfortunately misses the mark. And the time travel aspect is never explored in new or interesting ways, causing this film to rush through a story it could have taken its time exploring.
We start our journey by committing what I would consider a cardinal sin in the beginning of a movie, by showing us a scene that happens later in the movie. It works very sparingly and off the top of my head, only Mission Impossible 3 pulls it off. The scene we have here is tense and makes you feel like Laura (Clara Rugaard) must race to get one more travel in before the movie properly begins.
The run time we have to play with here is short (less than 90 minutes), so there is no easy way to develop characters before forcing them to interact. Within minutes of meeting our lead, Laura’s best friend Chloe (Lyrica Okano) is whisking her off for her mandatory “meet cute” with Chloe’s stepbrother, Harrison (Lewis Pullman). Harrison surfs and works in a record store. That is all he gets as a character. Laura Paints and loves Harrison. Like I said, a short run time means we yada-yada personalities. Because of the lack of character development, there is nothing cute or charming about when they meet for the first time. It is rushed along and not interesting enough for me to fully invest any emotion into either Laura or Harrison.
The first act of this movie is largely just setting up the second act. All of the scenes of Laura and Harrison are shown here because we will have to revisit them later. In one scene they are in an earthquake which is obviously just inserted here for Laura to predict when she inevitably travels back in time. Scene after scene plays out like this. You hear the song in the background, and some type of adorable date is happening so we have some context when Laura comes back. The first go-through of these scenes are a bit too by-the-numbers and don’t really incite excitement about coming back to these scenes later.
At about half hour in, we finally get to our conflict and rising action. Harrison sadly dies, but not before leaving Laura the catalyst for time travel we will see later. Laura is so distraught she gives up her mixtape. Four years pass and we catch back up with Laura, who has not yet moved on. She receives the mixtape as a gift, and we are off to the races.
Laura listens to the first song and is transported back to the first time she ever heard that song with Harrison. I wish the music choices were a bit more varied or recognizable, but I understand music rights are tough, so I can overlook this. Instantly, she tells Harrison everything in the short amount of time she has, as she can only travel back during the length of a song. The amount of time she is allowed to go back in time creates interesting conflicts, because she also can’t rewind the magical tape. Once she listens to it all the way through, no more time travel.
After her first jump back, Laura goes back for more right away to try to save Harrison’s life again, but learns that each time she goes back, he dies a different way. Now that we have all this movie’s rules, it is clear it is a mix between Frequency and The Butterfly Effect. She can only jump back to specific parts of her life and the person she wants to save keeps dying a different way.
After her initial jumps, Laura quickly tries to get Chloe on board, and here she learns that her reckless time travel has somehow messed with the timeline, but we never find out how or why the timeline gets affected; it just does. Laura is never concerned about fixing it either. It feels like this was a story beat that the filmmakers felt the need to use because it’s about time travel but it could have been largely untouched and the movie doesn’t suffer from it.
The movie continues with this method of storytelling for the remainder of the film, and it moves at a much better pace now that science fiction comes into play. Each time, Laura travels back and warns Harrison, comes back to the present, and learns she either didn’t fix anything, or made things slightly worse. At this point, I was enjoying it a lot more, but it was a slog to get here. Nothing new happens from each time travel song, but it’s fun to watch.
We finally reach the scene we saw that opened the movie, and I feel lied to. The beginning scene made it feel like Laura was in a race against time to listen to one last song, but that wasn’t the case at all. The two scenes are wildly different, and I don’t feel like that sets a good precedent. On top of that, it was literally the scene leading to the climax. It took away all tension from the rest of the movie because I knew we had this “key” scene to get to.
I will give Press Play this: the ending was a bit more creative, but it didn’t feel earned. Without credits, this is only an 80-minute movie. Several episodes of Stranger Things last longer than this movie. It feels like this could have been an anthology episode if The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror. I also think the time travel scenes are a lot more interesting if we see them the first time Laura travels back in time, instead of having to see the scene twice. But as of this writing, the biggest problem is you can only rent this movie. I can’t recommend anybody spend their money on this. It’s a fine film that plays with my favorite type of story in a couple of interesting ways, but it is simply not worth putting any of your money into. If you can catch it on streaming, it’s a fine movie to watch after work one day, but until then, there is no rush to press play.
Score: 5/10
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