Adventures in Streaming: Canadian time travel films worth streaming

The 1960 film The Time Machine (streaming for free on YouTube), based on the 1895 H.G. Wells novel, may have served as an introduction to time travel as a pivotal plot device in cinema, spawning a whole sub-genre in science fiction/fantasy films.

Seen today, the film is a bit corny, to be sure, with star Rod Taylor playing the anomalous two-fisted scientist hero. His titular invention sees him plunged into a future world where the supposedly advanced human population of Eloi (blond, beautiful Aryans frolicking in a pastoral seeming-Utopia) are occasionally plundered by a deviating race of subterranean hairy, glowing-eyed Morlocks, Wells’ extrapolation of Victorian-era class warfare. (Eat the rich, indeed.)

At the film’s end (spoiler alert), Taylor manages to transport back to his present day to tell his tale, only to return to the future where, we suppose, he will save the Eloi from their terminal complacency.

Utilizing time travel to save humanity would become a recurring theme in other time travel movies, notably The Avengers: Endgame and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

But on the other side of that coin is low-stakes time travel, in which temporal tourists are primarily interested in some kind of personal gratification. This year, two Canadian-made films explore that sub-sub-genre.

Time travel doesn’t get much more trivial than it is in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (streaming on Crave) a whacked-out extrapolation of the cult TV series (streaming on Disney+). Like the series, the movie is so Hogtown-specific, it may have Canadians from the rest of the country rolling their eyes at the sheer Toronto indulgence of it all.

That would be a shame: The film is an absolute hoot, following a pair of musicians Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol whose lifelong ambition is to play a gig at the fabled Queen Street venue The Rivoli (not coincidentally, the birthplace of The Kids in the Hall).

Schemer Matt contrives a publicity ploy to parachute into the SkyDome (a.k.a. Rogers Centre) via the CN Tower, a literally dizzying misadventure that damn near works, except for that inconvenient retractable roof. Plan B involves a scheme to masquerade as time travellers, a ploy that ends up succeeding (thanks to a discontinued soft drink) taking the pair into a future where McCarrol becomes a celebrated pop star once Johnson is out of the picture.

As in the series, the movie alternates between scripted comedy and improvisational bits filmed on the streets of Toronto — mainly Queen Street.

You don’t have to be Torontonian to appreciate it, but it helps. Not many movies could land a Jian Ghomeshi joke.

Even the movie’s time-travel MacGuffin is uniquely Canadian. Orbitz is a real soft drink featuring little balls of gelatin floating in every bottle, a perfect ingredient for the film given that it too was a Canadian failure story, ignominiously discontinued in 1999 after poor sales and a factory breakdown.

Shot in Winnipeg in 2024, writer-director BenDavid Grabinski’s Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice (streaming on Disney+) is an unlikely mélange of romance and gangland intrigue with a time-travel element that throws everything for a time loop.

Time travel is the invention of a theoretical scientist/influencer named Symon (Ben Schwartz). Symon asks mob wife Alice (Eiza González) to finance his work.

After investigating the device, Alice’s hit-man husband Nick (Vince Vaughn) shows up at the door of his friend and partner “Quick Draw” Mike (James Marsden) on a mission to save the life of someone near and dear to both of them.

Notable plot point: this is Future Nick, so named because he comes from six months in the future and the plan involves enlisting Present Nick, who is decidedly not enthusiastic about the prospect.

Even without the time-travel element, the plot is plenty convoluted, or it would be, except Grabinski likes to leaven things with goofy pop culture tangents, such as: who was the worst boyfriend on Gilmore Girls?

Seeing Vaughn participate in this frivolity might seem startling in view of the grim content of his more recent films, such as Hacksaw Ridge and Brawl in Cellblock 99. So the film is all the more pleasing for seeing him perform in the comedy milieu in which he started his career.

For a thespian, the film must have had its own rewards. How many actors get to play opposite ends of a character arc at the same time? As for Marsden, the X-Men actor has always kept in touch with his lighter side and he manages the greatest trick of grounding the proceedings with genuine heart.

Grabinski is American, but given that his last project was as the co-showrunner of the Toronto-centric Netflix anime series Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, his sense of humour is noticeably maple-flavoured.

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