Netflix’s New Time Travel Movie About 2000s Nostalgia Refuses To Pay Off Its Most Interesting Concept

Spoilers ahead for Time Cut!

Netflix’s Time Cut features some interesting takes on its biggest sci-fi trope, but the movie also introduces a huge concept as part of the film’s lore and then never revisits it – despite the fact it should have come into play many times. Although Time Cut is filled with hidden references and Easter Eggs, the story’s time travel logic is, at best, a little shaky. At worst, the movie’s canon is a thrown-together mess, and one aspect of Time Cut‘s worldbuilding demonstrates that perfectly.

Netflix’s new temporal adventure falls very short of making the list of best time travel movies of all time, but despite Time Cut‘s time travel rules being riddled with issues, it’s still a relatively fun ride. Hardcore sci-fi fans will likely find Time Cut‘s plot holes distracting, although one of the beauties of time travel stories is that they’re quite often subjective and possible to patch together with crowdsourced logic. That being said, a member of the Time Cut cast openly declares one of the world’s most prominent rules as if it’ll feature in a big way. Unfortunately, it never does.

Time Cut’s Massive Paradox Has No Impact On Anyone, Despite Quinn’s Warnings

Almost every Time Cut character gets caught up in what should be a paradox at some point

Griffin Gluck’s Quinn is Time Cut‘s resident genius, who apparently knows all there is to know about time travel. Although it’s hard to believe that a high school student knows so much about real temporal mechanics, Time Cut uses Quinn to dump the movie’s lore onto the audience. When talking to Madison Bailey’s Lucy Field about whether she should intervene and prevent the Sweetly Slasher’s killing spree, Quinn delivers a strict warning that altering the timeline could essentially end the universe by creating a paradox. Time Cut creates several paradoxes, and Quinn’s explanation comes to nothing.

”
It would be a huge mistake. You should not change the past. This isn’t some Marty McFly scenario, where he just disappears from a photo. You could create a paradox where everyone, everywhere just disappears.
“

Quinn himself, fully aware of the risks, travels back from the future as the Sweetly Slasher, which in turn would have impacted the years to come. So, there presumably was once a timeline where none of the victims were killed. Similarly, Lucy’s confusing Time Cut ending results in her parents never having her in the future, which should have made it impossible for her to travel back and live with her sister. The movie is one big paradox, and the fact there are no temporal consequences removes all credibility from Quinn’s explanation and makes him a character with zero authority.

Time Cut’s Confusing Time Travel Rules Are Secondary To The Movie’s Plot

Netflix’s sci-fi/horror movie has other priorities beyond tracking its time travel canon

Although Time Cut is quantifiably a time travel movie, the sci-fi elements of the plot weirdly take a back seat to the character dynamics. The movie’s primary genre is merely a loose vehicle to allow Lucy to meet and bond with her sister, and to allow the relatively predictable twist of the Sweetly Slasher’s identity to unfold. It’s not an issue that Time Cut didn’t want to focus too much on time travel, but the concept is too tightly wound into the story for how little attention is paid to the rules that it tries to establish.

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The movie does attempt to provide a blanket explanation for all its paradoxes, but it only comes near the end of Time Cut, and it’s incredibly lazy. When Quinn threatens to take his own life in an attempt to stop the Slasher, Future Quinn simply says, “You’ll learn that’s not how time travel works.” The implication here is that there is no butterfly effect in the world of the Netflix movie, which is proven to be incorrect countless times throughout Time Cut, making the line the biggest piece of evidence for the script’s refusal to prioritize the sci-fi trope actually making sense.

A teenage girl goes back in time to the early 2000s to save her sister from a dangerous killer.

Director

Hannah Macpherson

Release Date

October 30, 2024

Writers

Michael Kennedy , Hannah Macpherson

Cast

Madison Bailey , Megan Best , Michael Shanks , Antonia Gentry , Griffin Gluck

Character(s)

Lucy Field , Emmy Golden , Gil

Runtime

95 Minutes

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