“This machine is a gun that can fire a bullet into the past.”

Justin’s rating: I just use my time machine to send reviews to myself in the past

Justin’s review: Some of the best scifi is, at its root, an interesting question. Time travel often brings up a lot of interesting questions, but filmmakers aren’t often interested in addressing any but the most obvious of them. Then there’s 2023’s Aporia, which dives right into the query that any one of us might ask if time travel was a real thing: Why not go back to save someone you lost if you had the chance?

Eight months after losing her husband in a car accident, Sophie (Judy Greer) finds herself deep in a pit of despair. Her daughter is detached and flunking out of school, the joy has gone out of her life, and the jerk who killed her husband while drunk driving isn’t even in jail yet.

But all of this might change when her husband’s friend Jabir revealed that the two of them were working on a device that could send, not a person, but a bullet of subatomic particles to a specific spot in the past. Such as, say, the skull of a potential killer before the accident. Boom. New timeline. Husband is alive again, and Sophie and Jabir recall everything before and after the change.

Other than the ethics of committing murder in the past to someone who hasn’t technically killed yet — kind of a first strike philosophy — this action creates a ripple of unintended consequences. Sophie comes to realize that the cost for her husband’s resurrection is steep, especially for the family of the man she killed.

What to do other than fire another bullet into the past? Well, maybe NOT fire the time gun, but they do so anyway and even more unexpected outcomes arise. It’s very much Back to the Future Part II meets The Butterfly Effect, just more lethal and bleak. Kind of a Trolly Problem with a bit of a scifi bent.

Aporia starts with an interesting premise, but the problem is that it quickly falls off the rails and has nothing else to support it. The acting is fine, but the whole project is very low budget, slow, and dedicated to bringing the audience a string of bummers. I like time travel when it’s a fun adventure, not when it’s someone justifying homicide with the push of a button and then crying over the consequences.

When the smart shell of a film dissolves and reveals a mess of logical inconsistencies and dumb reasoning, the audience is bound to be lost. Listen, I really like the idea of Aporia, just not its execution. Maybe as a short story or a Twilight Zone episode or something, it would’ve worked a lot better. I’d scoot by it unless you’re scouring this genre for anything time travely.