“This is super sad. Like you’re stalking your own life.”

Justin’s rating: Farallon Five is a masterpiece. Fight me.

Justin’s review: Probably most of us, at some point, have been dumped by people we thought were the loves of our lives. Smarted a bit, didn’t it? But there’s nothing to be done about it other than write atrocious poetry, listen to a mix tape of breakup songs, whine about your ex to some friends, and get on with your life.

Or, if you’re a secret super genius and incredibly insecure like Stillman (Asa Butterfield, Ender’s Game), you decide to build a time machine to go back and figure out a way to preserve your relationship.

At the start of the unfortunately named Time Freak, Stillman is being dumped by his long-time girlfriend Debbie (Sophie Turner, X-Men: Dark Whining) but isn’t too crushed by the event. That’s because he’s got a time machine on his cellphone that lets him jump back as many times as he wants to try different approaches to avoiding the dissolution of a relationship that, frankly, he probably shouldn’t be in.

I like that this movie kicks right off with the time travel and the conflict rather than taking too long building up to it, and I like that this isn’t hard science but rather a clever way to examine a question that plagues most of us at the end of a relationship: Where did it all go wrong?

Through flashbacks and time travel, we learn about Stillman and Debbie in reverse, jumping back a year to explore how they met, fell in love, and fell out of love. Stillman thinks that if he can pinpoint exactly what went wrong, he can reverse-engineer a solution that’ll keep them together for good — with the help of his best friend Evan (Skyler Gisondo), because Stillman needs an audience surrogate to explain things to.

Cue a whole lot of jumping back and forth in time and fiddling with events and causality. Things start getting complicated when tensions rise between Stillman and Evan over all of the changes — and the machine starts to break. Oh, and Evan gets Groundhog Day’d into an elevator ride to hell because Stillman wants to relive a perfect moment a hundred times.

Honestly, Evan kind of steals the show here. He’s more charismatic and interesting than the two main romantic leads, which tells me that maybe this entire movie should’ve been about him — a Marty McFly who finds out that his best friend invented time travel.

This isn’t exactly the first time I’ve seen this idea of time travel as a way to make the past perfect and completely iron out any complications or rough edges from relationships. About Time did all of this, perhaps less with a stalker attitude and not as much a singular focus on a romance, but it’s pretty much the same.

It’s an interesting idea, I’ll give it that. I’ll even give Time Freak (still a horrible title) credit that it’s decently made and not a horrible mess. The time travel concept is wonky, something that’s used as a toy by children with poor impulse control.

The problem I have is that this movie-that-shall-not-be-named is a bit of a mish-mash of genres and tones that doesn’t settle into a consistent state of fun or funny. It’s a little scifi, a little comedy, a little drama, and — weirdly enough — a little romance. Going into the relationship backward made it really hard to be invested in their love story, so I didn’t care that much that they ever got back together. Really, the lesson should’ve sunk into this kid’s head after so many attempts that this was not meant to be and he needed to move on and grow up.

And I’ve yet to be sold on Sophie Turner as an actress. Does every Game of Thrones actor get a pass on actually having to appear in something good before we laud them?

It’s not terrible. It’s not. I’m almost always up for time travel stories, and so I fall more on the “like” than the “dislike” side of this movie. But it needed to pick a lane — or a better story — and stick with that.