From The Flash to Avengers: Endgame to 2002’s The Time Machine, time travel movies often follow characters hoping to prevent a present personal tragedy or larger calamity by tweaking some event in the past. The sweetly funny Our Times, now streaming on Netflix, breaks that mold by sending its characters to the future and focusing on how they make the most of their present — a novel, forward-looking reframing of the genre’s obsession with personal growth that could have been improved with a slightly deeper examination of its central theme about gender parity.
Multi-platinum singer and regular Latin Grammy Awards host Lucero stars as Nora Esquivel, a physics professor in 1966 Mexico working on building a time machine with her loving husband Héctor (Benny Ibarra). While Héctor views her as a true partner, everyone else at the National Autonomous University of Mexico sees her more as Héctor’s assistant. When the dean comes over for dinner to talk about the status of their project, he makes it clear he enjoys Nora’s cooking, but doesn’t care about her opinions. And Héctor doesn’t fight him on the matter for fear of endangering their funding.
That dynamic comes with historic precedent: Rosalind Franklin paved the way for the discovery of DNA, but didn’t share in James Watson and Francis Crick’s Nobel Prize. Chien-Shiung Wu made a crucial contribution to the Manhattan Project, but while she and her male colleagues conducted experiments together, they won a 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for those studies, while she was left out. Albert Einstein’s wife Mileva Marić was also a physicist and mathematician, and there’s speculation that she contributed to some of his theories. The CW’s time travel series Legends of Tomorrow devoted a season 2 episode to that story, with the characters breaking their usual rules about changing the past to instead ensure Marić got credit for her work.
Our Times writers Juan Carlos Garzón and Angélica Gudiño embrace a similar ethos. When the Esquivels’ time travel machine accidentally strands them in 2025, they seek help from the university where Nora’s former student Julia (Carolina Villamil in 1966, Ofelia Medina in 2025) has become dean. Julia is happy to provide whatever assistance she can, but is also eager to see her former idol get to show off her talents in 2025.
Lucero and Ibarra are charmingly goofy as they navigate the modern world, from fumbling around with 2020s technology to dubiously assessing current fashions. But their awe at the miracles of the internet and electric toothbrushes is overshadowed by their awareness of how much the rules of gender and sex have changed. Their awakening is almost an inversion of the one Ken and Barbie experience in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, as Héctor quickly comes to be viewed as the lesser talent in the couple’s partnership.
Our Times is, however, missing the strength of Barbie’s thesis that traditional gender roles trap everyone, not just women. Lucero and Ibarra have an easy chemistry, though director Chava Cartas develops it more convincingly in tender moments — like when they intertangle their hands before bracing themselves to shatter Einstein’s theories — than in the more drawn-out demonstrations of their affection, like dance sequences or their use of the periodic table to spell out “I love you.”
Photo: Netflix
That makes it a bit hard to accept how quickly their marriage breaks down, as Héctor longs to return to the status quo of the past, while Nora focuses on what her life could be like if she stayed in the present. It’s an agonizing rift in their otherwise passionate and highly supportive relationship, as Héctor grapples with the truth that what made him a good husband and celebrated scientist in 1966 might not be enough in 2025.
At a time when politicians and academics have become concerned about men falling behind women in terms of education and professional success, Our Times isn’t especially subtle in siding with Nora and Julia as symbols of the way women in the 2020s have more opportunities to be recognized in STEM fields, instead of being consistently overlooked in favor of mediocre men. Garzón and Gudiño could have done more to develop the way Héctor finds a sympathetic audience for his new feelings of inadequacy and injustice. But that arc is limited to a painfully awkward scene at an International Women’s Day panel and a drunken social media rant.
Likewise, it might have helped to have the 2020s characters reacting to Héctor’s inappropriate comments about women’s roles, or his attempts to talk over Nora, with the same disgusted befuddlement they show when he tries to light a cigarette indoors. On the other side of the equation, just a few lines from one of the sympathetic male scientists Julia recruits to help the Esquivels could have helped soothe Héctor’s anxieties, kept him from coming off as such a jerk, and even provided commentary on the other gendered panic of the moment: the loss of male friendships.
Like The Time Traveler’s Wife and About Time, Our Time isn’t invested in the mechanics or paradoxical nature of time travel so much as it’s focused on the way access to another era affects its protagonists’ romantic lives. The script’s vague explanation about their janky time machine being powered by tachyons and wormholes initially provides a technobabble reason why they can’t immediately turn back time, then creates a definitive deadline by which the Esquivels have to decide whether they want to return to 1966. Likewise, nothing ever comes of their concerns about keeping the science a secret from the people in the present, and the movie never addresses their real goals for time travel, beyond earning acknowledgement of their genius.
Photo: Netflix
While there isn’t much depth to the science in this science fiction, the intimate, personal approach to the impact of time travel turns Our Times into an examination of how women are often pushed to prioritize relationships above their own goals. Nora’s grandniece Alondra (Renata Vaca), a physics student herself, delights in shattering Nora’s worldview as they talk about sexuality. The results of their trip to a sex store provide an entertaining way to show off Nora and Héctor’s passion for each each other, before the story veers into another fight that pits his more conservative mindset against her spirit for adventure. But more significantly Alondra guides Nora away from her impulse to return to the family she left behind in the past, and tries to get her to embrace the new connections she’s found in the present.
Time travel stories are often about facing regrets and finding a way to move forward in the face of mistakes or loss, in spite of the things we can’t change. Our Times offers a very different spin on those same themes by pushing the central couple forward in time, not back. That unusual angle lets the filmmakers focus on the best ways for people can tackle feelings of regret in linear time, by deciding to make changes in their own lives to build a better future. Rather than obsessing over the idea of fixing the past, Our Time is a bittersweet meditation about personal growth and the way relationships shift with circumstances.
Our Times is streaming on Netflix now.
