Our Times Review: A Promising Mexican Sci-Fi Rom-Com That Tries to Be Different But Misses the Mark

Originally titled as Nuestros Tiempos, Our Times follows a familiar time travel premise: Two brilliant 1960s physicists — 1966, to be exact — from Mexico, including happily married couple Nora (Lucero) and Héctor (Benny Ibarra) have invented a time machine, but doesn’t seem to get it work as planned. Now, they need to secure more funding, but the university is running out of patience and can’t grant them any more money unless they can show some results. A few trials and errors later, they finally manage to operate the time machine and decide to give it a test run by travelling into the future for just fifteen minutes.

Well, if you watched enough time travel movies like Back to the Future, you know this will not go smoothly. The two, of course, do manage to find themselves in the future. Except it’s not fifteen minutes ahead of their time but rather 59 years too far. In other words, they were stuck in 2025, and not surprisingly, the time machine died down, forcing them to hide it by covering it with a large sheet they found lying somewhere.

What follows next is a fish-out-of-water comedy as the clueless Nora and Héctor try to make sense of the future. At one point, there’s a blink-or-you’ll-miss-it Easter egg to Back to the Future. From there, the couple learns about everything new, from flavoured condoms to smartphones and a subway train. For a while there, it was delightful watching the two struggling to adapt because, after all, they come from the past. Soon, they try to get to the university where they conduct their research, only to find a lot of things have changed.

But the current dean in charge, Julia (Ofelia Medina), happens to be Nora’s bright university student back in 1966, and the former immediately recognises her. Nora also meets her great-niece, Alondra (Renata Vaca), where the latter soon tells her about how things are different in the present-day era, including open relationships, sexuality and marriage. Nora and Héctor are still getting used to things around, like learning how to use a smartphone and discovering the meaning of the internet. So far, so good.

Then, as the movie progresses, director Chava Cartas, working from Juan Carlos Garzón and Angélica Gudiño’s screenplay, begins to turn the movie’s initial mix of lightweight sci-fi rom-com and fish-out-of-water comedy into a story about… feminism. You see, 2025 is a whole lot different from the more conservative ’60s era. Equality and women’s rights matter, which in turn, benefits Nora in proving herself as a successful female physicist.

With Nora now becoming the centre of attention, this somehow leaves Héctor on the sidelines. It feels like he’s living in her shadow, and this doesn’t sit well for men like Héctor, whose pride and ego have gone. While I don’t mind the strong feminist theme injected into this movie, the compact 90-minute running time isn’t exactly ideal to cover such a story. I get that the movie wants to say something about how changes are inevitable as time goes by.

But everything here is, unfortunately, executed as perfunctory as it gets, while the stakes and conflicts that ultimately tested Nora and Héctor’s relationship are disappointingly flimsy. It was a missed opportunity for fleshing out the story and the characters since Lucero and Benny Ibarra did an overall decent job playing the married couple. They share wonderful chemistry right from the start. However, the lacklustre plot that barely scratches the surface hampered them altogether. This is where a longer running time allows more room for substantial arc and development, especially given its topical and relevant subject matter.

Our Times is currently streaming on Netflix.