Safety Not Guaranteed Review

Safety Not Guaranteed is a 2013 indie romance sci-fi directed by Colin Treverrow. It's very much a hipster movie, with eye rolling, Star Wars references and awkwardness abound, and although there are sci-fi elements, the film is more of a romantic mystery. The time travel element is disappointingly misleading, and you don't even get to see the time machine until the last few minutes of the film. It's no Back to the Future, and none of the fun that comes with time travel (making mistakes, going back to correct them, disrupting the space-time continuum etc.) really features here. The real puzzle of the film is 'Is one of the protagonists crazy?', and depending on how you interpret the ending it's not really resolved. The ending is one element of the film which does work though; ambiguous endings are always fun, and although it could be argued it's a lazy way of making a film seem smart (e.g. Inception), it is fun to argue about how you think a film ended.

 So Aubrey Plaza’s Darius, an intelligent, pessimistic intern (ostensibly a saner version of her character in Parks and Recreation), joins Jake Johnson’s seemingly misogynistic Jeff, and an Indian Michael Cera (Karan Soni’s Arnau) to investigate a mysterious advert for a partner to travel in time. After tracking the author (Mark Duplass’ time-travel-physics-man-child-weirdo Kenneth) down they spy on him, Darius falls in love, and they question his sanity throughout the film. As Darius and Kenneth fall in love, Jeff revisits an old flame, and tries to recapture his youth by proxy by convincing Arnau to pull some conveniently placed holiday totty. These secondary characters’ stories are much more interesting to me than the conventional ‘two weirdoes find solace in each other’ cliché, and although Plaza is effortlessly likable and watchable I knew exactly how their relationship would play out (he would find out her ulterior motive, and ultimately forgive her because of course, they need each other). This is a problem; the subplots are more interesting than the plot, and the scenes in which Jeff falls for Liz ring much truer, and have much more heartache than the two leads' 'falling in love scenes' (in which Kenneth sings Darius one of his own songs while playing the zither next to a campfire).

I would love to go on holiday with Aubrey Plaza, Jake Johnson and Karan Soni.  Apart from that, Safety Not Guaranteed isn’t perfect. The sci-fi story is messy and confused, and Kenneth, whose sanity is constantly questioned, is so kooky it doesn’t make any difference whether or not he’s crazy. This is a theme of the film however; what is normal, what makes someone weird, and on what aspects of personality do we judge people? The film handles this very well, and I did gain a certain amount of sympathy for characters that at first seem unlikable. Jeff for example first appears a sleazy jock, constantly womanising and only out for himself. Later on we learn he is trying to recapture his past, a time in his life when he actually cared for someone, and his appreciation of this above all else did created more empathy than I had with Darius or Kenneth.

All the characters in this film seem to have something missing; the two leads’ dead loved ones, Jeff’s desire to really love someone and Arnua’s inability to engage with the outside world and take control of his life. As far as the supporting cast goes I wanted the character to fulfil their desires and in this sense the film worked. It's just a shame I didn't share this with the main characters.