No, I think the opportunity to discuss the possibility that Kenneth was actually right was squandered. If you’re going to end it the way they did, I think it needed some small bit of foreshadowing. Might as well just have had Teddy Roosevelt show up and beat the crap out of everyone - it would have confirmed that the time travelling was real, and it’d have 100% more TR! 
Here’s a link to my reaction.
I really enjoyed the movie, and I was OK with the ending. But as others said I would have like an ambiguous clue, like something in the box in the truck, to make you wonder if things were possible. It didn’t really detract from the movie, but I think it could have been stronger in that one aspect.
Not true. There’s one big example (going from memory; haven’t seen the film since the summer)[spoiler]He tells the Audrey character about the accident with his ex-girlfriend, and that’s what he had gone back to try to fix the first time. When she later interrogates the ex, the ex has no idea what she’s referring to re: the accident.
Now of course, he may have been lying to Audrey the whole time about the accident, turning it into a melodramatic story, but the other option is obvious: that he was successful in going back and changing the circumstances of that one regret, so that the accident never occurred at all and nobody has a memory of it except him[/spoiler]
I mentioned that incident several times, and why I don’t think it counts as foreshadowing. But let’s say it was - did Kenneth actually say that’s what he went back the first time for?
Hell, they foreshadowed the ear prosthesis, but not the ending. That’s an odd choice right there.
Kenneth was surprised to learn that Belinda (Kristen Bell) was alive. It seems that saving her was the result of a time journey that has not been made yet. The first time journey alluded to in the newspaper ad remains unexplored, perhaps it was just a quick proof-of-concept.
I was surprised that they didn’t play with this a bit more. If he was just crazy he could have adopted this into his world view and come up with some reason why he now needed to complete things so that it would happen. If he was on the right path this could have proved to him that it worked. But instead he just dismissed it as if he’d been found out, which kills any foreshadowing to me.
It did seem to prove to Kenneth that his machine worked. His conclusion when Darius told him about Belinda being alive was that he must have gone back and saved her. What makes you say he dismissed it?
Did anyone else notice that Audrey Plaza tends to look at the world out of the sides of her eyes. I’d always associated this mannerism with Susanna Hoffs.
I guess I forgot that, so that’s a strike against my interpretation. I thought that he quickly changed the subject.
We watched this last night on DVD. We both enjoyed it (and MrsFtG isn’t usually a fan of the more odd ball indie stuff).
What baffled me most: I know some guys are shallow and Jeff is supposed to be particularly so, but his revulsion at first seeing Liz is not believable. She is hardly overweight or whatever to account for such a strong response.
Nice small bits by Mary Lynn Rajskub and Jeff Garlin.
It’s amazing what you can produce today on a small budget thanks to digital equipment.
So bumping the thread in the hope that more people will be encouraged to see it.
I just watched this–it’s on Netflix streaming for anyone interested.
I liked it quite a bit, but then I love Aubrey Plaza in anything. (BTW, it is Aubrey, not Audrey 
).
As for the ending–well I think that whether the machine was going to work or not didn’t matter by that point. What mattered was that Darius trusted Kenneth, and he trusted her. As others have said, the story isn’t really about time travel.
I only recently saw this movie - did not care for the “Being There” ending, but liked it overall - EXCEPT Jeff’s two-thirds of a character arc. I laughed out loud when he raised his fist in tribute to the leads’ efforts at the end, because there was no way his character was ‘there’ yet.
Not to mention the problem that his arc really wasn’t believable at any point. As previously noted, his high school ex wasn’t ugly at all, and while he certainly conveys some dissatisfaction at the hollowness of his life, it’s hard to believe he has this kind of neurotic meltdown, based on what we learn about him in the beginning of the film.
I recently saw this on Netflix Instant, I thought it was a great little movie. Maybe it would have been better for the ending to be ambiguous but overall it was just the sort of quirky but down to Earth movie I like.
I saw this with my wife earlier this evening. We liked it a lot. Almost the entire movie worked for us, even the quirkiness. We almost jumped out of bed with joy when the machine finally disappeared on the lake as we hoped it would. I would have been very disappointed if Kenneth turned out to be nuts.
My wife became a little emotional when Darius gave the box of money to Kenneth’s co-worker at the supermarket.I wish they’d fleshed out the interns’ boss’ story more but, other than that, the movie was very enjoyable.
I saw this last night. I was a little disappointed in it. I loved the concept, but I thought it squandered a lot of its potential. Mark Duplass was great. However the character arcs were all fairly shallow and predictable, and the themes were much too heavy handed. Without the time travel hook, it would be a perfectly typical indie romantic comedy.
It might have been better if the jerk reporter had met someone other than his ex, just to show a little departure from the constant drum-beat of “we all want to change the past when we should be living in the present” and to show that sometimes we end up stuck in the same patterns even when we do try to let the past go. You want “theme and variations,” not “theme, theme, THEME!”
I fully expected it to end with Kenneth and Darius calling off the mission and deciding to live in the present. That would have been unsatisfying and predictable, but it would have fit with her falling for him because of who he is, not because of what he claimed he could do. Having him be right undermined that idea. A better ending would be if the machine had exploded at the end leaving no trace, suggesting that they could have gone back, or could have been killed. Some people are saying that’s what happened, but the special effects at the end looked too sci-fi and too much like movie time travel is supposed to look like for me to buy that. He was clearly doing something science fictioney at the end–there was no matter left, no smoke or ash, they weren’t disintegrated into anything, they disappeared. Whether into the past or into another dimension isn’t really an issue, the implication is that they succeeded, and it turns Darius’s faith in him from a willingness to love him despite the craziness into merely a canny assessment of his ability. I also would have liked Kenneth to have a little more of an apparent dark side to him, to force Darius to question how much she was really willing to put up with in order to love him. Could she love him if he was crazy? Instead, he was clearly a great guy, who just might be deluded about this one thing, but it turned out he wasn’t, so her decision was obviously the right one. That’s where more ambiguity would have paid off.
Resurrecting this zombie because I finally got around to watching this. I liked it.
It wasn’t perfect. Heck it wasn’t even close to perfect. Tons of flaws in the story, the directing, the narrative, the characters… but it still worked.
And I thought the ending totally fucking rocked!
We just watched it, too - I liked it. I liked the ending, too. I recently watched Woody Allen’s “Vicky Christina Barcelona,” and I thought that movie had the worst ending in the history of endings, so I liked an ending that was an actual ending, not like the writer had reached two hours worth of material and just stopped writing.
I saw this when it was first available on Netflix. I liked it quite a bit, although, similar to what’s been said above, it was at least slightly flawed in just about every aspect. Even so, it was a worthwhile little indie film in its own right.
As a vehicle for Aubrey Plaza, it was very Aubrey Plaza. I find her kinda charming, and so that works for me. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who failed to find her kinda charming, however.
If I had been involved with this film, I would definitely have made it more satisfying - more ambiguous puzzlers and teasers regarding time-travel paradoxes and foreshadowing. I would have put in some sort of smart teaser about the ending (e.g. “Well, it’s either going to be true time travel, or it’s going to be some sort of bomb”).
Definitely not as smart and cool as Primer, but a worthy, quirky, time-travel romance in its own right.
Speaking of Primer, I saw Shane Carruth’s other flick, Upstream Color. It was interesting, but, well, it was definitely the sort of second attempt one would expect from the creator of one of the most profoundly interesting indie SF debuts in history. A mix of “truly innovative” with more than a little “trying too hard” and lots of “hey, look at me, I’m full of Indie symbolism”. Definitely worth watching, but somehow it can’t help but be a bit of a letdown after his first.
Seeing Primer mentioned in this thread, I decided to give it another try (tried once and fell asleep.) It was an interesting movie, but other than being about time travel didn’t have much in common with the quirky and charming Safety Not Guaranteed. I would need to watch it again to fully understand what they were doing and the ramifications of that, but I really am not inspired to do so.
I watched Primer when it came out on DVD. It’s very well done, especially considering the budget, but I found it kind of hard to follow all the time traveling. Maybe I should watch it again.