The Man From The Future Review

4 stars for this tongue in cheek sci-fi romantic comedy.

The Man From the Future is a subtitled Brazilian film, written and directed by Claudio Torres. It was first released in 2011, had it’s UK premiere at the Sci-Fi London Film Festival in 2013 and now arrives in the UK on DVD for the first time.

It tells us the story of Zero (Wagner Moura – Elite Squad, Elysium) a brilliant but disillusioned physicist who is decidedly unhappy with his lot. He doesn’t like the students he teaches and his entire world view is tainted by the events of November 22nd 1991, eight years previously, when he was utterly humiliated in front of all his peers by the woman he thought he would spend his life with, Helena (Alinne Moraes).

She firmly believed that one day he would change the world with his inventions and even now that is what he is trying to do. He wants to create a new energy source but after breaking too many machines trying, his boss Sandra (Maria Luisa Mendonca – Sunstroke) is threatening to pull the plug, so he decides to take a massive risk.

With the help of Sushi (Daniel Uemura), one of his students and his best friend Panda (Fernando Ceylao), they hack into the city’s power grid to finish the experiment. Zero puts himself inside the chamber and because he is thinking back to that night, it somehow transports him back in time to the night of the party.

He is a bit disappointed, as he wanted to invent a new power source, not a time machine, but he soon realises the possibilities for making his life a little bit more the way he would have liked it to be, so he wastes no time at all finding himself and proceeding to change his own history.

What follows are his hilarious, sometimes moving attempts to fix a mess which is entirely of his own making. This is truly entertaining sci-fi, full of bad decisions and worse paradoxes and a great story which had me dying to find how it ended.

It is all rather low budget, cheap and cheerful looking but that doesn’t detract from it at all and there are some very effective special effects during the time travel sequences. The acting is fine, my only complaint is that the subtitles are really quick, I had to stop it a few times to read them, and I read fast.

All that being said however, if you are a fan of sci-fi that doesn’t take itself too seriously and you can get along with subtitles than this is definitely one to watch.

“Millions of years ago, primitive men rubbed two little rocks together and lit up a cave. Tonight…humanity will kiss their energy bill goodbye.”