Hot Tub Time Machine — the title itself speaks volume . But with time travel warrant from the outset , the film ’s jokes are n’t just about the past , they ’re about what you ’re supposed to do when you get there .
Geeks , by nature , are experimenters ; we work hypotheses , test outcomes , and secondly guess our results . It ’s for these cause that the time travel machine has always been ( and will always be ) the ultimate gadget : the one that might permit us tinker with our own pasts .
But the characters of Hot Tub Time Machine — a threesome of estranged booster played by John Cusack , Rob Corddry , and Craig Robinson , with hanger - on Clark Duke — aren’t former flake , they ’re present - day losers . For them — though they may not recognise it at first — metre locomotion is n’t as much a chance to amend their dorky past times as it is a means to obviate their miserable futures . In fact , once their hot tub time political machine send out them back in time , they ironically become haunted with preserving the past , not change it . The clowning lift from the eccentric ’ attempts to construct their footsteps , as well as their overwhelming temptation to depart from them .
What they ’re implicated with , naturally , is keeping the textile of time space from unraveling . At one point , when the quartet is debating the likely aftermath of their front in the eighties , Duke ’s quality , Jacob , conjure up the butterfly theory , with a modern crook : “ you step on a Isidor Feinstein Stone and the net ’s not fabricate ! ”
For Jacob , an Alienware - using gamer , the internet not being invented is a big deal , and it signalize one of the most striking things about Hot Tub Time Machine : its current - ness . Gadgets can date moving-picture show pretty quickly — even by the fourth dimension a moving-picture show make water it through product , its engineering science , or its general sensation of what ’s “ current , ” can seem passe — but Time Machine feels very much of the moment in a way other picture do n’t . It make jokes about Twitter and Google . An iPhone shows up prominently in the first moment of the film . The friend even take a poke at Wild Hogs . OK , mayhap that ’s not so current . But it ’s definitely funny .
While the flick ’s keenly aware of the present second in which it exists , it ’s also very wise of its place in the lineage of time travelling movie house . The generic understudy of the “ older time travelling guy”—the obscurely wise old human beings who empathize the secrets of time — is present and accounted for ( he ’s a familiar face ) and he ’s treated as that line grapheme throughout the movie . Another cameo follow from a well - known time travel movie veteran who serves as a chime - hops for the resort at which the titular tub is settle .
What all of this amounts to is establishing characters whose experiences are familiar to the audience . Their life are n’t always glamorous and their jokes are n’t always advanced . They have average jobs and average problem . And when they time travel back to the 1980s , they do n’t get mire in metaphysics . They just set out to have fun ( albeit the precise fun they had the first prison term around . )
Thankfully , the picture show ’s sense of humor is take root in this general plight ( reliving a sentence you ’ve already lived through once before ) more so than the specific plight ( reliving the 1980s , which you ’ve already lived through once before . ) certainly , there are gags about the Cold War and cassette tape , but the funniest moments of the movie — which is , I should make well-defined , very funny — descend from the characters ’ finding to do everything just as they did the first time . They follow as you ’re fawn along with the friends as they ’re force to make the same mistakes they did as teenagers . And they come , satisfyingly , as the characters meet the time travel imperative of tinkering with their own lives , even when they ’re sample their hardest not to .
Hot Tub Time Machine opens nationally on Friday . If you you like express mirth or clock time travel , I highly recommend checking it out .
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