Summer Time Machine Blues

Katsuyuki Motohiro's 2005 Japanese comedy begins in a university club room in stifling heat. The members of the science fiction club spill cola on the air conditioner remote and break it. At that exact moment a time machine turns up in the room. The solution looks obvious to them: go back to yesterday and take the remote before it is ruined. But every small intervention alters a detail in the present, and the group has to keep travelling back to correct its own mistakes. The film treats time travel not as a universal catastrophe but as an entirely lazy, everyday problem, and that is where the comedy comes from. It is adapted from a stage play and keeps that theatrical tightness: nearly every detail turns out to matter later. Who it's for: viewers who like time travel puzzles and low-key Japanese comedy. Who it's not for: anyone expecting large-scale science fiction and visual effects; the film barely leaves one room.