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***SPOILERS****

The premise is pretty sound.
Genius inventor father has time machine in his basement.
Genius son accepted to MIT after growing up without a father, but needs scholarship money.
Here is where it starts to fall apart.
Genius son looks to rip off his father’s work and pass it off as his own to get scholarship.
Years later son of genius inventor finds time machine blueprints and with the new technology of today is able to build a working time machine.
Genius invites fellow genius friends to help build machine.

Genius son uses time machine and goes back 24 hours.
He sees himself in an old video that they find in the attic, he is in the mirror at his seventh birthday party, the same day his dad is killed in a wreck.
Geniuses discuss all time travel movies they can think of ( bad idea; writers reminding us of better written time travel movies) to set up rules for traveling in time. Why do we need rules? So that they can break them of course!
The biggest one is to never use the machine alone.

Genius teen uses time machine to woo the girl he is crushing on, and of course they have chemistry.
Teen hormones and the desire for popularity take over, the teens start doing innocuous things with the time machine like going to lollapalooza. Wining the lottery, cheating on a pop quiz, getting revenge on a bully, then the bully is suddenly the sister’s best friend for no reason.
However even the smallest ripple has effects.

Good things happen when they return, and then extremely bad things happen when they return from their joy rides.

Soon they all either wind up in the hospital, breaking up with each other, afraid to lose their popularity, oh no the friends are fighting!
Some of the repercussions are not really clear such as why the science teacher is fired. My guess is he gets fired when all that hydrogen winds up missing.

David eventually winds up at his seventh day birthday party once again trying to “fix” everything.
He does but then at the end there are now two video cameras in the attic and one has a record of all their time travel mishaps.
No one ever sees this new video until the repeat day where the brother and sister go to the attic to look for an experiment so he can get into MIT.
The two teens use this knowledge to their advantage without building the time machine which in essence is just as bad as using the time machine in the first place.

The special effects are not the focus of the film but they are decent enough.
The major holes in the story line and the reminders of better movies about time travel, except for Back to the Future, the most well known time travel movie, make for some pretty confusing moments. They are moments you can figure out to a degree.

I can assume that David is being chased because of his girlfriend’s disappearance but we do not know for sure.
There is also a huge hole when David disappears to make his girlfriend not break up with him. This is strange because the 9 hour trip they took before only took 41 seconds! How many days passed where the two wound up madly in love and he had no idea? That part was a little off.

The main focus is on David and Jesse, not on the other three which is unfortunate, the two geniuses have a few scenes and I would have liked to have explored their experiences with time travel more. David though is the only one to break the rules and time travel by himself. The more he tries to fix, the worse he makes things. Fix one thing another breaks and so on.

The main problem I think we find here is that this is a teen romance movie being crammed into a sci fi time travel movie.

If you want to see a great romantic time travel movie, then watch Safety Not Guaranteed.