Surprisingly Good

Rating: 8/10 (14 December 2004)

I wasn't expecting much from this movie. Time travel stories are often disappointing. This one's pretty good. Evan, the protagonist, discovers that he can alter the past by possessing his younger self at certain, key times during his childhood. His attempts to improve the lives of his friends backfire in unpredictable ways. The rules of time travel in this movie are refreshingly consistent: 1) Only Evan remembers the unaltered timelines; everyone else thinks he's delusional. 2) He is unable to remember the events of new timelines. 3) He has no childhood memories of the times when his older self is in control of his body.
There are a few times where the events of the movie seem a bit contrived but they are at least consistent with the internal logic of the story. The writer created a world in which certain rules apply and stuck to it. The rules are never broken in order to advance the plot.