This movie is quite an interesting watch, and as much as it has this high school vibes, it was educating science-wise as it further broadened my knowledge on time travel. Yeah, it's a time travel movie with a kick and I did pick some vital lessons from this movie. Some of these include:

We should not only value but cherish every moment that we spend with our loved ones because we never know when it's the last time. I bet none of us wants to go around having that hovering guilt that we would have done better in situations we can never take back. That regret hits differently and as someone who hates regrets, I try to always do right according to the ethics of life.
I learned to be careful when dealing with people because not everyone forgives and forgets. Moreso, in situations where we could be anything, let's not forget to be kind.

THE PLOT

Jamie just turned 16, an obnoxious teenager who felt her parents were being overprotective. Apparently, 35 years ago, while her parents were teenagers, 3 of her mother's best friends were murdered on their 16th birthday. Thus introducing the title of the killer to the neighbourhood as the Sweet 16 murderer. What was most intriguing about the killer was after the three murders, he vanished without a trace as he was never caught. But on every Halloween, people were dressed up as the mysterious masked killer who got scot-free with murder.

Despite no sign of the killer for 35 years, Jamie's parents couldn't help but be worried, especially on Halloween when she turned 16.

While Jamie made plans for Halloween to go to a concert with her bff, her mother thought she could stay home and hand out candies. But Jamie wasn't having it and this led to a heated argument with her mother until her mother gave in but on the condition that her father would accompany her to her bff and then to the concert.

Jamie reluctantly agreed. She and her father set out, leaving behind her mother, who was later murdered in their home by someone dressed as the Sweet 16 murderer.

Devastated, Jamie resorted to using the time machine that her BFF had been working on to go back in time 35 years ago and try to stop the Sweet 16 murderer from his first murder, hoping that it would save her mom.

MY TAKE

The one thing I'm going to flag as bullshit in this movie was the scene where Jamie's mother was murdered. I mean, she called 911, she already took self-defence classes she seemed prepared to protect herself from the sweet 16 murderer, but at a point, her effort just seemed like foolishness because she had plenty of chances to escape, but it felt like she was hoping to be killed and it didn't make sense to me. Maybe because I have always responded to survival by running away from anything that will harm me instead of standing on my ground to fight.

Like every time travel movie, this movie has a lot of loopholes and scenes that did not make sense too, but regardless, there was something that made it stand out for me, which was the definition of time. Back in the past 35years ago when Jamie met the mother of her bff who was the original inventor of the time machine, she wanted to know what happens to the present since she was in the past.

The response she got was that time is like a flowing river which never flows backwards but keeps moving ahead. According to Lauren, the mother of Jamie's BFF, a disruption in time like Jamie's going back, could be likened to throwing a stone into a flowing river. While the force of the stone thrown into the river causes a ripple effect in the body of water, it never stops it from its continuous flow forward. This means that Jamie's actions might cause some changes in the space-time continuum, but time will continue moving, and while Jamie was stuck in the past, life continued in the present.

To my understanding of this definition of time, like a river with plenty of channels, so does time equally have plenty of sources and as seen in the movie, Jamie going back to the past was just joining another source of time like visiting a parallel Universe and being part of it such that the present becomes another parallel universe existing simultaneously with the past she's in.

As it was later seen in the movie when Jamie returned to the present, it was different from the one her mother died as this new present seemed like an offshoot of the past that she was in. I had always thought going back in time was on the same linear progression but this movie proved otherwise for me.

Again, as I mentioned earlier, we really should strive to be kind in our words and actions. Certain things that we might take for granted might be held highly by the next person. It was interesting to see how the actions of the three teenagers who were murdered caused the death of a teen, and while they didn't see it as a big deal, the lover of that teen took it seriously, resulting in their death, a lot of casualties and sinister ambitions.