Road to Yesterday

Today I fell for the advertising and was prepared to ‘Netflix & Chill’ to the latest nollywood movie on the world renowned streaming site, Netflix. I was thrilled. It’s Genevieve’s first production and well… just like everyone else, I love Genny. Not to mention, this movie was hyped till the death and so I hit play.

Road to yesterday tells the story of a couple struggling in their relationship who are forced to face their relationship woes on a road trip to a family member’s funeral. The story is told in media res (a narrative that starts in the middle of the story and not at the beginning) and we get bits of the beginning through flash backs.

We see how the couple met and how they fall in love. We see them courting and how they finally got to the point of getting hitched. Then somewhere along the line (after a sufficient percentage of film time has been spent) the real and current conflict is finally revealed.

As the movie progresses you begin to get a strong sense of one fact. I mean if there’s one thing they are not slacking on it’s the looks. The costumes, the makeup, the men (I mean… the meeeennn), the ladies, the sets, the angles, all of the looks are on point! But the screenplay is lacking.

By the time the real conflict is finally revealed, I find myself rolling my eyes like “can the real scriptwriters, please stand up”. And this doubt in the scriptwriter did not start when the movie peaked. Nooooo! You could see it coming from a mile away. You could tell from the simplistic and basic dialogues that the characters were having. You could almost predict what the characters would say before they said it because it was that cliche.

Even the conflicts from earlier in their relationship were almost cringeworthy at how basic they were. There’s one scene where Oris’ character comes in to meet Victoria (Genevieve’s character) and she’s clearly peeved. After a while of poking and proding to find out the source of her anger, she finally reveals that it’s because he went the entire weekend without calling or texting her. *Somebody pump the brakes* “babe, really? What are you in high school (secondary school)? This is really why we are vexed?” Ok.

After that point in the movie, it began to hit me that at the end of this movie the source of all this conflict will most likely be something ridiculously basic, and then I’m going to need a refund. I’ll grant one thing though, the source of the conflict in the end was not as superficial as the dialogues had been, however, it was not even within the vicinity of being original (or worthy of the hype). The source of the conflict between the couple was basic and resolvable.

And I think that was the point of the movie.

In the final moments, the movie finally reveals its true colors and manages to salvage much of that lost hope in the script and just resurrects like a fast crashing flight jumper that finally found the parachute release button.

In the end it was not just a pretty movie with a pretty leading lady and a pretty leading man who together made a really pretty baby. It wasn’t just about the really pretty clothes or the really pretty pair. In the end, the real screenwriters did stand up. It might have taken them 90% of the movie to get there, but they got there.