'About Time' Red-Band Trailer: The Time-Traveler's Girlfriend

The last time Rachel McAdams fell in love with a time traveler, things took a turn for the romantically tragic. But she's apparently willing to go back and do it all over again, in hope of a sunnier result.

Richard Curtis' About Time stars Domhnall Gleeson as unlucky-in-love Tim, whose father (Bill Nighy) reveals that the men in their family have the ability to travel through time and alter their own lives. Tim uses the power to woo beautiful Mary (McAdams), altering key moments again and again in an effort to construct a perfect relationship. Watch the technically NSFW (for language) red-band trailer after the jump.

I know I just likened About Time to The Time Traveler's Wife in the first paragraph, but in truth this may actually be more like a romcom version of The Butterfly Effect. Like Ashton Kutcher's Evan, Tim discovers his powers as a young man. Also like Evan, he uses the ability to alter his own life, only to find that the perfect outcome remains out of reach. Unlike Evan, though, Tim is trying to fix moments of the "utterly mortifying" variety, rather than the "horribly, criminally life-scarring."

All of those comparisons aside, About Time looks pretty sweet and funny in its own right. Curtis is the director behind Love, Actually (which I still watch every Christmas, and only partly because it's unavoidable if you have cable TV) and the writer behind such genre classics as Four Weddings and Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones's Diary, so this is territory he knows well.

About Time opens November 1 in the U.S. and September 4 in the U.K.

At the age of 21, Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleeson) discovers he can travel in time...

The night after another unsatisfactory New Year party, Tim's father (Bill Nighy) tells his son that the men in his family have always had the ability to travel through time. Tim can't change history, but he can change what happens and has happened in his own life—so he decides to make his world a better place...by getting a girlfriend. Sadly, that turns out not to be as easy as you might think.

Moving from the Cornwall coast to London to train as a lawyer, Tim finally meets the beautiful but insecure Mary (Rachel McAdams). They fall in love, then an unfortunate time-travel incident means he's never met her at all. So they meet for the first time again—and again—but finally, after a lot of cunning time-traveling, he wins her heart.

Tim then uses his power to create the perfect romantic proposal, to save his wedding from the worst best-man speeches, to save his best friend from professional disaster and to get his pregnant wife to the hospital in time for the birth of their daughter, despite a nasty traffic jam outside Abbey Road.

But as his unusual life progresses, Tim finds out that his unique gift can't save him from the sorrows and ups and downs that affect all families, everywhere. There are great limits to what time travel can achieve, and it can be dangerous too. About Time is a comedy about love and time travel, which discovers that, in the end, making the most of life may not need time travel at all.