Matthew Turner | On 26, May 2022

Director: Kevin Willmott
Cast: Tosin Morohunfola, Danielle Cooper, Kevin Willmott, Trai Byers, Walter Coppage, Samra Teffera
Certificate: 16

In the mood for some time travel titilation? Transport yourself no further than Time Travel Thursday, our column devoted to time travel movies. It’s on Thursday.

This engaging, low-budget sci-fi comedy is written and directed by Kevin Willmott, whose screenwriting credits include Chi-Raq, Da 5 Bloods and BlackKklansman. Borrowing heavily from 1950s sci-fi, it has the same satirical impulse as Willmott’s 2004 film, CSA: The Confederate States of America, a mockumentary that explored a world where the South won the American Civil War.

The film opens in Kansas City, 1939, where a group of African-American community leaders decide that the only rational response to the current segregation laws in the USA is to build a rocket and colonise Mars. Using a special rocket fuel developed from peanuts and sweet potatoes by George Washington Carver (George Forbes), scientist Warrington Avery (Willmott), his daughter, Beneatha Avery (Danielle Cooper), and cocky pilot Captain Race Johnson (Tosin Morohunfola) blast into space, but instead of landing on Mars, they accidentally time travel to 2013, with the film switching from black-and-white to colour.

It takes the trio a remarkably long time to realise that they’ve crash-landed on Earth rather than a parallel universe – “like our world, just insane” – but after meeting student activist Karen Wilborn (Samra Teffera) and gay would-be hip-hop star B-12 (Trai Byers), they eventually understand the significance of their journey. Meanwhile, they also have to avoid sinister Senator Howard Horn (Walter Coppage), a descendant of their 1939 nemesis Dr Horn (also Coppage).

Destination Planet Negro earns some serious points when it comes to time travel tropes. Not only is there an actual time machine (technically a space rocket and a black hole, but close enough), but there are also plenty of decent adjusting-to-the-future gags and the film even indulges in that rarely seen time travel movie detail – when the timeline corrects itself and wipes out people in the present.

A lot of the humour is decidedly on the campy side (the overacting during space travel is very funny), but there are plenty of good gags, ranging from amusing lines to slapstick (Johnson learning a stylish walk) to some smartly thought-out culture-clash jokes that mix history, modern pop culture and 50s sci-fi – eg. the trio observing a Black man and thinking that he’s so weak from field work that he doesn’t have the strength to pull his trousers up, and that the headphones in his ears must be controlling his mind.

It’s fair to say that some of the comedy falls painfully flat, such as Strom, a Robbie the Robot parody with a heavily stereotyped Deep South accent (voiced by Huddie Willmott) – although that might have been worth it if they’d put a bit more effort into the “Danger Jackie Robinson!” gag. Similarly, there are a handful of jokes that are intended to be progressive (particularly with regard to the gay characters), but miss their mark slightly and come off as misguided.

Admittedly, the satire could have been sharper, but the messaging is solid throughout, staying just the right side of preachy. The performances are likeable across the board, with the actors comfortably carrying some of the weaker material. The film also deserves praise for its effects and production design, considering its extremely low budget – the brightly coloured spacesuits are a particularly nice touch.

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