‘Same Boat’ Marries ‘The Terminator’ and ‘Before Sunrise’

Lily (Tonya Glanz) has just dumped her boyfriend at the outset of a cruise they’re taking together. James (Chris Roberti) is on the boat for a professional assignment, but his co-worker has gotten sick and is confined to their quarters, leaving him free to roam. Lily and James have a classic meet-cute in the ship’s lavish dining area late one night, when he asks her where to get free ice cream. There are instant sparks between the two, and their connection goes deeper than just physical attraction. It has all the makings of an enduring romance.

There’s just one problem: James is a time-traveling assassin sent from the future to kill Lily. That’s the delightful high concept of director and co-writer Roberti’s 2019 micro-budget film Same Boat, which plays out like The Terminator crossed with Before Sunrise. It’s also an impressive example of resourcefulness in indie filmmaking, as a closing title card proudly notes that it was “secretly filmed on a cruise ship.” 

Roberti and his collaborators are so ingenious that Same Boat rarely looks like a surreptitious guerrilla production, instead making full, apparently unrestricted use of its luxurious location. The characters roam throughout the ship, from waterslides to ballrooms, and the cinematography by Darin Quan is never stilted or shaky, even when he was presumably grabbing shots on the fly. The editing, which gets more elaborate as the story gets more timey-wimey, is crisp and clear, and if editor Josh Melrod had to compensate for missing coverage, he’s done so seamlessly.

Same Boat is far more than just a filmmaking gimmick, though. Roberti crafts a surprisingly tender love story and a sneakily profound meditation on the nature of fate and what brings meaning to our lives. He suggests a vast network of time-travel missions from a vaguely dystopian future via nothing more than a couple of small devices that look like reworked digital thermometers and a handful of rudimentary editing tricks. There’s no need for an intricate backstory, just the opening onscreen text that describes the 29^th-century practice of sending agents back through time “to eliminate individuals who would do damage to the future.” It also notes, however, that “the results have been mixed.”

Although James is later asked about the familiar thought experiment of killing young Adolf Hitler, Roberti makes it clear from the start that his missions are not nearly that serious. A prologue set in 1989 shows James and his rookie partner Mot (Julia Schonberg) taking out a newlywed couple who will supposedly be responsible for the creation of reality TV. “They’re bad for humanity,” he tells Mot in one of her first on-the-job lessons. “They’re not bad people. There’s a difference.”

So when the pair target Lily in 2019, it seems likely that her alleged future crime doesn’t involve something like genocide or nuclear annihilation. That makes it easier to invest in the burgeoning relationship between James and Lily, even as the specter of death looms over all of their interactions.

James has a penchant for declaring the past a “golden age” of various things, from fruit to detergent, and he’s wowed by simple amenities like the cruise ship’s endless ice cream offerings. But this isn’t a movie about some awkward time traveler who doesn’t understand the ways of the modern world. He’s not the T-800 learning to say “hasta la vista, baby” in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, or Scotty trying to talk to a computer mouse in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. He’s just a normal, somewhat introverted guy, who eases into friendly, flirty banter with an attractive woman. 

If anything, Lily is the instigator, looking for some company after her impulsive but satisfying break with affable doofus Rob (Evan Kaufman). She’s the one who first tries to kiss James, as they tour a cemetery during a daytime excursion to Key West. That’s a more appropriate location than she realizes, and James initially rebuffs her advances. But for all the supposed wisdom from his vast experience as an agent that he passes down to Mot, he’s helpless in the face of true love, a force more powerful than the time-space continuum.

That’s a heady idea, and Roberti uses plenty of humor to subvert the story’s potential heaviness, filling the movie with goofy supporting characters, including Rob himself, whom James befriends without initially realizing that he’s Lily’s ex. A pair of horny cruise employees who keep getting frisky at inappropriate times may at first appear superfluous, but they intersect with the central plot at crucial moments, as does a cleaning worker who is always attempting to show James and Lily his terrible magic tricks.

The comedy, the romance, and the genre elements all rely on the acting to succeed, and Roberti gets excellent performances from his entire cast, including himself. He and Glanz have the kind of relaxed, intimate chemistry that makes it easy to believe that James and Lily are falling in love within such a short span of time, in the manner of star-crossed cinematic couples from Brief Encounter to Past Lives. Kaufman provides the right dopey energy tinged with darkness as the jilted boyfriend, and Schonberg elegantly expresses the movie’s core ethical dilemmas.

That tonal balancing act is encapsulated in a late-film scene of James, Lily, Rob and Mot all having room-service breakfast together, with the casual vibe of old friends hanging out, alongside the very real threat of deadly violence. Roberti delivers a lovely, sweet romance that’s all the more affecting for the possibility of its sudden, tragic end. He doesn’t cop out on that possibility, building toward a melancholy finale that splits the difference between The Terminator’s Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese and Before Sunrise’s Jesse and Céline. Same Boat proves that the romantic longing of couples like those is identical across time and space — and genre.