Tag Archives: time travel

Taking on time travel

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Time travel is the thorniest of plot elements. By nature, it’s full of flaws. Take the Grandfather Paradox — watch Futurama for the best example of that. Time travel is difficult because it doesn’t fare well under the light gaze of logic.

But lets push logic aside — whether time travel is or is not possible. When I read fiction (or watch movies or TV), I often want to escape. And what better way to escape than to leave the time period entirely?

Time travel as a plot device offers infinite possibilities. When you’re no longer constrained by time itself, the plot permutations are endless. The imagination can run wild. And for that reason most of all, I love nothing better than a great time travel story.

One of my favorite websites, io9.com, recently ranked all the time-travel-related movies, from best to worst. The article, and their reasons behind each ranking, is worth a look.

For a quick rundown, here is their top five:

5. Time Bandits

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4. Back to the Future 2

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3. Groundhog Day

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2. Primer

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And their top time travel movie of all time is….. Back to the Future (the first one)

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It’s an impressive list. I applaud the effort that went in to compiling it. My take? For the most part I agree, with some reservations. I’m not a Groundhog Day fan, and that barely qualifies as a time travel movie in my mind. And I disagree with the low rating for Ashton Kutshcer’s Butterfly Effect. Sure it was hokey, but what was great about it was how it showed the accumulated futility of trying to alter time.

As far as my own personal list, my favorite time travel movie ever, which made the top ten, has to be The Terminator. It was a brilliant sci-fi/thriller that established a mind-bending franchise. Arnold is great, and both Sarah and John Connor are now pop culture icons.

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Watch this movie: Predestination

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Time travel story plus great performances minus a creaky plot equals a stylish, though flawed, film.

predestination

It took me about 20 minutes into Predestination, the new sci-fi film starring Ethan Hawke, to figure it all out. Predestination is a movie that tries to shroud itself in mystery, but that mystery is pretty evident to anyone who pays attention. If it wasn’t for the stylish visuals and strong performances by the two main actors — Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook — Predestination might have ended up being nothing more than a silly time-travel flick that falls apart too quickly.

But it’s not.

The plot, or as much as I can share, is this: Hawke plays a time travel agent who has been hopping around the latter half of the 20th century in an effort to stop the so-called Fizzle Bomber. When he’s on a stakeout as a bartender in a NYC dive in 1970, he meets a surly patron who proceeds to tell him a wild tale.

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That’s about all I can say without giving anything away. Predestination, based on the short story All You Zombies by Robert A. Heinlein, brings one huge thing to the table for me: time travel. I love the conceit. I don’t care that time travel stories are inherently unstable, full of logical paradoxes. They’re fun. Predestination isn’t especially groundbreaking in its use of time travel. But at least they didn’t spend too much time trying to explain it. Part of that was a conscious narrative choice. This is a tightly told story. It sticks very close to certain characters. Just like them, we never get the bigger picture.

What sets Predestination apart from other movies of this genre is the performances. Ethan Hawke has been around long enough now — the man knows how to act convincingly. He is solid throughout. Sarah Snook, who plays a tough but lonely girl named Jane, is something else entirely. I’ve never heard of Snook, but I can’t imagine I won’t be hearing from her again. She had a tough role to play, and she was simply amazing. Her emotions ran the gamut, and she pulled them off convincingly and movingly. As played by Snook, Jane is a tragic character who you can’t help but relate to.

Sarah Snook

Despite all this, Predestination is stuck in B-movie land. The plot, especially toward the end, just could not carry the movie to the point of greatness. Nevertheless, Predestination is worth the time.

Is time travel possible (for real)?

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When I was young my mother was in college and she took me to one of her film studies classes. I was maybe 8 or 9, and the movie we watched was an avant garde French black-and-white flick called La Jetee, about a man from a desolate future who travels back in time and is killed. A boy watches the man die, and the boy turns out to be that man as a child (You can watch the whole movie here).

La Jetee

Since then I’ve been hooked by time travel stories. They’re a staple of sci-fi, and some of my favorites are The Terminator series, Doctor Who, SyFy channel’s Continuum, and 12 Monkeys, which was based on La Jetee.

Twelve_monkeysmpWhile time travel is an interesting fictional conceit, it’s been pretty much dismissed as an impossibility for several reasons:

1. How could it be done physically?

2. The possibility of time-destroying paradoxes — the most famous one being, what if you went back in time and accidentally killed your grandfather before your parent was conceived?

3. If time travel is possible, then why aren’t time travelers all around us?

I’ve never been convinced by number 2. Number 1 never interested me. Number 3 has always been the most persuasive.

Nevertheless, scientists are getting closer to solving the riddle presented in number 1.

According to this report, a team of Australian physicists have simulated time travel on a quantum level using particles of light. The particle “traveled” through spacetime on a closed timeline curve. This means that the particle returned to its original starting point. It did not create a new curve.

In the simulation, the particle was sent back to an earlier point in time and interacted with the original particle before returning back to the present.

Don’t ask me to explain the nitty-gritty science behind this stuff. I failed physics in college.

So, if I’m reading this correctly, time travel is theoretically possible, at least in the quantum world. Will this mean that we can one day travel through time? Probably not, but who knows?

In the meantime, I’ll keep going back, time and again, to time travel stories.

The monsters in our family tree

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Scientists have discovered a startling fact — compared to our not-too-distant ancestors (5000 BC), we are weaklings. Or as one of the researchers said, “the people back then were monsters by comparison. what you see today is quite pathetic.”

skeletonBritish researchers examined human bones from time periods spanning 5300 BC through the present day. What they found was that the oldest of the bones were comparable to those of today’s elite athletes. The average guy of today wouldn’t stand a chance in one-on-one with the average prehistoric man. You can read the original scientific study here, or try these summary articles in Outside magazine or the Daily Mail.

Why were people so much stronger back then? Because their lifestyles demanded it. There was no agriculture. Food had to be foraged and hunted. The humans back then had to have the physical stamina to roam—and run—great distances, all the time.

With the invention of agriculture, obtaining food became much easier, so we didn’t have to work as hard as a result. And, some speculate that our diets became poorer as a result.

side by side

So what’s the main takeaway? If you plan on travelling back in time several thousand years, you’d better be well armed.

But what about the future? As our world becomes more mechanized, as the physical demands on our bodies lessen, will we shrivel even further?

(Image source: Daily Mail)

Can you really laugh while watching sci-fi/horror?

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Sometimes humor can cut the tension and seriousness, but it’s rarely done well.

I love most things horror and sci-fi related. But it can all get so heavy. Horror is basically about ghosts, witches, demons, vampires, etc. And as for sci-fi, well… science isn’t very funny. Scientists take what they do so damn seriously sometimes. Most times. Ok, 99% of the time.

In the fictional world there seems to be a stark divide. On one hand, there’s the hardcore, where pinhead2you never laugh, except maybe unintentionally. Take Hellraiser‘s Pinhead. There is nothing funny about him. Compare that with the comedies — Spaceballs, Scary Movie 1 to infinity. Those play it only for laughs.

But then along come those rare shows that can balance drama with comedy.

The first one that comes to mind is the iconic series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At its core it was a tragedy: a teenage girl is chosen (against her will) to become a vampire slayer. These girls rarely see their 18th birthday. Fun, right?

Well, head writer and creator Joss Whedon and Buffy herself — Sarah Michelle Gellar — made it fun. The writing was sharp and clever and the jokes would fly.

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But Buffy the Vampire Slayer never let you forget the tragedy at its core.

Another example is from the SyFy channel (or SciFi as it was called back then). Farscape was about John Chrichton (Ben Browder), an American astronaut who is shot through a wormhole to a thoroughly alien part of the universe. He accidentally kills the brother of a psychotic military captain, and winds up aligned with a band of escaped convicts. He spends the series on the run while trying to get back to Earth.

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Farscape could be heavy, and many times it was. But Chrichton was written as a loose cannon, confounding his adopted compatriots for better and for worse. He was often serious as hell. But he was also funny, sharp and crafty.

I think we need more of this in these genres. Take time travel. Most of the time travel movies are 100% serious (the Terminator franchise). The only non-serious time travel movie I can think of is Hot Tub Time Machine. But that’s straight up comedy.

But there could be alternatives. I came across this short clip below, courtesy of io9.com. It takes place in a world where time travel is common, and is used by drunken assholes. It’s clever, and it left me thinking… what if? What if someone could successfully inject humor into time travel, while keeping the drama?

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/70410780″>Timeholes</a&gt; from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/mallaby”>Ben Mallaby</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

I’m waiting, Hollywood.

Time travel – from fiction to fact?

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So far, the answer is no, unless the time travelers are hiding themselves really well.

It’s not too often that you hear of honest-to-goodness scientists searching for time travelers in a systematic fashion, but a few of them are. Richard Nemiroff, an astrophysicist at Michigan Technical University, and his team took a deceptively simple approach for tracking down time travelers: they did an Internet search.

They entered the following terms in the Internet: Pope Francis (there was no Pope Francis before March 2013) and Comet ISON (discovered in September 2012). Their theory — if they found mentions of either before the dates they were known, that would point to the existence of time travelers. They found only one mention of Pope Francis, but that seemed accidental.

Then they called for tweets using the hashtag #ICanChangeThePast2 or #ICannotChangeThePast2, specfically asking that the tweets be sent before the date issued. No responses.

Maybe there are no time travelers roaming among us. Or maybe they’re smart enough to not leave a paper trail.

So, for now, we’re stuck with time travelers existing only in TV, movies, and books. Maybe that’s a good thing. It’s complicated enough in imagination land. See my post on killing Hitler here for a good rundown. Also, check out io9.com’s complicated examination of the paradox-filled, twisted timelines of the Terminator franchise.

The bottom line? Time travel is hard stuff — hard to write about, and possibly too hard for us to ever achieve in reality.

 

Want to kill Hitler? Good luck with that

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Attention time travelers, killing Hitler, while noble, may not be as easy as it sounds.
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One of my favorite web sites, io9.com, compiled several literary/TV attempts to kill Hitler, and the results are not particularly encouraging.

In a nutshell, all the literary/TV tries either 1) fail miserably due to the bumblings of the time traveler, 2) end up working, only leading to an even worse outcome, or 3) actually CAUSE Hitler and WWII as we know it.

Now, I wasn’t aware that this was such a common trope. I’ve seen the Doctor Who episode, Let’s Kill Hitler, which actually had little to do with the big bad himself, and was more about developing one of my favorite Who characters, River Song (for a good intro to all things Who, watch the two-parter Silence in the Library). Hitler was quickly forgotten in the first ten minutes or so.

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And I remember watching one of the items on io9’s list – the Twilight Zone episode (in full here) where Katherine Heigl (!) time travels to visit baby Hitler. She’s not there for a friendly visit, and not to give it away, but history incorporates her mission with no noticeable change in the timeline.

Several of the other books/stories/etc on the list are intriguing, and worth a look. Read this clever short story here, in its entirety.

The moral of this story?

Time travel as a dramatic device is great for one reason – there are endless permutations and possibilities. One simple concept – killing Hitler – can be spun in countless entertaining ways. As long as it’s well executed, it will work.