Time Travel In the Movies (1 Viewer)

[David Oliver]

I've always thought that 12 Monkeys was pretty internally logical and consistent movie with respect to it's time travel.

I was going to include Slaughterhouse Five, but upon reflection it doesn't seem to me to involve time travel so much as someone living their life out of order.

 

[MichaelPe]

I don't know if the science in the film is different than in the book, but Timeline had a pretty logical approach to time travel (though I should admit that my knowledge of quantum physics is poor).

Terminator should be mentioned here for its logically-inconsistent paradox, but that's a whole other debate.

 

[Dan Rudolph]

The Back to the Future series also had inconsistent and nonsensical internal logic, but did a fairly good job glossing over this.

I'd agree the 12 Monkeys makes more sense logically than pretty much any other time travel movie.

 

[James T]

I think Back to the Future has the most scientific explaination for time travel, even though the movies are comedies. They explain everything. Why you can't meet yourself, why it's bad to know too much about your future. But they screwed up at the last 2 minutes of the movie when Jennifer asks about the piece of paper that says Marty got fired is now erased and Doc responds by saying something along the lines of the future is not set and its whatever you want it to be.

So they threw out all the destiny stuff in favour of a nice happy ending.

I also liked how they did time travel in Donnie Darko, although explaining it will spoil the movie big time for those who want to see it.

 

[Bill Williams]

There are a number of films that had pretty solid approaches to time travel.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home had a good approach to time travel with Kirk and company sling-shotting around the sun to go into time warp, a throwback to a couple of episodes of the original series. The only thing I wonder is, wouldn't there be two Birds-of-Prey heading to Earth, one with George and Gracie and one without?

Star Trek: First Contact did a pretty solid job of presenting the time travel issue with the Enterprise-E and the Borg sphere heading back in time, and that was resolved pretty nicely, IMHO.

Another good film that handled time travel effectively is Nicholas Meyer's Time After Time. That one was brilliant.

And let's not forget Somewhere in Time, although the time travel theory seemed to be a bit stretched. The original Richard Matheson novel seemed to be a bit clearer in presenting the notion that Richard Collier had been dying of a brain tumor and may have dreamed about the entire time travel experience during his last days.
That entire subplot was scrapped from the final film.

 

[Geoffrey_A]

Sadly, it has to be a really great movie for me to take a time travel story. Not because I dislike time travel stories mind you, but because of what I know about the practicalities of time travel. Especially in the Star Trek universe, which often cites Quantum Physics.

Here's the thing. If we believe the multiple dimension theory, where there are an infinite number of universes where every probablity is played out, then time travel is completely useless. Take the favourite time travel paradox for instance, you go back and kill your parents, but then you won't exist so how can you go back? Answer: Doesn't matter. You left a universe in which you were born, as soon as you appear in the past you now occupy a different universe. Therefore, if you kill your parents, nothing happens to you, because you come from a parrallel universe where you didn't. Your universe carries on without you, the universe your in now does the same, excpet in this one you'll never exist. And the kicker? You can never go back to your universe. You now occupy a universe where you will never exist, go forward in time from that point and you end up in the future of that universe. Try to stop yourself and you will exist in yet another universe where you showed up to stop yourself, and so on and so on. Confusing, isn't it

The problem inherent in this view of time travel is that it makes time travel completely useless. You could go back and kill Hitler, and it might very well make that universe a lot better, won't change anything for your world. In your universe Hitler still did horrible horrible things. Same thing with going to the future, you will arrive in a universe where you disappeared at some point in the past, and if you go back to where you left, you change the future you just visited. Time travel is a fun idea, but doesn't take a lot of scrutiny, because once you look into it a little deeper, it all falls apart.

Dammit, I wish I'd never gotten so keen on studying time travel, damn you star trek!

 

[Dave Poehlman]

If we believe the multiple dimension theory, where there are an infinite number of universes where every probablity is played out

I wish I lived in the one where Jennifer Garner is sitting on my lap right now?

I'm the same type of skeptic with time travel movies, Geoff. The implications of appearing in the past are infinite. It's the whole "a butterfly can cause a tidal wave on the other side of the world" thing that gets glossed over by Hollywood. Not that they don't understand it.. it just doesn't make good plotlines.

I have an interesting sci-fi book on time travel: Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card. It's not a great book, but I think it's one of the more "believable" stories about time travel.

 

[Nick T Robot]

The only thing I wonder is, wouldn't there be two Birds-of-Prey heading to Earth, one with George and Gracie and one without?

Could you elaborate, I don't see why there would be two Birds-of-Prey that would time travel back to "earth's past" to collect humpback whales.

 

[Bill Williams]

If we are to assume that, based on the first third of the film, the people at Starfleet witness the crash of the Bird of Prey in San Francisco Bay, based on their point of view, then it doesn't have George and Gracie and Dr. Taylor with them. However, in the revised timeline, we see the Bird of Prey heading for the bay with their 20th century additions on board. So it's possible that there could be two Birds of Prey that land in the SF Bay.

Then again, it's equally feasible that in the original timeline, Earth is destroyed by the probe, which would then get rid of everything Trek after that (ST V and VI, TNG, DS9, and VOY). Therefore, the revised timeline occurs when the Bird of Prey returns to Earth, so Earth is saved.

 

[Joseph Howard]

There is time travel in every movie. Every one ever made.
You see, time travel does happen. We all travel time.

Wanna see me time travel? Here I go.
1
2
3
Here I am 3 seconds later. I time traveled.


***********************

Additionally, we can recieve electromagetic signals from
the past. (Thus, messages recieved in the present from
the past....)

Look at the sun outside your window. A signal from the
past as the sun was 8 minutes ago.

Heck, books travel into the future but bring ideas from
the past. Time travel happens every moment. (If time
is continuous and not quantized - which it would be
if there is a beginning of time and an end of time - quantized into one big gigayear quanta)

Time travel and getting messages from the past is real
science.

Now, dislocation in time coordinates is a whole
other matter.

Clearly, I've had too much Dr. Pepper today.

Dr. Joe

 

[Blaine Skerry]

I love the idea of Vonnegut's SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE. Billy Pilgrim becomes "unstuck" in time but he can only travel within his own life events. He can effect no changes but learns to concentrate on the good events in his life.

 

[Jamie corrns]

Anybody see or read Stephen King's The Langoliers? That was an interesting take on time travel.

 

[Nick T Robot]

If we are to assume that, based on the first third of the film, the people at Starfleet witness the crash of the Bird of Prey in San Francisco Bay, based on their point of view, then it doesn't have George and Gracie and Dr. Taylor with them. However, in the revised timeline, we see the Bird of Prey heading for the bay with their 20th century additions on board. So it's possible that there could be two Birds of Prey that land in the SF Bay.

In an alternate timeline, Kirk and Company may have arrived on earth while it was being "attacked" without the whales ("There be NO whales here!"), in another alternate timeline, Kirk and company just didn't go to earth, since they recieved word about the "attack" before arriving. There are limitless possibilities, but in what we saw, the Bird of Prey would have had to arrive at a time and place where they had been before in order for there to be two of them. Since they collected whales in 1986 and came back to their time with them and had never been to earth in that Bird of Prey, there would only be one there.

In Back to the Future, there would be two of the same character or object only if they traveled back to where they had been before. Like Marty going to the "Fish under the Sea Dance" in 1955 to retrieve the "1950-2000 Grey's Sports Almanac" just days after(well, in his POV) He had gone there to make sure his parents kissed at the dance. There were two seperate Marty's because he had gone to that same point in time twice in the same universe.

 

[Dave Poehlman]

Thought I'd dredge up this thread to say I just watched "Primer" last night. A pretty good film... has a real "indie" feel to the whole thing.

But, it deals with the concept of time travel quite realistically... and how quickly things can get complicated and how it's impossible to know all of the consequences of your actions.

Towards the end of the film I was like "WTF is going on?!?"

 

[BrettB]

This line from Primer got a lot of laughs;

I haven't eaten since later this afternoon.

 

[Colton]

Here's the problem I have with time travel in movies - in The Time Machine he sees night and day cycles as he speeds back in time, but shouldn't the Earth begin to move away from him as well? The way I picture it, when you travel through time - everything will rapidly move backward (or forward) except you. So, the planets (including the Earth) will continue to rotate and move around the Sun. What should have happened in The Time Machine was his machine slowly drifting away from the Earth. He would have to calculate when the Earth would return at the EXACT SAME SPOT to determine his destination. If he were to miscalculate, he would be drifting into space forever.

Just my theroy.

- Colton

 

[Rich Malloy]

My favorite time travel movie... Chris Marker's "La Jetee". Most interesting one seen recently... "Primer".

 

[DaveF]

Mock me if you must, but my favorite time-travel movie is Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

I enjoyed the novel Time Line (haven't seen the movie), but I'm frustrated by its internal system being called time travel. It's not. It's hopping parallel universes which line up at different temporal locations.

 

[Sam Favate]

Time travel stories can be very interesting or they can just fall apart (Timeline). The Twilight Zone episode (The Last Flight) handled the topic very well, showing the reverberations from time travel (and had its plot lifted by the ST:TNG episode Yesterday's Enterprise, which was also very good).

Here's my theory: Assuming it is possible to travel through time, you can go back in time and see yourself. You cannot, however, go forward and see yourself, because you have taken yourself out of the timeline to time travel, so the world you left behind will think that you vanished one day. Even if you plan on going back to the present, your future self will not exist in the period you traveled forward to visit. It's logically impossible to see your future self. (So Marty McFly in BTTF II could not have seen his future self.)

 

[Kwang Suh]

The way I picture it, when you travel through time - everything will rapidly move backward (or forward) except you.

Seeing as how time travel is totally fictitious, and thusly there are no set rules as to how time travel operates, that's not really a useful assumption.