Time Travel and Parallel-World Films, Plus Some That Aren’t Either (#SFWApro)

TIMERIDER: The Adventure of Lyle Swann (1983) stars Fred Ward as a moto-cross biker who rides into a time-travel test site and winds up back in the 1870s, where he spends a lot of time driving around and scaring people with the strange thing he rides before outlaw Belinda Bauer forces him into bed at gunpoint, then spends the rest of the movie waiting helplessly for rescue. Even emptier of substance than Final Countdown.  “Dammit, are you the cop or not?”

Now, the parallel world stuff—SLIDING DOORS (1998) is the charming rom-com which follows two alternate timelines, one in which Gwyneth Paltrow catches a train and thereby finds true love with John Hannah, the other in which missing the train leads to Paltrow working night and day supporting her cheating boyfriend. While this isn’t officially a parallel world story, it’s close enough for my taste, and fun to rewatch in any case; Jeanne Tripplehorn plays a bitchy romantic rival (“I’m sorry you had to learn this way.”). “A sure sign you’re not over someone is when you’re still reading their horoscope in the hopes they’re going to be wiped out in a freak napalm incident.”

By contrast, while SyFy’s WEBS (2003) specifically takes place on an alternate Earth (visited by Richard Grieco and his friends), that detail is so irrelevant to their fight against the killer spider-people infesting it I doubt this will do more than make the appendix. Adequate for Sci-Fi Channel, but Grieco ain’t much of a lead actor.“Then you’ll understand why I don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on.”

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) is, of course, the classic of alternate history in which Jimmy Stewart discovers that in a world where he didn’t exist, his town would be a mess of slums and red-light districts, Gloria Grahame is a dance-hall floozy, Beulah Bondi a hard-bitten boarding-house owner and evil bankers Lionel Barrymore finally gets to own everything (“It’s Potterville—you don’t think I know where I live?”). What makes this different from many of the films I’ve watched is that where many time-travel flims use the present to set up the alternate history, the set up is the heart of this film, with the alt.history just there to drive home that Stewart’s George Bailey really did have a wonderful life. A great film, but it doesn’t hold up for me on multiple viewing as well as the best Christmas Carol adaptations do. “One man touches so many lives—it leaves a big hole when he’s not there.”

BARBIE’S CHRISTMAS CAROL (2008) will never rang with those rewatchable versions of Dickens, but I did think it might qualify for the book (if Chasing Christmas can play time-travel games with the Dickens story, why not Barbie?). But no, it’s a fairly straight and unimpressive rendition of the tale, though I did like how the protagonist—a brilliant but heartless actress who expects everyone in her show to rehearse Christmas Day—ruins her own career through her selfishness, setting up the bleak Christmas Future.  “In a selfish world, the selfish succeed.”

ESCAPE IN TIME (2007) is an arty indy movie about a janitor who discovers he’s stuck in the flashback booth of a gangster who broke out of Alcatraz years before. No actual time travel, so I fast-forwarded through a lot of this and didn’t feel I was missing anything.

A CHRISTMAS STORY (1985)—or as TYG called it on Christmas Eve, “that movie Eyes Shot Out“—once again became our Christmas viewing, as little Ralphie struggles to get his dream Christmas present despite skeptical teachers, worried mother Melinda Dillon (“You’ll shoot your eye out.”), tongues stuck to flagpoles, defective furnaces, soap poisoning and impatient Santas. What more need be said? “Palmolive had a piquant, after-dinner taste.”