Monthly Archives: March 2015

The grandfather paradox is the big one in time travel stories. You go back in time, you kill your grandfather, you’re never born. But if you never exist, how can you go back and kill your grandfather (I have, by the way, no idea why it’s grandfather rather than say your father or mother)? Similarly, once the past has been changed, why do your characters not remember it as always being true (RA Lafferty’s “Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne” has fun with people constantly trying to change the past, and never realizing they’ve already done it).

I don’t think this is actually that big a paradox. I’ve always thought the simplest solution was to assert that if you’re back in the past, you’re disconnected from the consequences of time travel. If you change your past, you’ll still exist as you were. When you return to your present, you’ll be in a world where “you” don’t exist. For example, at the end of Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated, the team discovers as the result of the time changes they’ve wrought, their entire lives are different, but they still remember everything the way it used to be.

Of course that still doesn’t explain how in (for example) Running Against Time, Robert Hays friends in the present remember the original past, before he went back to try and stop Oswald shooting JFK (need I say it goes horribly wrong?). As a result, they’re able to monitor Hays’ impact on the time stream by looking at old newspapers and comparing the headlines with their memories.

One possible solution is that just being aware time is changing makes it possible to remember. In STEIN’S;GATE: Burdensome State of Deja Vu, Okarin has the ability to sense the timelines changing, but Cristina suggests deja vu results from everyone having a small ability to “read Stein” as they call it.

Another paradox defuser, as I noted here, is to have some kind of tech that neutralizes the effect of time changes.

One common solution is to say that the protagonist (or villain) didn’t change anything, they just created a new branching timeline. Which makes sense, but (as noted at the link in the previous paragraph) it’s really unsatisfying in movies. Having seen Robert Loggia drunk and guilt-ridden for most of Against Time, I want to know the ending (he’s happy, healthy, and his tragedy has been erased) affects him, not that it created a new Loggia and the old one is still miserable in the original timeline.

Yet another possibility: Magic. Or God. In Repeat Performance, it’s obvious something supernatural and powerful allowed Joan Leslie her one-year do-over. Presumably anyone/anything that plays at that level won’t have trouble keeping her memory intact.

Of course, lots of time-travel movies don’t have any theory, they just go with maximum dramatic effect. But I’m impressed b the movies that do make an effort.

IDAHO TRANSFER (1971) is Peter Fonda’s very low-budget film in which federal teleportation researchers secretly use their tech to send teens into the future after an upcoming eco-collapse, only to have several recruits on a test trip stranded when the project shuts down. Unfortunately their activities consist of walking across the wilderness and chatting around the campfire, so there’s no real sense of an apocalypse or even a future until the incomprehensible ending. Poor (all rights to image with current holder) “It could be 50,000 gallons of chartreuse high-gloss enamel—we could paint Portland!”

FUTURE HUNTERS (1986) has a traveler from a post-apocalypse Road Warrior-type future come back to the present where he enlists a couple (one half being Robert Patrick pre-Terminator II) to prevent Nazis from using the Spear of Destiny to bring about the world’s destruction. Even if this wasn’t a Philippines movie (and so outside my mandatory range) it might go in the appendix for how little the time-travel matters: after the opening scenes, it’s a straight Indiana Jones knockoff with the protagonists racing the Nazis to the Spear and encountering pygmies, Amazons, gunmen and martial artist Bruce Li. It doesn’t help that the female lead is useless except for screaming, nagging, getting rape threats and getting semi-naked (say what you will about badly written strong female characters, I still prefer them to badly written wimpy ones).It’s just like riding a bike except for two little things—takeoff and landing.”

CAMP SLAUGHTER (2006) has a group of college-age friends stranded at a woodland summer camp discover a slasher systematically butchering the campers, then doing it all over again when the day reboots. The low budget and poor acting  are undeniable, but more money probably wouldn’t have this the next Scream as the concept is so poorly handled (even those who are aware of the loop never try to change things). And the obnoxious leads are simply puzzled by the characters’ 1980s slang (the murder took place in 1981), they react like they’re talking Serbo-Croatian (it’s not so far back they’d find it that alien). And the repeated emphasis that they’re knocking off Jason Voorhees gets old pretty quick. “Please tell me the date is not Friday the 13^th.”

TIMESLINGERS (2013) has a time portal not only drops two squabbling teenage siblings back into the Old West, it does so just as a stranded baby ET needs help rescuing his captive mother from a sheriff who plans to sell her to a Barnum-type exhibitor. Cliched and unimpressive. “I know we have to save Jiffy’s mother, but we’re dealing with a psychopath!”

TIMEKEEPER (1998) has a trio of kids discover too late that their spooky neighbor is actually a guardian of the timestream, the Too Late part being one of them has fallen into the past and thereby erased our reality in favor of a steampunk alt.history. Some nice touches, like time police from the alternate future trying to preserve it, but mostly routine Disneyesque fluff. “If I’d known the entire fate of my world would rest on my shoulders, I’d have checked my watch..”

JULES VERNE’S MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (2010) turns Verne’s book into a Lost knockoff in which Civil War soldiers and 21^st century “Jules Fogg” find themselves stranded in the Bermuda Triangle (I suppose we should give JJ Abrams credit for putting his island in the Pacific) due to Captain Nemo’s accidental creation of a time-trap while attempting to rewrite history. Mediocre on pretty much every level, and if they were going to throw in modern women, why not make them more than just damsels in distress? With W. Morgan Sheppard and Mark Sheppard as different ages of Nemo. “We aren’t traveling in time—we’re lost in it.”

FIRE TRIPPER (1985) is a good anime fantasy in which a toddler time-jumps from a fiery death in feudal Japan to the present, then jumps back as a teen and becomes involved with an Obnoxious and Irritating village warrior (the manga is by the same writer who later created Inuyasha). This has a couple of nice twists, slightly confused by my conviction the two leads were siblings and finding it implausible how fast the girl accepted incest. “Oh, no, it’s like an indirect kiss!”