This may get a little confusing, but bear with me.

First, ground rules. We must understand that time only exists in a line. It is a sequence of events that happen in succession. We can only travel or see directly parallel to the line (we’ll say the x-axis). Anything else is dimension travel (traveling on the y or z axis’s, or otherwise anything not exactly on the x-axis).

1) The word “future” is what WILL happen. What will happen cannot be changed. If it can be changed, it wasn’t the future but a tangible representation of the POSSIBILITY of the future. This means that it is IMPOSSIBLE (yes, impossible) to change the future. The future includes you discovering time travel and changing it.

This tosses out movies like Back to the Future pt 2. When Marty went into the future and saw his future self, his future self should have known exactly (to the minute) of where past (or present) self would pop up and what he would do. Simply because he already did it. This also tosses out worthless piles of crap like Next, when Nick Cage can see a little bit of the future and change it. That’s called womanly intuition and I’m sure Nick has a lot of it.

There are two ideas of traveling BACK in time. One is correct.

2a) The first and incorrect (also most widely used) Says that the second you enter in the past, you enter an “alternate dimension.” That term is used loosely so I’ll clarify… An alternate dimension is a reality that you are living now with a few (or exponential amounts) of variables that have changed. The one main variable that has changed is that you are now there–possibly twice. This is how movies like the Back to the Future pt 1 and Deja Vu are made logical. The past isn’t actually the past but a presently happening version of the past with different variables.

This isn’t time travel at all, but dimension travel.

2b) The timeline already exists in it’s entirety from beginning to end. If someone travels on that line, it is already APART of the line itself. When someone from the future travels backwards on the line and puts them self in the timeline, it was already in the timeline that it would happen. For instance, if I had assassinated Lincoln because I found out something terrible he was going to do from letters he wrote that were discovered in 2008 (or something like that). That means that the past included me from the future and all events that I would perform.

This would toss out movies like Deja Vu because he changed the past. If this were correct then the boat blowing up would include Denzel on the boat and blowing up every single time. Let me show this in a graph.

 
 

We can see that at one point there are two Denzels, between the boat explosion and his death. We can also see that when he travels back in time, he no longer exists in the present timeline (he disappears from the time machine). If he stops the boat from exploding, then he hasn’t traveled back in time at all because in this timeline the boat explodes every time.

They almost had it right in Deja Vu, right until the very end. They even threw in something that let me think that it was going to be right but never explained it. I don’t know if you guys remember this but when Denzel is walking by the body bags after the explosion and a cell phone rings, he thinks it is his. He looks at his cell phone and sees that it isn’t ringing. Possibly showing that his future self was one of the bodies (when they try to call him after the explosion to see if he succeeded).

This would also toss out the ENTIRE Terminator series. SOOOO many flaws I get the shakes every time I see it on TBS. We’ll overlook the obvious problems (why not send the Terminators back to the same point in time, or maybe while she was 9 months pregnant, etc) and we will notice that it would be impossible for the terminators to even exist as the inventor and all pieces of the current project were destroyed before they were even invented in the second movie. If they went back in time to save him or the pieces, they wouldn’t have been destroyed, they would have been saved.

To this day I haven’t seen a correctly done Time Travel movie so I would love any suggestions (don’t say Minority Report or you will get another post like this ). I guess it doesn’t make for a very exciting movie as you know exactly what will happen and nothing can change for the hero.

Anywho, if someone disagrees please let me know.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Geek, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.