a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2070 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Sci-Fi club no. 35: I'll Follow You Down discussion

Good time travel movies can be accomplished by limiting the accessibility to time travel. This is why Back to the Future works - he goes back once, it's a mistake, he fucks shit up royally, he has to correct it all, he's got one completely improbable method home and he gets there and he didn't just unfuck everything he made it radically better. The next two movies emphasize your point: once Mr. Fusion is online blipping around the continuum ain't no thang.

It's the same limitation that allows Edge of Tomorrow ("Day after tomorrow" is that 2004 thing about how global warming is going to kill us all instantly and dramatically) to work - Tom Cruise is gonna fuckin' die and only by getting the timing right over and over again can he start over. Edge of Tomorrow is basically Groundhog Day with an alien invasion welded on; Groundhog Day is basically Ken Grimwood's Replay with the timescale set to "one day" rather than "one lifetime".

Star Trek, under Roddenberry, had the maxim that every change made to the universe during the course of the episode had to be reset to zero by the end of the episode. No budding relationships, no personal beefs, no treaties, the plot was basically catalyst that caused a reaction but neither created nor destroyed anything. The new show has gotten away from this which makes it more interesting.