Timecrimes (some spoilers)

One of my favorite movies is Primer, the smartest time travel movie I've ever seen. I happen to be taking a class called The Evolution of Sci-Fi Film right now, and we're talking about time travel. Most of our discussion towards the end was about how awful Looper is, but my teacher mentioned Primer and a movie that was slightly similar. I asked about this, and he let me borrow his copy of Timecrimes.

I just watched it the other night, and...I don't know how to feel about it. The worst part was the dubbing. It's a Spanish movie, and I was lazy about subtitles, so I watched it with all English voices. And all that does is make the characters sound like idiots. I watched parts of it over again in Spanish, but of course the subtitles just said exactly what the English dub said, so...yeah, no real improvement.

Basically, the movie shows Hector, a middle-aged man who, upon seeing something strange in the woods by his home, goes to investigate and gets chased by a dangerous man whose face is covered in bandages. As one can easily guess by the nature of the movie, this is himself from the future, and he soon stumbles upon the time machine that leads to him doing everything he already saw himself do. It's a bit of a paradoxical thing, since he has no reason to force the girl who follows him into doing what she does other than to create the scene he saw originally. As far as being consistent with time travel, this movie wins a gold star. But this consistency comes at a price. The main character switches between being very dumb and very insightful at almost random times. He does almost everything in an attempt to recreate the right conditions, but his motives aren't very clear from time to time. I thought that he would make a big deal about saving his wife, but the way he does it--while very clever--doesn't make it seem like he's very passionate about doing it. While most people would try to change things drastically, he sticks to the plan, almost without emotion.

So with those things in mind, it's a very strange film. I would've liked it better if it were a bit more complicated, or if the characters were more developed. Still, it's worth watching.

All Travel is Time Travel (and a bit about Source Code, so Spoiler Alert)

My fiancee recently made the statement, "All traveling is time travel." Her uncle proceeded to comment on it, saying that surely not all of travel was time travel. His argument didn't make much sense to either of us, but it still got me thinking about the nature of the fourth dimension.

I read The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells, a bit over a year ago. In this book, Wells puts forth the idea of time as the fourth dimension, in addition to length, width, and height. Many people have a hard time conceptualizing time, so this is the easiest way to do it, in my opinion. To move across one dimension, you go left and right. To move across two dimensions, you go forward and backward. To move across three dimensions, you go up and down. And to move across four, you go through your day. Every moment that passes pushes you along that dimension into the future.

This is why it's easy to see that anything you do automatically moves you across that dimension. Even sitting still does, since time is still passing. And, as many people fail to realize, the Earth is constantly in motion, so you really can't escape movement unless you're out in the void of space and are able to stop yourself from moving. Even then you're going through time: you might not be moving as a whole body, but processes are still taking place inside of you.

The only way to stop movement along that axis would be to "freeze" time. But how would that really work? Reaching absolute zero? That stops all movement, after all. But does the cessation of movement really mean the cessation of movement along the fourth dimension? Well, think about it: does it end movement along the other dimensions? Sure, you can't move left, right, back, forth, up, or down...but those dimensions still exist, creating the landscape of the frozen universe. Hmm...but it has stopped movement. I'm not convinced, however, that time itself would stop. Everything would be frozen at a particular point in its four-dimensional travel, but that doesn't stop things from moving along that axis.

The difference, of course, is that movement across four dimensions works without conscious effort. So I guess this would be a fatalistic way of looking at it, but...just as our first three dimensions are constantly present, so is our fourth. Our life can be seen as a block, and the passage of time is just our observation of the measurement of time. An example that would make this clearer is Kurt Vonnegut's classic novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. The Tralfamadorians, an advanced alien race, are able to see all of time. They describe the human observation of time as rolling down an incline while looking at a mountain range through a tube (I am paraphrasing. If you haven't read the book, you should; it's a masterpiece). It's all there, but we can't see the entirety of it. We just see one bit of it at a time.

(Hmm...now that I think about it, this could possibly disprove the idea of all travel being time travel. After all, if every instance of your life is always there, all that's really changing is which part of it you're viewing. Then the only time travel that could occur would be through a time machine. Of course, that's only if you're taking the fatalistic "block" conception of time to that extent...and besides, it's not like our consciousness is outside of time, looking in. So never mind. Just what I thought was a setback... Your consciousness is part of your transformation through time, since its nature can change through the passage of time, and thus it time travels. There.)

The only way to be outside of time would be to use a device that stops time, like the one in that episode of The Twilight Zone where the guy stops time and then breaks the stopwatch, ending up stuck like that forever. But even then, you are working by your own subjective fourth dimension. That's the whole point, after all. When he freezes time, he doesn't freeze himself. He goes out and steals money. Though I guess the real problem with this is that something like that shouldn't be possible. Air would freeze, the tools he would need to get the money would freeze, his clothes would freeze, etc. He shouldn't be able to move at all. I guess that's what comes of not thinking through all the implications of such a thing... Anyway, such a device would freeze all time completely. And perhaps that would be the end point of the four-dimensional axis. The only way to avoid time travel is to avoid the possibility of travel--namely, by stopping time itself.

This whole conversation got met thinking about time travel movies, since I am taking a science fiction film class at the moment. The second review we have to write is for a time travel movie, and I was mad to see that Source Code was on the list of recommendations. I guess that every movie, technically, is a time travel movie, since all movement is time travel as I have described it above. So I would change the criteria for "time travel" from "movement through time" to a more specific definition. From now on, when I talk of time travel, I mean, "unnatural movement across the fourth dimension, esp. by use of a time machine." This excludes the normal workings of life, but includes such things as cryogenics, stasis, slingshotting around the sun, and other methods outside of the natural flow across our fourth dimension.

Source Code purports to be a time travel movie in the sense I have just revised it. But in the end, it fails at all the science it attempts. The basic point behind the plot is that Colter Stevens is sent back into a dead guy's memories to relive the bombing of a train and find out who was responsible. This is a ridiculous premise, worse than Looper. If such a technology existed, there is no way he could do anything other than what the man already did. As such, he cannot learn things that the person didn't learn the first time through. He can't go places the person didn't go, or make conversations that the person didn't make. Otherwise it would cease to be that person's memory.

But the filmmakers go a step further, and completely ruin all credibility by adding the time travel aspect to it. Colter decides that if he changes things on the train, he can change the future. Which is the dumbest idea ever. I emphatically agreed with the people in the movie telling him he was crazy for thinking it would work. Because, logically, changing what happened in someone's memories, in a computer simulation of those memories, does not constitute going back in time and changing real events. All he would've done is changed how those 8 minutes turned out, which he shouldn't be able to do anyway. The simulation should have shut off, leaving no alternate universe. The only possible way this new alternate universe could exist is as a fantasy in Colter's mind similar to that in the short story, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", by Ambrose Bierce. And that is how I choose to interpret that movie, because I'm really serious about time travel.

Looper (spoilers galore)

To start off, I'll pick one of the movies I watched recently. Ever since I first heard about Looper, I was excited to see a time travel movie with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, especially with Bruce Willis in the cast. I was a little skeptical about the plot, but I figured that it would all shake out in the end, and the movie would be amazing.

But I didn't see it for quite a while. I saw people mentioning it, saying it was a really great movie. I was starting to like Joseph Gordon-Levitt after rewatching Inception, seeing that he was in The Dark Knight Rises, and watching 50/50 (which was a good movie). I thought it would be okay if I just waited for it to go to video first, though, before seeing it.

And what a great decision that was!

Let me just say this: I love time travel movies. Time travel has got to be my favorite plot device...and my favorite science fiction topic. The tragedy, however, is that very few filmmakers use it correctly. And that's not to say that I want them to hold to one specific theory of time travel (like quantum mechanics, which is my personal favorite as far as which one is probably true). I just want films to be consistent in which method they use. Looper is not.

The logic of Looper, which Bruce Willis's part of the main character doesn't want to discuss, is that if any changes are made when traveling back in time, they revise the course of events such that the future will automatically feel the effects. This is pointed to when Joe's friend lets his loop run, and they cut directions into the past guy's arm, so the future him will interpret this as a message from his past self. When the future guy gets to the spot, they start torturing his past self, so that his future self will be weakened when he arrives, and they can kill him.

Seems clever at first. The problem, of course, is that this new version of this guy will already know that it's a trap, and so his future self should know as well. Why doesn't he? Oh yeah, because the past is "blurry" when it's changed. I could try to overlook this. Except for the fact that the future self is weakened. If 30 years go past, wouldn't he have some work done to improve upon his physical well-being? And wouldn't that damage make it impossible for his future self to have run away in the first place?

It was about this time that I realized a glaring hole in the plot. The whole point of the Looper system is to dispose of bodies in the past, because it is nearly impossible to do this in the future. However, when Joe's future self is explaining what happened to him before he went into the past, he describes how the mafia killed his wife...in the future. The place where they don't want to kill people. Huh? The only explanation I can come up with for this is that they will send her body back in time to be disposed of. But if they can do that...why don't they do that for everyone they want dead? Instead of risking people running around screwing up the past, they could just kill them in the future and have them sent back into the furnace, or at least nearby so the Looper just shovels them in or something.

Once I thought of this, the rest of the movie just felt pointless. And the end? Oh, sure, Joe sacrifices himself to stop the Rain Maker from becoming such a bad guy...except that the scenario he cooks up can't be the reason the Rain Maker is what he is. Originally, he had no interaction with the kid, and yet he turned out to be evil. His going back in time would've started the thing that made him go back in time. Paradox. Even that would be okay if they actually pointed it out.

Instead, they make things worse by having his past self commit suicide. This, my friends, is the worst thing he could've done. Now, none of what his future self has done will occur. Meaning none of this movie occurred. (hmm...maybe this the best eventuality then...except that the filmmakers fail to see that this is the proper course of events). Of course, they decided to go along with it anyway, and everything future Joe did is still there...which, by the movie's logic, it shouldn't.

There are countless other problems with this movie (the 30-second steak, for instance), but it really doesn't deserve much more discussion. If you want to see some other problems, just look up Cinema Sins's video, "Everything Wrong with Looper in 3 Minutes or Less." There are some pointless ones in there, and I want to address some of the things they don't seem to comprehend in regards to The Dark Knight Rises, but I'd say they're a good gauge of how bad a movie really is at following logic...and Looper fails their test horribly.

Though there is another way of looking at that ending. Maybe now time should revert to when the original Joe shot his future self...leading to the Bruce Willis timeline, and creating...a loop. Wow. Y'know, that would actually make some sense. If they just fixed the mafia bit, this could work...

Wait, no...because the mafia is too stupid not to realize that forcing someone to kill their future self is ridiculous. If I had to do that, I would just take the gold and split it with my future self, running away from the mafia thanks to my future self's superior knowledge of them. Better yet, I could pretend I had killed my future self, then run away with him. Peaceful life, looping forever.

Edit: My father has recently pointed out that it is possible for the mafia to track the future self, hence they know when the Loop is running. So you can disregard that last bit. I might still try to evade them with future knowledge, though. Perhaps tamper with their tracking equipment so they can't find him?