Some Films Where Time Travel Just Does Not Work Well
This Is One of Those Impossible Plot Elements, For Sure
Now I’m no physicist. I spent most of my high school Chemistry classes trying to figure out what I could do just to keep my grade from dropping to or below a C. Most script or drama plots I attempt to write fizzle out before I’ve gotten to the second half of Act 1 Scene 1. But you don’t need to be a science mastermind or film expert to recognize that something is off with the time travel elements in major classic films. Let’s just take a look at a few of the most well-known time travel films out there; maybe you can make better sense of them than me.
Back to the Future, a Good Place To Start
Let’s start with the Back to the Future film franchise. Certainly, this is one of the genre’s greatest. Marty McFly and his good friend Emmet “Doc” Brown manage to steer the DeLorean auto with its flux capacitor through numerous eras and perilous situations. Just think of the whole sequence of events over three films. Travel to 1955 by mistake and then fight to get back to 1985. Visit 2015 and then be forced to travel back to 1955 to reclaim the original version of 1985. Travel back to 1885 to then fight to get back to 1985 again...are you still with me?
The thing is, in Back to the Future 2 there is an irregularity in the plot itself that may throw the whole story into freefall. The elderly man Biff from 2015 goes back to 1955 and offers his younger outrageous self a Sports Almanac. Although the almanac proves a chance for Biff to make millions and changes the future timeline when Marty and Doc Brown go back to 1985, the thing is if the younger Biff changed the future shouldn’t it have shaken up the 2015 Marty and Doc were in? Viewers should have expected something like Marty’s and Doc’s surroundings starting to vaporize or something similar. This is just one of the numerous paradoxes many have noted from the franchise. Surely this genre classic shows how the kinks of time travel cannot fully be worked out on the big screen.
The Lake House
So now we change gears to zoom in on a romantic comedy between Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. The Lake House, featured in 2006, brings these two stars together again in a romantic comedy centered around a beautiful and serene house off of Lake Michigan. Alex Wyler (Reeves) seeks to renovate the lake house built by his famous architect father in 2004. However, his efforts to reunite with his father and younger brother take a backseat to mysterious letters mailed to the house. They are from a whimsical and full-of-life doctor from 2006. Two years in the future, Dr. Forster is leaving messages for the new tenant. However, the letters go back to 2004. Soon, it appears these two wanderlust beings find themselves connected through some mysterious time loop that skips back and forth two years through the house’s mailbox.
The plot moves fast enough with solid performances by Reeves and Bullock. However, as one reviewer noted, the plot is riddled with more holes than “Swiss cheese.” It’s not so fantastic that time loops of some mysterious nature could exist in weird places like mailboxes. However, the fact that both Reeves’ and Bullock’s characters just seem to make it to the mailbox at just the opportune moments juxtaposed next to minute details like trees suddenly popping into existence or a mysterious bus accident suddenly being reversed makes the time gap all too troublesome. However, Reeves and Bullock certainly made their names out of outrageous bus films before.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home — Or Some Form of Home Anyway
So now we venture back to the mid-1980s when Star Trek IV debuted with the original cast including William Shatner, DeForest Kelley, and Leonard Nimoy. Hey, this is the same timeframe Admiral James Kirk, Captain Spock, and crew time time-traveled to as well by slinging a captured Klingon bird-of-prey around the Sun. Their mission: to bring back two humpback whales from the 20th century as a response to some mysterious space probe infiltrating 23rd-century Earth.
If you are a Star Trek guru, you will be well in tune with the paradoxes of time and space commonly explored in the franchise(the very film franchise itself takes a plot twist no fictional world has gone before with later films). But doesn’t this storyline just seem extra tough to energize? Not only do you bring two humpback whales back into the future, but you manage to transport their whale biologist caretaker as well. Plus let’s throw in a few messy scenes on the streets of San Francisco plus stealing power from a nuclear submarine. And you thought the Borg were bad news?
Kate and Leopold — Or a Romantic Comedy/Time Travel Plot Gone Terribly Off-Kilter
Okay, imagine a film where the plot is so beautifully laid out each piece fits seamlessly like the next chapter of a page-turning novel. Now, since we are talking about time travel, throw in some mind-boggling scientific theories about time as a 4th-dimension. In common theoretical frameworks, time is like a giant pretzel or intricate basket weaving where past, present, and future intersect in more ways than one. So there we have this spazzy romantic comedy Kate & Leopold, featuring Meg Ryan as 21st-century Kate McCay and Hugh Jackman as Duke Leopold of Albany. Somehow the 19th-century Duke Leopold, a royal struggling to find his way in the ever-progressing turn of the century, is drug into the 21st century. Besides the existential shock, Leopold quickly becomes smitten by the very modern woman Kate McCay, a publishing executive struggling to rise to the top of the corporate ladder.
Oh, how grand of a plot certainly for a novel. But the juxtaposition of times doesn’t fit well on the big screen(neither do the characters from my viewpoint). Though Jackman and Ryan give strong performances, the film is as one critic put it “not a huge success.” Okay, that’s putting it nicely. The time travel bit becomes a little bit too hair-pulling. Whatever happened to a telephone booth or DeLorean? Here, the characters just jump off bridges to be sucked into the gravitational time portals. We never knew time travel could be so…outrageous. At least Kate and Leopold end up happily ever after in the 19th century and Kate can write letters for her 21st century family members and friends to read someday.
Make Any Sense Yet?
Okay, we’re back where we started(I won’t dare say when). We’ve explored Marty McFly’s amazing DeLorean adventures with the science whack Doc Brown(who doesn’t seem to age much over the decades). We’ve danced around those time-travel romances and visited science fiction. Maybe fiction can never adequately capture the paradoxes and mysteries of any possible form of time travel. Perhaps we really are not anywhere close to understanding the true nature of time(and let’s face it if we cannot get time down in fiction then it may be likely to remain an ever-elusive phenomenon in reality). Hey, isn’t that one of the goals of film and fiction — to at least begin to imitate the universe's numinous and unboundedly complex realities if only just a bit?
