I've noticed that time travel in movies sucks not because it's not couched in our own physical knowledge of the universe, but because.....It is often blatant and obvious deus ex machina. even though I approve of the new star trek movie as highly entertaining, there again you have highly dubious deus ex machina. because the time traveling spock and vulcans changed captain kirk's history, they can side-step and recreate the franchise without having to pay homage to the vast annals of its history and the conundrums a remake would ultimately be confined to if it were to be acknowledged. which is great news for me, who vaguely liked the sci fi of star trek, but was never quite embroiled and bedded down in it so much so as trekkies might be. I can imagine how violated I would feel if I were one of those trekkies. but, there it is. it's all about what he does with it. the next trek movie should be great (and we know it's in the works), but let's see if they don't take another bite of the delectable apple called retroactive plot editing. and so long as time travel is in the mix it is always a dark shadow on the horizon that indicates that there is not a lush universe with people and characters with interesting and surprising things to come, but one that is not fully imagined and as revisable as a jingo's holocaust.

the same is true of heroes. every season time travel ultimately allows them to undo the apocalypse, and then they have to prevent the apocalypse the next season. which allows them to play with themes on terrorism that battlestar galactica did much better with at a time when they were much more controversial or whatever else they like, heck they can do whatever they want, next season, they just shake the magna doodle with time travel, and nothing they commit to entering into ever holds. generally it just means that it sucks. there's no real dilemma to deal with except the fake one. all of your beloved characters will be there next season. at least in season 1 we were tantalized with a world where being super had consequences, where there was a very nasty villain, and where there were precogs but that didn't necessarily help them avoid being killed off forever. perhaps it is because in part that real drama requires that we have something precarious to lose. or maybe we're just the more willing to accept revived simulacra as the real thing.

so much so with the terminator franchise...etc. it's not that time travel isn't accurate (this is fiction baby, i don't care), it's that it is a sort of card an author plays whenever they don't want to have to explain the universe they have created. while j.k. rowling tries to deal with a muggle world we all are familiar with, she doesn't do away with it by not mentioning it while her stories are happening. maybe she doesn't do it well, maybe, she botches her own plot devices or makes it seem fake, but at least it's there. at least the pause button doesn't exist when the cat is out of the bag. I'm tired of seeing it used not as a plot element but as a plot recision tool. it makes it blaringly obvious that there is no organically developed story with characters that have reference points and conflicts that are consequential, but makes for fiction where those who are alert aren't watching a narrative about the future imagined, but the future imagined as soap opera, where every beloved character you might imagine might spring from the dead, not as a zombie, a haunting memory, or a vampire, but because you liked that person/character, and damnit, you want them to be back, that's why they're there, you're not taking a ride or reading someone else's story or being transported to a strange world, you're just being transported to the same place, only the furniture got moved around while you were sleeping.

I cannot go through all the comments, but I wonder whether anyone here brought up the movie "Primer" (which the author forgot); there is depiction of "realistic" time travel and some people even made a diagram of its multiple time lines and causalities.

I did...
<link>

traugott:

I cannot go through all the comments, but I wonder whether anyone here brought up the movie "Primer" (which the author forgot); there is depiction of "realistic" time travel and some people even made a diagram of its multiple time lines and causalities.

my friend brought up relativity and star trek the other week. he spoke of a novel called "future war". sounded interesting because it used the idea of relativity throughout and consistently.

i guess my main point is that i don't need time travel to be physically consistent with what we know for it to be enjoyable, it just needs to be done in a way that doesn't allow me to see the seams in the cloth. but so often it's a patchwork used to make something look cohesive when it clearly is not. like a supposedly good game of chess only for it to be good my opponent asked me to look over there and then stole a few peices from the board. maybe a problem when multiple authors work on the same peice of machinery, which is true of a lot of time travel movies.

wfletch:

I did... <link>

I can see this is getting away from my point. time travel sucks because it's used as deus ex machina, not because it's not physically consistent. o lord the internet. but i suppose that is my fault. the author of the article makes the same mistake. i.e. "these time travel plots suck because they don't hold up scientifically" and thus, has nothing to do with the content of the movies most of the time. I haven't seen the time traveller's wife, but from what i've seen it's about one partner not being there all the time, and mainly a metaphor, but let's go on about how the metaphor needs to be based in the reality of modern day physics.

metaphors aren't good because they are realistic, per se, it's because what they say has some truth in it, and offers a perspective that is in one way or another ironical, i.e. making you realize something you didn't accept as possible within your own mind. so, I might have TONS of problems with the zombies from "world war z", except i'm willing to accept them as metaphorical. but hey, that may bother many people that somehow a being that does not respirate coordinates the entire functioning of organisms in order to spread themselves, unless you destroy the brain.... or in another way, "1984" is metaphorical, but gets lost when people take it as verbatim realism. so that the things going on in the book aren't critiques of where our modern society is headed, but actual revelations along the lines of nostradamous about where the world will be and what it will be like.

or maybe 'lolita" is about pedophilia. people will then talk about how pedophilia is wrong and get away from the actual meaning of the book. but i'm talking more about "fiction" then "fphysics".

...Or in a TV show, which will often rotate through a rolodex of writers for its episodes (LOST etc)

I think I've seen more mainstream TV than actual Sci-Fi movies use time travel as a massive crutch when continuity threatens to dismantle an over-arcing plot. I guess for some mini-series or seasn-length shows its just too hard to keep things going without resorting to aliens, time travel, or "It was all just a dream all along"

volkstraum:

...Or in a TV show, which will often rotate through a rolodex of writers for its episodes (LOST etc)

I think I've seen more mainstream TV than actual Sci-Fi movies use time travel as a massive crutch when continuity threatens to dismantle an over-arcing plot. I guess for some mini-series or seasn-length shows its just too hard to keep things going without resorting to aliens, time travel, or "It was all just a dream all along"

yeah. that's exactly it. it's become so mainstream that it's any wonder that they wonder about the physics of it. it's just a useful plot device. it's diaphanous. at such a point why wonder about it's relationship to actual physics. i have actual beef with it as a plot device let alone as to whether it makes sense.