No
major spoilers. I promise. Don’t freak.
Two big blockbuster movies came out
this summer and they had as a central conceit my favorite plot device. I saw both of them and I enjoyed both of
them. I give them an A minus. They were very good but there was an element
or two that threw me off. I won’t
include details here; suffice to say the details were not about time
travel. X-Men: Days of Future Past and Edge
of Tomorrow were both fun films about traveling through time and resetting
history. What I found interesting was
just how many similarities these two
unrelated films had with each other.
X-Men
features the most famous mutant Wolverine and his attempt to alter the course
of history. Through the power of a
fellow mutant, his consciousness is sent back through time to the 1970’s to
prevent an event from happening.
Wolverine’s body in the future remains asleep, in a state of
unconsciousness while his mind and full set of memories operates his body back
in the days of furry moustaches and bellbottoms. I love consciousness time travel. I think of it as the purest state of time
travel methods. It is cerebral and it
takes the tech out of the equation. You
have no worries of running into yourself, however it forces to rely on your
memory to behave and interact as you did years ago. It is Desmond’s journey in the Lost episode “Flashes Before Your Eyes”,
where he is convinced by someone to not alter the crappy future he is supposed
to have. It is the embodiment of the
phrase “if I had it to do all over again”.
The Tom Cruise sci-fi battle pic Edge of Tomorrow takes the same
consciousness premise and speeds it up.
Cruise’s character is repeating the same sequence over and over again in
the hopes of repelling an alien onslaught.
He dies at some point in the sequence, and actually needs to finally get
it right. In the process, he learns to
become a soldier and a hero, and cease his life as a worthless schmuck. It is Groundhog
Day, but the mission is at the center and there is at least the perceived
plan of the loops ending. Becoming a
better man was just incidental.
There were no time machines in
either movie. In fact, all the
travelling was created biologically; either through mutant powers or the
influence of alien DNA. When you take
the tech out of the equation, it closes off a set of plot points but opens up a
lot more. I think it would be
fascinating to try this more often in other films. With a machine, it can be controlled and
operated by human hands, without a machine the whims of time travel itself are
in flux.
The most striking similarity is the
style of time travel. Both employ First
Person time travel, where one person enters a new time without having actually
been there before, either in life or through time travel (Marty McFly). It got me to thinking, is First Person time
travel actually time travel, or
jumping to a parallel universe? Single
String time travel defines itself by assuring that if you are going to travel
to 1940, you could conceivable find a picture of yourself from 1940 before you
even go. First Person contends that you
couldn’t, because you haven’t gone yet.
But what if the sheer act of
time travel is just a way to go to another universe, where you are born in 1972
yet can somehow interact with people in 1940?
Does Wolverine enter into his life
in the 70’s, or is it another universe, where he exists in the 70’s with all of
the memories of his life right up until he travels back? Is Tom Cruise altering the future every time
or is he entering multiple universes where he dies in different but sometimes
hilarious ways?
Yeah, it hurts my head, too.
Both of the heroes at the end are
still the only ones who know what happened.
Their realities are ones of multiple timelines and all of the
possibilities that could have happened, and actually did happen to the both of them.
It is good news for the people in their lives they were trying to
protect, but it is kind of a bummer to the two heroes. Time travel can be a lonely business.
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