Do the Time Machine

Darkmoon's Rants #32

It amazes me how fast I run out of things to rant about sometimes. I think it's just cause I've fallen into a pop-culture rut, where I sit at home, watch movies and TV, and surf the web. Sometimes it's not until the time I sit to write something that I come up with anything. And those times were it seems like I got nothing to say are usually because I actually had nothing to say. Hopefully those don't seem all that often to you readers.

But, I came up with a bit of something for today. The above was just a mini-rant to help blow off steam.

Switching gears: Time travel. I wanna kinda et some ideas flowing on this topic, just cause I don't think I've touched upon it enough before. This all stems from the Back to the Future set I got for Xmas. If you hit the bonus features on the third disk, you'll find a groovy FAQ about the series. Inside they answer all sorts of questions about paradox and how the movies could possibly work when you really sat and thought about it, cause people like me really have sat and thought about it.

I find the whole subject of time travel fascinating really. The ability to go forwards or backward in time, create new timelines, see what changes... Or just to see the past. Of course, the devilish fun of time travel is what could happen if "blah blah blah" changes.

They did a movie like that recently. Butterfly Effect, which I still need to see. But that was the whole concept. Mr. Punk'd can use his brain and revisit the past, since, let's face it, he doesn't use his brain for much else. In the past, he changes things, and then see's what happens afterwards. Things go badly, he goes back, and tries to change something else.

See though, the biggest flaw with that concept isn't paradox or implausibility. It's a cool concept yes, but there's not fear of what could happen. If he doesn't like what happens, all he has to do is sink back into that cavernous wasteland he calls a brain and think of something else. There's no worry that maybe he can't travel back that next time and fix things, that maybe it was a one shot deal.

Even Back to the Future had the whole "what if I can't get back" deal. It adds tension, and tension is a good thing in a flick.

So yeah, we all know my idea time travel movie would separate the traveler from his travel device sooner or later... of course, after a few changes he makes, so we can explore alternate timelines. Cause, what's the fun of a time travel movie, if we don't see what changes and how bad the dude fucked things up.

I'm gonna come back to this idea soon, but I ran out of stuff for today.