I watch it now and giggle like an idiot the whole way through.
I think I was just a dumb kid?
I'm not sure child-me could have handled pure, uncut Terry Gilliam. I had to wean myself on the diluted version you got in Flying Circus for years, expose my system gradually. Jump right into the deep end and your brain just shuts it out as a defense mechanism.
Oh my other favorite time travel movie (my actual favorite) is 12 Monkeys (coincidentally also Terry Gilliam). If you didn't think Bruce Willis could act, this is the movie that'll prove you wrong.
Brad Pitt actually does a tremendous job in it, as well.
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Mego Thor"I say thee...NAY!"Registered Userregular
Time Bandits is my favorite Terry Gilliam film, closely followed by the The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
So I read that thing on reddit about the US Marines going back to Ancient Rome
It was cool! And I would much rather he had just kept writing it there or put out a book, because if that movie actually happens it's probably not gonna be real good
Back in college I took a course called Philosophy of Science Fiction, which in practice was basically Time Travel 101. We spent about 99 percent of our time discussing time travel, the various hypothetical ways it could work and the paradoxes involved.
One of my favorite things about the class was that the teacher would often talk about time travel as if it was a thing that actually existed. Also he had a very future-y sounding last name (Arntzenius) and an accent that none of us could place, so my classmates and I just kinda jokingly assumed he was actually from the future.
One day we asked him what his favorite portrayal of time travel in a movie was.
"Oh definitely Bill and Ted," he said. "It's solid."
What was his least favorite?
"Back to the Future. I mean, come on. That's not how it works at all."
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The GeekOh-Two Crew, OmeganautRegistered User, ClubPAregular
I'm going through the Star Trek movies and IV is up next.
BLM - ACAB
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The GeekOh-Two Crew, OmeganautRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Also, Braid is a rad game involving time manipulation.
The first time travel movie I remember seeing as a kid was Timerider. It was about a motorcycle guy in the Old West. All I really remember is this super gruesome bit where a helicopter shows up and the blades hack one of the dudes and he falls off of his own legs. I have no recollection of the time travel mechanics.
Anyway, I like time travel where there's only one timeline, but you basically destroy the previous timeline every time you travel back in time. If you interact with practically anything there's a butterfly effect and nothing is going to be quite like it was when you left... If you bump into someone on the street in the past, you may prevent them from getting to work on time, which prevents their promotion, which affects their financial viability, and all of a sudden they never got married to the same person and even if they do, it's a different sperm and a different egg when they finally do get together, and their children are completely different.
This is not a super popular time travel model, because a lot of productions use the time travel/alternate history conceit as an excuse to show the familiar cast in a different context, or to show them getting gruesomely killed and have it not "count." Misfits did an episode about an old Jewish guy that went back in time to kill Hitler, failed and left his cell phone in the past, returning to find that the Nazis won WWII due to reverse engineering the cell phone, and all of the main characters of the show were different. When the paradox is resolved, the one Misfit that returns to the (normal, for the show) present, he or she retains both the memories of the new timeline AND of going back in time to defeat the Nazis... which doesn't seem right. Another time travel story from that show has a character realize that time was going to be Groundhog's Day'd, and records a video message to him or herself on a cell phone... and for some reason it works. The past self gets the message. While I enjoyed the show, its time travel was all over the place.
My favorite time travel book is Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card. In that book, humanity is on the decline as resources had become scarce, and climate change was slowly choking the life out of the species, but they develop the ability to watch any event in history, and at some point realize that their tech can also change the past.
They're watching some slaves get killed, and, shortly before their deaths, the slaves see the Pastwatchers somehow. Since they're immediately killed afterward, it doesn't affect the timeline, but it does clue in the researchers as to alternate uses of their tech.
The conceit is that the future people realize that they only get one chance to change the past, so they send three people back to three different points in history, simultaneously, with a plan to guide various cultures and prevent western civilization from destroying the environment. Once they do the time travel, ZAP! There's no more from the future people in the rest of the book, except for what they sent back.
The film Millennium (1989) starts off using this method, with the future people only kidnapping people who were about to die in plane crashes, leaving future corpses with altered dental records to maintain continuity, but later treats paradox like a natural disaster of some sort, a sort of tidal wave that gives them time to struggle against history erasure.
But when you're talking history erasure, there's only one game in town.
Metaphysics: Problems of metaphysics, including such topics as: possibility and necessity, paradoxes of time travel, nature of space and time, free will and determinism, causation, mind-body problem and identity-over-time.
Time Travel: A study of contemporary metaphysics organized around the topic of time travel. David Lewis, perhaps the foremost contemporary metaphysician, argues that time travel is possible. His argument is based on ingenious positions about three central topics of metaphysics, personal-identity, causation, and free will. Students will consider each of these topics in some detail, always with an eye to their implications for time travel.
No it in no way impacted my desire to go there, why do you ask?
OverthinkingIt has done good time travel stuff. There was one article that talked about how Marty would basically be in a family of strangers in his reality at the end if the first movie, since his parents and siblings turned out so different.
Actually, based on how time travel appears to work in BttF, it would probably be more horrible than that. The Marty from BttF1 would probably vanish and be replaced by one who does know his new family. Granted, that's the worst case scenario. The effect however might be limited merely to his memory being updated.
There's actually a line that you can take as confirmation that Marty has been changed/replaced. In BttF2 when he's in 2015 posing as his son, there is a scene where Old Biff insults his father. Biff is referring to Marty Sr. (since Marty is disguised as Marty Jr.) but Marty thinks he's referring to George and gets defensive about his father not being a loser. Except BttF1 Marty should know full well that his father was a loser, unless he doesn't remember it that way anymore. Granted, that's just one way to take that scene, as it could still just be a kid standing up for his dad regardless.
Oh my other favorite time travel movie (my actual favorite) is 12 Monkeys (coincidentally also Terry Gilliam). If you didn't think Bruce Willis could act, this is the movie that'll prove you wrong.
Brad Pitt actually does a tremendous job in it, as well.
I've heard that the director couldn't get quite the performance from Brad Pitt that he wanted, and so in order to get Brad Pitt to have the right edge that he wanted, he took away Brad Pitt's cigarettes for the duration of the shoot (Brad Pitt apparently having been an avid smoker at the time).
Back in college I took a course called Philosophy of Science Fiction, which in practice was basically Time Travel 101. We spent about 99 percent of our time discussing time travel, the various hypothetical ways it could work and the paradoxes involved.
One of my favorite things about the class was that the teacher would often talk about time travel as if it was a thing that actually existed. Also he had a very future-y sounding last name (Arntzenius) and an accent that none of us could place, so my classmates and I just kinda jokingly assumed he was actually from the future.
One day we asked him what his favorite portrayal of time travel in a movie was.
"Oh definitely Bill and Ted," he said. "It's solid."
What was his least favorite?
"Back to the Future. I mean, come on. That's not how it works at all."
Yeah, BttF's "ripple effect" that it uses doesn't really seem like something that would be used in a more serious science fiction story, but it's great from a storyteller's point of view as it allows you to screw up the past and still have time to fix it, along with easily understood repercussions for the audience.
I'm okay with it not being explained or not being the focus, but they still need to remain consistent. One of the biggest problems I usually see is a story using two conflicting versions of time travel in the same story. Mainly this involves crossing the "future isn't written yet" with a pre-destination/fate version. It would be like if the bad guys in Bill & Ted actually could change the future and win despite all those things that future Bill & Ted have set up still happening. So Bill & Ted lose and thus never come back to set up those things that we already saw that they had set up.
Or for the reverse, it would be like BttF showing us that things can be changed drastically with the alternate 1985 and such, only for Marty to still end up breaking his hand in a car accident and end up working in a dead end job that he gets fired from in 2015.
---
There have been a lot of good book/movie/etc. recommendations in this thread so far. Does anybody have any others?
I can't remember what the earliest time travel thing I was exposed to was. Probably Quantum Leap or Back to the Future (as a fun side note, I remember that I actually saw Back to the Future 2 several years before I managed to see Back to the Future 3 and resolve that cliffhanger, so all I had to go on was the trailer in the credits of BttF2).
On a related note, it's kind of impressive what Quantum Leap did back in the 80s. It actually had episodes dealing with racism, homophobia, mistreatment of women, ableism, and so on thirty years ago. Granted, it addressed them by placing a straight white male into their position, but it was still bringing up these issues in what is regarded as a much more close-minded time.
There have been a lot of good book/movie/etc. recommendations in this thread so far. Does anybody have any others?
I really like Continuum. It's a Canadian science fiction show. A cop from the future accidentally gets sent back along with 8 terrorists. As far as the time travel aspect goes, seasons 1& 2 deal mostly with can the future really be changed or is it all predetermined. It can get into police procedural territory, so if that's not your thing then it may not be for you. It's been airing on Syfy, but you can also find it on Netflix. Season 4, the final season, should be starting soon.
I choose to believe that the changes Marty made in BttF1 are the reason why in 2/3 he suddenly has the never-before-seen character trait of hating being called a chicken.
Seriously he does not react at all like that in 1.
The idea that Marty slowly shifts into a different person based on how he changed the timeline appeals to me. Much like the disappearing isn't instant becoming alternate Marty doesn't happen all a once. Everyday he is missing memories he once had and gaining new ones. He slowly starts exhibiting character traits he's always had.
The idea that Marty slowly shifts into a different person based on how he changed the timeline appeals to me. Much like the disappearing isn't instant becoming alternate Marty doesn't happen all a once. Everyday he is missing memories he once had and gaining new ones. He slowly starts exhibiting character traits he's always had.
So the net result is that Marty Prime ceases to exist? How terrifying!
One problem with time travel is that the universe would be overrun with time travelers
One science fiction series I read as a kid had this huge, hidden alien civilization would which would scour any civilization dabbling in time travel technology from the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies, lest some hostile civilization went back in time to destroy their race before it could ever develop
One problem with time travel is that the universe would be overrun with time travelers
One science fiction series I read as a kid had this huge, hidden alien civilization would which would scour any civilization dabbling in time travel technology from the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies, lest some hostile civilization went back in time to destroy their race before it could ever develop
That's one reason why BttF and SG-1 are my favorite time travel stuff (yes I know SG-1 isn't about time travel I'm referring to their time travel based stories)
Because in BttF Doc invents it, antics follow, and he decides to destroy it (except the very end but you know whatevs).
In SG-1 every. single. time they figure out a way to time travel (almost always by accident), it always goes horribly wrong for them and it's like "okay yeah no fuck time travel."
One problem with time travel is that the universe would be overrun with time travelers
One science fiction series I read as a kid had this huge, hidden alien civilization would which would scour any civilization dabbling in time travel technology from the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies, lest some hostile civilization went back in time to destroy their race before it could ever develop
That's one reason why BttF and SG-1 are my favorite time travel stuff (yes I know SG-1 isn't about time travel I'm referring to their time travel based stories)
Because in BttF Doc invents it, antics follow, and he decides to destroy it (except the very end but you know whatevs).
In SG-1 every. single. time they figure out a way to time travel (almost always by accident), it always goes horribly wrong for them and it's like "okay yeah no fuck time travel."
FISH IN THE LAKE
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TrippyJingMoses supposes his toeses are roses.But Moses supposes erroneously.Registered Userregular
I have a fervent, poorly justified belief that the idea that quantum mechanics allow for time travel will eventually turn out to have been completely untrue. The smug shadenfreude I would feel if the unified theory of physics is somehow cracked within my lifetime and reveals just this would be the greatest joy of my life.
I hate time travel
Parallel universes are also bogus fyi
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Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
I have a fervent, poorly justified belief that the idea that quantum mechanics allow for time travel will eventually turn out to have been completely untrue. The smug shadenfreude I would feel if the unified theory of physics is somehow cracked within my lifetime and reveals just this would be the greatest joy of my life.
I hate time travel
Parallel universes are also bogus fyi
or is that just what you want us to think...
TO THROW US OFF YOUR TRAIL, ALTERNATE UNIVERSE HITLER WHO IS TWICE AS BAD AS OUR HITLER!?
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Mego Thor"I say thee...NAY!"Registered Userregular
Wouldn't alternate universe Hitler be really cool and laid back?
One problem with time travel is that the universe would be overrun with time travelers
One science fiction series I read as a kid had this huge, hidden alien civilization would which would scour any civilization dabbling in time travel technology from the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies, lest some hostile civilization went back in time to destroy their race before it could ever develop
That's one reason why BttF and SG-1 are my favorite time travel stuff (yes I know SG-1 isn't about time travel I'm referring to their time travel based stories)
Because in BttF Doc invents it, antics follow, and he decides to destroy it (except the very end but you know whatevs).
In SG-1 every. single. time they figure out a way to time travel (almost always by accident), it always goes horribly wrong for them and it's like "okay yeah no fuck time travel."
Wouldn't alternate universe Hitler be really cool and laid back?
Depends on the universe! There's definitely one where he's a successful painter with a dog and his beautiful young wife Eva and shit, but there's also a universe where Germany managed to work out the h-bomb and fuckin stealth aircraft and a German flag is flying over Washington and London and Moscow and Hitler is an immortal cyborg god-king.
Edit: or you could go the animorphs route and he's just some jeep driver or whatever
I have a fervent, poorly justified belief that the idea that quantum mechanics allow for time travel will eventually turn out to have been completely untrue. The smug shadenfreude I would feel if the unified theory of physics is somehow cracked within my lifetime and reveals just this would be the greatest joy of my life.
I hate time travel
Parallel universes are also bogus fyi
Time travel and parallel universes are awesome things to use in fiction.
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Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
I strongly disagree but also really don't want to have an argument!
Opinions!
The only thing I don't like about Jackson Pollock is that it takes him 3 years to do one season of a TV show. Nobody else in television is as anemic as him when it comes to work schedules, and plenty of other, better shows can put out a season a year and not lose steam.
Posts
I'm not sure child-me could have handled pure, uncut Terry Gilliam. I had to wean myself on the diluted version you got in Flying Circus for years, expose my system gradually. Jump right into the deep end and your brain just shuts it out as a defense mechanism.
Brad Pitt actually does a tremendous job in it, as well.
Cardinal Fang, fetch the comfy chair!
I think I have a decent grasp of relativity and time dilation and such
but Primer made me feel like an idiot child.
Need some stuff designed or printed? I can help with that.
It was cool! And I would much rather he had just kept writing it there or put out a book, because if that movie actually happens it's probably not gonna be real good
One of my favorite things about the class was that the teacher would often talk about time travel as if it was a thing that actually existed. Also he had a very future-y sounding last name (Arntzenius) and an accent that none of us could place, so my classmates and I just kinda jokingly assumed he was actually from the future.
One day we asked him what his favorite portrayal of time travel in a movie was.
"Oh definitely Bill and Ted," he said. "It's solid."
What was his least favorite?
"Back to the Future. I mean, come on. That's not how it works at all."
which are basically "fuck it, whatever"
Anyway, I like time travel where there's only one timeline, but you basically destroy the previous timeline every time you travel back in time. If you interact with practically anything there's a butterfly effect and nothing is going to be quite like it was when you left... If you bump into someone on the street in the past, you may prevent them from getting to work on time, which prevents their promotion, which affects their financial viability, and all of a sudden they never got married to the same person and even if they do, it's a different sperm and a different egg when they finally do get together, and their children are completely different.
This is not a super popular time travel model, because a lot of productions use the time travel/alternate history conceit as an excuse to show the familiar cast in a different context, or to show them getting gruesomely killed and have it not "count." Misfits did an episode about an old Jewish guy that went back in time to kill Hitler, failed and left his cell phone in the past, returning to find that the Nazis won WWII due to reverse engineering the cell phone, and all of the main characters of the show were different. When the paradox is resolved, the one Misfit that returns to the (normal, for the show) present, he or she retains both the memories of the new timeline AND of going back in time to defeat the Nazis... which doesn't seem right. Another time travel story from that show has a character realize that time was going to be Groundhog's Day'd, and records a video message to him or herself on a cell phone... and for some reason it works. The past self gets the message. While I enjoyed the show, its time travel was all over the place.
My favorite time travel book is Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus by Orson Scott Card. In that book, humanity is on the decline as resources had become scarce, and climate change was slowly choking the life out of the species, but they develop the ability to watch any event in history, and at some point realize that their tech can also change the past.
The conceit is that the future people realize that they only get one chance to change the past, so they send three people back to three different points in history, simultaneously, with a plan to guide various cultures and prevent western civilization from destroying the environment. Once they do the time travel, ZAP! There's no more from the future people in the rest of the book, except for what they sent back.
The film Millennium (1989) starts off using this method, with the future people only kidnapping people who were about to die in plane crashes, leaving future corpses with altered dental records to maintain continuity, but later treats paradox like a natural disaster of some sort, a sort of tidal wave that gives them time to struggle against history erasure.
But when you're talking history erasure, there's only one game in town.
My local university offers courses on metaphysics and time travel.
No it in no way impacted my desire to go there, why do you ask?
Basically, you can rewind time to fight along side your self. It's pretty rad.
Actually, based on how time travel appears to work in BttF, it would probably be more horrible than that. The Marty from BttF1 would probably vanish and be replaced by one who does know his new family. Granted, that's the worst case scenario. The effect however might be limited merely to his memory being updated.
There's actually a line that you can take as confirmation that Marty has been changed/replaced. In BttF2 when he's in 2015 posing as his son, there is a scene where Old Biff insults his father. Biff is referring to Marty Sr. (since Marty is disguised as Marty Jr.) but Marty thinks he's referring to George and gets defensive about his father not being a loser. Except BttF1 Marty should know full well that his father was a loser, unless he doesn't remember it that way anymore. Granted, that's just one way to take that scene, as it could still just be a kid standing up for his dad regardless.
I've heard that the director couldn't get quite the performance from Brad Pitt that he wanted, and so in order to get Brad Pitt to have the right edge that he wanted, he took away Brad Pitt's cigarettes for the duration of the shoot (Brad Pitt apparently having been an avid smoker at the time).
Yeah, BttF's "ripple effect" that it uses doesn't really seem like something that would be used in a more serious science fiction story, but it's great from a storyteller's point of view as it allows you to screw up the past and still have time to fix it, along with easily understood repercussions for the audience.
I'm okay with it not being explained or not being the focus, but they still need to remain consistent. One of the biggest problems I usually see is a story using two conflicting versions of time travel in the same story. Mainly this involves crossing the "future isn't written yet" with a pre-destination/fate version. It would be like if the bad guys in Bill & Ted actually could change the future and win despite all those things that future Bill & Ted have set up still happening. So Bill & Ted lose and thus never come back to set up those things that we already saw that they had set up.
Or for the reverse, it would be like BttF showing us that things can be changed drastically with the alternate 1985 and such, only for Marty to still end up breaking his hand in a car accident and end up working in a dead end job that he gets fired from in 2015.
---
There have been a lot of good book/movie/etc. recommendations in this thread so far. Does anybody have any others?
I can't remember what the earliest time travel thing I was exposed to was. Probably Quantum Leap or Back to the Future (as a fun side note, I remember that I actually saw Back to the Future 2 several years before I managed to see Back to the Future 3 and resolve that cliffhanger, so all I had to go on was the trailer in the credits of BttF2).
On a related note, it's kind of impressive what Quantum Leap did back in the 80s. It actually had episodes dealing with racism, homophobia, mistreatment of women, ableism, and so on thirty years ago. Granted, it addressed them by placing a straight white male into their position, but it was still bringing up these issues in what is regarded as a much more close-minded time.
I really like Continuum. It's a Canadian science fiction show. A cop from the future accidentally gets sent back along with 8 terrorists. As far as the time travel aspect goes, seasons 1& 2 deal mostly with can the future really be changed or is it all predetermined. It can get into police procedural territory, so if that's not your thing then it may not be for you. It's been airing on Syfy, but you can also find it on Netflix. Season 4, the final season, should be starting soon.
Season 4 promo
Season 3 intro
Seriously he does not react at all like that in 1.
So the net result is that Marty Prime ceases to exist? How terrifying!
Or you will destroy yourseeeeelf
One science fiction series I read as a kid had this huge, hidden alien civilization would which would scour any civilization dabbling in time travel technology from the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies, lest some hostile civilization went back in time to destroy their race before it could ever develop
That's one reason why BttF and SG-1 are my favorite time travel stuff (yes I know SG-1 isn't about time travel I'm referring to their time travel based stories)
Because in BttF Doc invents it, antics follow, and he decides to destroy it (except the very end but you know whatevs).
In SG-1 every. single. time they figure out a way to time travel (almost always by accident), it always goes horribly wrong for them and it's like "okay yeah no fuck time travel."
FISH IN THE LAKE
I hate time travel
Parallel universes are also bogus fyi
or is that just what you want us to think...
TO THROW US OFF YOUR TRAIL, ALTERNATE UNIVERSE HITLER WHO IS TWICE AS BAD AS OUR HITLER!?
*shrug* close enough
Depends on the universe! There's definitely one where he's a successful painter with a dog and his beautiful young wife Eva and shit, but there's also a universe where Germany managed to work out the h-bomb and fuckin stealth aircraft and a German flag is flying over Washington and London and Moscow and Hitler is an immortal cyborg god-king.
Edit: or you could go the animorphs route and he's just some jeep driver or whatever
Have you seen his paintings?
Time travel and parallel universes are awesome things to use in fiction.
I have! Out of curiosity I looked some up a few years ago and I remember them being decent. Not great or anything but decent.
If Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol can be successful artists, fuckin anyone can.
Edit:
pollock and warhol were attempting no such thing
and are you really trying to say they were bad?
AW GROSS I JUST LEARNED JACKSON POLLOCK IS FROM CODY, WYOMING! EW. WHY CAN'T HE BE FROM COLORADO? OR UTAH?
Seriously though, my niece is 5 and she was bringing home stuff from daycare that looked just like Pollock's work.
Warhol's art is vapid. That's the perfect word for it. He was Banksy before Banksy was.
Opinions!
The only thing I don't like about Jackson Pollock is that it takes him 3 years to do one season of a TV show. Nobody else in television is as anemic as him when it comes to work schedules, and plenty of other, better shows can put out a season a year and not lose steam.