In theory, time travel sounds like it might be quite a bit of fun, darting from one time period to the other to witness great historical events as they happen or or engaging in more simple pleasures like stopping Chris Brown from being conceived.
It could also improve your standard Friday night out, instead of spending in your regular pub, why not travel for some drinks and debate with Hemingway, like in Midnight In Paris? Or instead of your boring African safari’s, you go back sixty-five million years and hunt dinosaurs, which is what happened in B-Movie crapfest A Sound Of Thunder?
Both sound like far more fun than happy hour at Pitcher & Piano, but as the face palm above illustrates, time travel is actually a spectacularly annoying and pretty dangerous way to spend your free time. Here are ten ways that films have shown us why it should be avoided at all costs.
10. People Will Think You Are Crazy
If somebody wandered up to me in the street and told me they were from the future, I would think one of two things, either they are a first year drama student who is trying to involve me in some form of live street performance or they are batshit insane. Obviously those two things are not mutually exclusive, but chances are this particular individual would just be crazy.
So if you are in fact a visitor from the future, chances are that if you tell someone who you are and why you are here, as is the case with Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys, you will get locked up in the nearest nut house where you will be forced to hang out with a crazy Brad Pitt and eat spiders instead of attempting to stop humanity being pretty much wiped out.
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1 Comments
God, Looper sucked! It presents the same comedic model of time as was used in Back to the Future, but then insists you take it seriously. That scene where the past version of one guy is tortured and his future self starts losing fingers and limbs just like that… Why was I the only person in the cinema to laugh out loud? The people on the next row actually turned round to me with faces that seemed to say, “what are you laughing at – this is really dramatic!” No it isn’t – it’s hilariously impossible!
Although… some of it was okay. Anyway, where’s Primer? That film has one of the most realistic representations of time-travel ever depicted and it is a crazy cautionary tale. A particular detail worth noting: one of the travellers takes his mobile back with him and receives a call that – in the original timeline – would’ve gone to his past/other self. Inconsequential detail, but that sort of thing is so rarely thought about.