BEFORE: I've tried very hard to put a focus on time-travel movies this year, because they have a tendency to build up and clutter up my list if I don't attend to them. And there really have been a fair number that I've watched in the last almost-13 years, from "Hot Tub Time Machine" and "Looper" to "Time Lapse", "Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel" and even a few on this whole time-travel-meets relationship issue, like "About Time" and "The Time Traveler's Wife" and even "13 Going on 30".
This year, I've managed to work in a few, like "Palm Springs", "When We First Met", "Tenet" and "Bill and Ted Face the Music" - sure, four very different movies that all treated the topic in different ways. I suppose "Terminator: Dark Fate" and "An American Pickle" also qualify to some degree. But then I found that three of the ones left on my list connect to each other, so you know I just had to try to get to them before the year is up. So Asa Butterfield carries over again from "The Space Between Us", and I transition from space travel to time travel.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "When We First Met" (Movie #3,769)
THE PLOT: A genius teenage boy is in love with a girl, but they break up after a year. He invents a time machine and tries repeatedly to fix the bad days and change the outcome.
AFTER: Honestly, it's no surprise to me at all when time-travel stories converge with relationship stories - it's not like, say, putting chocolate sauce on an onion. There's a natural wish after a break-up to re-assess, to figure out what went wrong, to say, "Oh, if only I could go back in time and do THAT part differently." Well, yeah, sure, that's always easy after the fact, but then the bigger question becomes, "Why didn't you do that part differently in the first place?" And then, really there's nothing left to do but to try to do better the next time, in a relationship with somebody else, or if you are lucky enough to get a second chance with that same partner.
College physics student Stillman is at the head of his class, and he's writing formulas that he has to explain to his teacher, which, umm, probably doesn't really happen. This guy's nerdier than the cast of "The Big Bang Theory" combined, so there's no real explaining how he ended up dating Debbie - but our first glimpse of the couple is during their break-up, which seems to repeat over and over, with Stillman taking a slightly different tack each time. Ah, he's using some kind of device to replay the moment over and over, hoping for a different result. But after a hundred (?) tries, he's forced to concede, the break-up is inevitable. Ah, but what if he could use the same device to go back to key moments from their year-long relationship, and improve the worst moments, which no doubt could result in a longer-lasting relationship, even if he's not QUITE sure of the exact reason for the break-up. (Umm, did he think about asking Debbie that question?)
Instead he charts out the last 365 days, assigning each one a rating, based on his copious journal notes, and he walks his friend Evan through a PowerPoint presentation where he's isolated the key awkward moments in his relationship with Debbie, those moments that need to be revisited and improved with the handy-dandy time machine. And in good old "Back to the Future" fashion, he's got a screen shot of Debbie's break-up text, and he figures once he fixes the relationship, that image will disappear from his phone. Now, just bear in mind this isn't actual physical time-and-space travel we're talking about here, Stillman and Evan sort of "beam" into their bodies in the past and take control, which nearly avoids the problem of having two Marty McFlys - sorry, two Stillmans and two Evans - in the same place and time. Their past consciousness gets displaced, or go to sleep or something, or they hang out in limbo, it's not important. But with this special phone app of Stillman's design, they can skip around the timeline, displacing themselves at key moments to improve Stillman's relationship performances, and maybe even Evan's performance at the Ultimate Frisbee championship. Yes, that's a thing.
That time that Stillman showed Debbie and her friends his favorite sci-fi movie and they hated it? Causing him to have a bad reaction to their hating it? Let's play that one again, and again if need be, until we land on a good reaction from Debbie. That time that Debbie wanted to play Stillman a song, and he didn't quite understand the meaning? Let's take that one over, too. The theory is that all the negative days become positive ones, Debbie will have less incentive to split up, because all of her memories with Stillman will be good ones. OK, sure, but what if Debbie's just a flake who gets tired of people after a year, no matter what? Every relationship has an expiration date, right? That's the rule of entropy and maybe we're fooling ourselves if we think there's anything we can do to change it. Or, the other way of looking at this is, sure, people in a relationship SHOULD be conscious of impending doom at every moment, and that should color our actions to the point where we should always be offering to help our partners out, make them that fresh pot of coffee or go on bagel runs as needed.
Here's what I remember, though, from breaking up with my first wife - that feeling that things hadn't been great for the last two years, and didn't show any signs of improving, so staying together felt like beating my head against a wall, and I just knew it would feel better to stop doing that. Go figure. So one particular April Fools Day in 1996, I spent the early morning in Prospect Park, trying to decide what to do, and there was another feeling, that there were two timelines diverging from that point, and I had to pick one as my future. Down both roads there was pain, but at least in one the pain might be temporary, and after a while I might be happy again, somehow, with someone else. So I feel you, Debbie, I really do.
The break-up, however, spurs Stillman to invent the time machine, and it seems he'd gotten the formula for the flexibility of time on that same day a year ago when he and Debbie met, after Evan hit him with the car. You know, because most great scientific inspiration comes at moments like that - Einstein used to walk out into traffic hoping for such inspiration to strike. JK. And so Stillman and Even time-hop through the last year of their lives, trying to correct the mishaps and pitfalls in the Stillman-Debbie relationship, only at some point the phone app starts glitching and they can't control the speed or direction of the time travel any more. So, umm, that's just normal life, then, right?
When they finally catch up to the moment that they first left from, and the relationship is solid, no break-up, Stillman finds the warehouse that held the time machine is now empty. Ah, this makes sense, because if there was no break-up, there was no motivation for him to invent the time machine! And that explains the glitch, because they changed the future into one where the time machine never existed, so it all worked perfectly, right? Hmm, not in my book, because if you carry that logic one step further - no break-up means no time machine, but then no time machine means that they DIDN'T travel back to fix things, because there was no machine to send them. So then they somehow both did and didn't travel back to fix the timeline. It's the baby Hitler paradox all over, because if you travel back to pre-war Germany and kill baby Hitler, you succeed in changing the timeline, but removing Hitler from existence means there was no need for you to travel back, in fact you wouldn't have even known who Hitler WAS, so after you did it, that means you didn't do it. Or after you did it, then before you did it you wouldn't know it was even a thing that needed to be done. So you didn't do it. This is sort of proof that time travel won't ever be possible, because it creates paradoxes - unless you believe in alternate timelines and divergent realities, a la Marvel Comics - "Avengers: Endgame" and such.
But back in Stillman's house, everything is fine and dandy, two years later they're living together, Evan's actions in the past have also caused him to be in a solid relationship now, only I don't think he ever gets around to learning the name of his girlfriend. That's bound to be awkward. Stillman's still time-traveling, fixing things every time Debbie burns dinner, which is like, a lot, because she's not that smart. Somehow Stillman then gets it in his head that this is proof that they never should have been together in the first place, so he time-travels back to Day one of the relationship and tries to end it then. I'm not sure he's logically thought this one through, but then again, maybe he's just tired of the forty lifetimes he's spent with Debbie by now and wants to try something different, I can't say as I blame him.
Because I'm not seeing the whole Sophie Turner thing - I said this when she played Jean Grey twice, and I felt like I just got nothing from her in those X-Men performances, she just read like a total blank. Which maybe works for somebody playing a telepath, like they might have a blank look on their face when they're reading somebody's mind or something, but that's not quite it. I feel nothing when I look at her, I'm not attracted to her at all, and I find a fair number of women attractive - just not her. Here she's playing a rather free-spirited but also somewhat dim/dumb girl, and that doesn't really help either. OK, she got a lot of attention from being on "Game of Thrones", but I haven't watched that show, so help me out here, what exactly is the big fuss over Sophie Turner? I don't get it - which made we want to say when she broke up with Stillman, "So what? It's no great loss, and he's probably better off without her."
Every time travel movie sort of ends up with the same moral - that for one reason or another, you just can't (or shouldn't) change the past. Really, it's a lot of work just trying to change the present, and forget about the future, that's all theoretical, so it might as well be impossible. Your best bet, really, is to think about today, and what can you do TODAY to make it, and maybe the future, better? That should really be your only motivation, because everything else is futile.
But that tagline - "If at first you don't succeed, build a time machine." Oh, I want so badly to put that on t-shirts and sell a bunch of them at Comic-Con, I bet I could make a ton of money.
Also starring Sophie Turner (last seen in "X-Men: Dark Phoenix"), Skyler Gisondo (last seen in "Booksmart"), Will Peltz (last seen in "Paranoia"), Aubrey Reynolds, Mary Elizabeth Boylan, Jillian Joy, Joseph Park, Caden J. Gregoire, Cassie Williams, Coral Chambers, Joey Miyashima.
RATING: 6 out of 10 cheese fries
No comments:
Post a Comment