Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 16:41:41 -0500 (EST) From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at keithlynch.net> To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net> Subject: [WSFA] Waste of "Time Machine" (MAJOR SPOILERS) Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net> This message contains MAJOR SPOILERS for the recent TIME MACHINE movie. You may want to skip it, or save it for later, if you plan to see that movie. However, I recommend that you skip the movie. I've always had a tendency to enjoy time travel stories. I'm not sure why. I've always had a tendency to dislike fantasy, since it's difficult for me to suspend disbelief in the elements of traditional fantasy. I enjoy Tolkien not because his works feature elves, wizards, and magic, but despite that fact. He was a good enough writer that he overcame that major handicap. He made his world plausible despite those implausible elements. I dislike the recent Time Machine movie despite it involving time travel. It's a bad enough movie that it doesn't work for even though it starts out ahead. Soon after his first trip back through time, the time traveler incorrectly concludes that it's impossible to change the past. Even though he had just done exactly that! It's true that the altered past also contained the death of his fiance, but the mode of death was different. Small consolation, except that it proves that it IS possible to change the past. But instead of following up on that, either with careful controlled experiments or by simply trying again, perhaps bringing her back to the present in his time machine, he instead heads into the future in search of an answer to his questions about time travel. He should have realized that if people in the future know more about time travel than he does, that they would certainly have time machines of their own. In which case, why hadn't they made themselves as evident throughout all history as Europeans made themselves evident all over the globe after they had mastered the sailing ship? As in the 1960 George Pal movie of the same name, but unlike in H.G. Wells' original novel, the time traveler stops in our near future on his way to the year 802,701. In the George Pal movie, he encounters WWIII (after brief stops at WWI and WWII) in the 1960s, a full-scale nuclear war. Apparently such a war has since become unfashionable, as it has been replaced by The Hubris of Man Tampering With Nature. I might have been more sympathetic had it been a nanotech gray goo disaster, or even a conventional plague. But the idea of one or several 20 megaton explosions either breaking up the moon or radically altering its orbit shows an appalling lack of sense of scale. A million explosions a thousand times that size wouldn't suffice. (Consider how many millions of megatons the explosions that resulted in the larger lunar craters must have been.) If the moon did break up, it wouldn't do so in the manner of a cracked dinner plate. And if it came much closer to earth, it would result in tides which would wash away New York city. There were no signs of such tides in the movie. (I have read that the movie was originally intended to have scenes of meteors wrecking the World Trade Center and other major NYC landmarks.) As in the George Pal movie, the dress shop across the street seemed to spend as much time dressing and undressing the mannequin as displaying dresses on it. (Is there a requirement that time travelers set up shop next door to such a dress shop?) Also, each skyscraper stood for only about as long as it took to build it before it was replaced by an even larger one. And all the while, airplanes flew past the accelerated cityscape at what looked like normal airplane speed. I'd like to see time lapse photography done right. I wish I had had the foresight when I moved into this apartment 23 years ago to set up a movie or video camera pointing out the window to shoot one frame per day. I would have five whole minutes of footage by now. Even better would be if somebody had taken one overhead photo of Manhattan each month from 1600 to the present. People still speak perfect English in the year 802,701, without even an accent. That's a thousand times longer than our language has existed. Supposedly the Eloi know the language from seeing words carved in stone left over from our time. That's a hundred times longer than the time since the earliest known stone inscriptions. But one seldom sees stone inscriptions even half that old kicking around, even though there was no lunar breakup to scour, scatter, or bury them. And even if we did, nobody would know either the meaning or the pronunciation of any of them without extensive scholarship. Why not just have the time traveler stay there a while and either learn their language or teach them English? Most unbelievable of all, the "Vox" holographic computer the time traveler encountered in the 2030s is still active in the 803rd millennium, even though it consists largely of sheets of glass. Now, my home may be Microsoft free, and I do have two UPSs, nevertheless I don't think any of my computers is likely to stay up for 8000 centuries. Especially not if the moon breaks up causing the fall of civilization. Nor if there's an intervening ice age or two. If nothing else, what would they use for power? Given Vox's amazing durability, it's not surprising that it survives a massive underground explosion and collapse, and is then easily relocated to a more convenient location. The Eloi retreat to their cliff dwellings every night so that the nocturnal Morlocks can't get to them. But one of the Morlocks has no problem climbing into the dwelling to steal a pocket watch. He knows about the pocket watch because he reads minds. Nevertheless, he falls for a simple trick when returning the watch. And continues to fight even after he turns into a skeleton. Nor do the nocturnal Morlocks have any trouble engaging in a massive daylight raid. Fortunately, their poison darts have no effect if they're simply pulled out. Too bad the Eloi never thought of that ingenious countermeasure before. I'm also having a hard time believing that an Eloi chatted with the hologram, since it looks like neither the Eloi nor the hologram have the slightest bit of curiosity. I can't think of another movie which so badly failed to meet the burden of suspension of disbelief. Even the infamous Plan Nine was more plausible. -- Keith F. Lynch - kfl at keithlynch.net - http://keithlynch.net/ I always welcome replies to my e-mail, postings, and web pages, but unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) is not acceptable. 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