MovieChat Forums > Time After Time (1979) Discussion > a cosmic charnel house

a cosmic charnel house

posted 18 years ago by dreamonforever1
4 replies | jump to latest

like any good (thought-provoking) film, "time after time" leaves you with questions.
i had 3 of them after seeing the movie again for the first time in about 20 years:

1. an obvious one: what would do if you had access to a time machine (responsible users only), and could go backwards or forwards in time at will? the implications are staggering, of course, which is why time travel continues to be a fascinating subject for writers and filmmakers to this day. the possibility of changing the past (and the present) or gaining knowledge of the future (and using it in the present).

2. if, as both john stevenson (warner) and wells (mcdowell) state at one point, killing and being killed are a permanent part of human nature - and, of course, even the non-violent wells resorts to buying a gun in the end - is there any real hope of people co-existing in peace, at any time in history?

3. and, on a lighter note: why does wells (a practical genius, for all intents and purposes) make the very commonsensical mistake of using "sherlock holmes" as an alias (not once, but twice) when he must surely be aware that the police would take him for a lunatic? holmes would've been a contemporary of wells, unless i'm mistaken. and even though wells might have aspirations to be a detective, it would seem like a boneheaded thing to do for such a smart man.

again, good film - even if it does have a few lapses into melodramatic coincidence and plot contrivance (not sure if that's the screenplay or the novel it's based upon).

gregory 062007

[–] 18 years ago

[deleted]

[–] hachmom-1 17 years ago

3. and, on a lighter note: why does wells (a practical genius, for all intents and purposes) make the very commonsensical mistake of using "sherlock holmes" as an alias (not once, but twice) when he must surely be aware that the police would take him for a lunatic? holmes would've been a contemporary of wells, unless i'm mistaken. and even though wells might have aspirations to be a detective, it would seem like a boneheaded thing to do for such a smart man.
'

To step outside the film for a second...this is what is known as an "In Joke" since at the time of this movie Nick Meyer was mainly known at the writer of several Sherlock Holmes pastiches

If you watch Star Trek IV (for which he wrote the San Francisco scenes) you will see he wholesale lifted several scenes from this movie....expecially when they go to the pawnbrowkers....also an in joke

It is not our abilities that make us who we are...it is our choices

[–] kcmk 17 years ago

Also, re: the Sherlock Holmes reference: although the Sherlock Holmes stories were very popular when they were written, I don't think anyone from that time period would reasonably expect that someone from the future would know who he was. It would be sort of like us expecting someone 100 years from now to know who Harry Potter is. Holmes' continuing popularity 100 years later would be a surprise. Just a theory...

[–] stomaino 14 years ago

That's how I explained it. He would not have known that "Sherlock Holmes" might be a name still known and Stevenson called him that name, so it was on his mind.

It's kind of like one of us using the name "Peter Parker" before the Spider-Man movies came out. The odds that the police would be familiar with a comic book character or someone from an obscure tv show or cartoon would be remote.

Sam Tomaino