And the ring?
Why he has the ring with the other items if he knew the guy will still it, I mean he must be 'cause he knew every move in his future, it doesn't make any sense.
shareThe working Michael bought the ring knowing that it would be stolen on the bus and the erased Michael would chase the thief back to the front of the bank building, which he would enter and then start understanding the pattern that had been laid out for him.
If it sounds dumb that's because it is. Plot holes abound like the spray jets in a shower head.
Ahh thanks i understand now but it's really sounds dumb
shareIt is.
shareIt's INCREDIBLY dumb.
If the future were that concrete, him knowing who would steal the diamond & where he'd run, then Ben didn't have to do ANYTHING. It would all turn out OK anyway.
Why would it all turn out OK anyway?
The ring was also part of an alternate ending where they spot it in a pawn shop and he uses it to propose to Uma.
Ahh ... was that in the trivia section? I hadn't seen it yet.
Yes, I did wonder about that ring at the end. Thought it was too bad it wasn't around at the end when his girlfriend who knew he was a Red Sox fan deserved it.
If the future were that concrete, him knowing who would steal the diamond & where he'd run, then Ben didn't have to do ANYTHING. It would all turn out OK anyway.
It's true that it was definitely going to come out okay. But he had to do what his "good" future had him doing. Anything else would have changed that future.
... and the rocks it pummels. - James Berardinelli share
Damn, people are stupid to not get this movie ;(
shareThanks god, one with who I agree. Watch the movie again (all of you above) and this time try to understand and enjoy the good movie. Everything makes sense.
shareI'd have to say this is just over-thinking things. I had no problem following the purpose of the ring. He'd stormed out of the place mad, hadn't he, so he had to get back to where it all began to figure it out.
I really liked this movie.
I think one of the problems people have getting the premise, is that they somehow assumed that Michael gets it all in one go. Like he sat down and said "Ok, what is a specific list of items I would need to survive this entire experience and not end the world?"
It's better if you think of it like the end of Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey - the filling in the blanks method. I'll plant sandbag, you plant a cage, I'll plant a key, etc. etc...
Michael probably spent days or weeks, making various plans, and then seeing how those plans played out on the machine - especially since that's a natural part of how a reverse engineer functions. When he'd get to a stumbling block in the path, he'd think of a solution and what he'd need to accomplish it, then the machine would extrapolate the resulting changes from him making that plan.
Like the train station, he can't find a better way out than the tracks, but he keeps getting killed by the train. Well, what if he could stop the train? So now he imagines himself standing there, needing stop the train without real tools to accomplish it - what would he wish he had in his pocket to jam up the panel? A paperclip. So he makes the decision to put that paperclip in the envelope, and the machine automatically adjusts and plays out the events with that new paradigm.
The easiest way to get bogged down in this plot (which isn't perfect but is moderately genius) is to forget that this guy is not just an engineer, he's a reverse engineer. Having a time machine tell him what is going to go wrong, and then allowing him to test out multiple solutions to prevent it, is a bit like giving a video game character a bag containing exactly what weapons he'd need to kill every bad guy, in the first 15 minutes of the story. Giving Michael at least a month (he changed the paperwork at Reddy Grant four weeks earlier), with the machine, to reverse engineer his own happy ending, was a near guarantee he'd 'win'.