Movies That Got Time Travel Right - Men in Black³ (2012) Discussion

[–] ven_042000 13 years ago

What about "Back to the Future"? i thought that was perfect and accurate.

reply

[–] jconn426 13 years ago

It wasn't exactly perfect unless you applied the theory I posted about the "Two Marties" plot hole at the end: Doc sent the "Lone Pine Mall" Marty on an eternal trip to the non-existent Year 0, rather than 1955, to make room for the Marty we followed all through the movie. (Otherwise, he knew 1955 would eventually be hip-deep in Marty variations, all looking for him to send them back...to the future!)

===
And He has on His robe and on His thigh a name written:KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.

reply

[–] mikeyflatley 13 years ago

u 4got back 2 da future

I live, I love, I slay, and I'm content

reply

[–] DoomCanoe 13 years ago

Triangle

such a fun movie to try and break down also

reply

[–] topsy05 13 years ago

Journeyman & Life On Mars were awesome!

reply

[–] MrGoneJediKnight 13 years ago

I soooooo loved Journeyman!

___
Our Universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic. -Dexter

reply

[–] supmyman7 13 years ago

Lost. They did it right.

reply

[–] vimhawk 10 years ago

I prefer to go with whether I enjoyed the plot rather than look for the holes. An often overlooked but IMHO classic is "Time After Time", the difference here is that the original time machine guy, H G Wells himself, builds a time machine and goes into the future (to find Jack the Ripper). I'm guessing that time travel in that direction is less likely to cause controversy. Sounds odd but highly recommended.

reply

[–] omoxus 13 years ago

Deja Vu and Primer are my best time travel related films. Time travel is treated seriously and real world.

Im the Alpha and the Omoxus. The Omoxus and the Omega

reply

[–] mythbustfan 13 years ago

if you liked primer, you should check out 12:01 and retroactive

Ich bin ein berliner, I am a jelly doughnut, JFK june 26, 1963
if you don't like this sig, tough

reply

[–] MrGoneJediKnight 13 years ago

Ah, Retroactive. Another great time travel flick.

___
Our Universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic. -Dexter

reply

[–] darkangel_7 13 years ago

Actually I liked the premise of the new Time Machine movie. No matter how often he went back to save his wife from dying something kept killing her. He learned after that because the only reason he built the time machine was to save his wife, but if his wife did live, he never would've built it to begin with so the time paradox prevented him from ever changing the past. This was the concept H.G. Wells had developed that you cannot change the past.

reply

[–] MrGoneJediKnight 13 years ago

I agree, I do like that concept:

That no matter what some things were destined to happen. He did affect the past, just not in the way he wanted. Of course, I might have liked had he tried more than one time...but thats besides the point. ;)

___
Our Universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic. -Dexter

reply

[–] q_leo_rahman 13 years ago

There is this really strange anime called GOSENZOSAMA BANBANZAI (available on Japanese Youtube): it's a dramedy about a family who is visited by a descendant from the future: a 17-year old comes to pay a a visit to her 17-year-old grandfather. They face adversity from the boy's mother, who believes her a fraud, and the girl's father, a time patrolman who doesnt want them to get together (with good reason: it turned out the grandfather and granddaughter slept together, and the patrolman was the result of the temporal incest, thus the girl ended up becoming her own grandmother).

Freaky. And like I said, it was a dramedy so it focused more on relationships than the sci-fi aspect. But still, it posed an interesting angle of time travel: what if you ended up your own parent or sibling?

07/08/06... 786... the sentinel of Allah has arrived.

reply

[–] MrGoneJediKnight 13 years ago

Ah cool! I might have to check that out. Thanks for the recomendation.

___
Our Universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic. -Dexter

reply

[–] Nukeuz 13 years ago

Scientifically speaking, you can never go BACK in time. You can only go FORWARD in time. Once you are in the future, you cannot go back. The only way we can theoretically time travel is to go faster than the speed of light (which cannot happen because the massive G force will completely destroy our bones and internal organs, no matter what 'armor' we have on our bodies), or to go around or inside a black hole (which is impossible to either survive in, or impossible to come out of it because it sucks you and there is no way to just get out.)

In theory, if you are close or inside a black hole, time goes EXTREMELY slow while time goes 'normally' outside of it. A few weeks can pass in a black hole and on Earth, around 200 years would have gone by. However, if you are in a black hole it will feel like youve been in it for those 200 years even though its just been 2 weeks. I may confuse some of you but science and astrophysics can be confusing sometimes LOL

reply

[–] PizzaDaHut 13 years ago

Finally someone else said what I was saying before but you went into more detail. Do not forget you still can move into the future the faster you go but its fractions of seconds.

reply

[–] MrGoneJediKnight 13 years ago

True, but it's fun to speculate about time travel as presented in fiction. :)

I love the science of reality tho.

___
Our Universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic. -Dexter

reply

[–] PizzaDaHut 13 years ago

The movie stunk but the time machine had it right with time travel and fixing things. Anything can be correct as long as they stick to the logic they created.

reply

[–] MrGoneJediKnight 13 years ago

Thats key for me, it just has to follow the rules it creates.

___
Our Universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic. -Dexter

reply

[–] dlancer 13 years ago

Actually, you can go both forward in time and backward. The physics allow it. It's the energy limitation that does not. As you approach the speed of light, you move forward in time. Astronauts have already done it by being on long missions and returning with their clocks slightly behind earthbound ones. Once you reach the speed of light, time stands still, and once you surpass it, time runs in reverse.

You can say it's impossible for anything with mass to surpass the speed of light using today's technology, but you can't say there's nothing scientific that allows traveling back in time. It's just far more difficult to execute. Scientists have been able to send neutrinos beyond the light-speed barrier, albeit very slightly, but those kind of subatomic particles have no mass and pass through everything.

If you can read this then you are trying too hard.

reply

[–] [email protected] 13 years ago

Actually, you can go both forward in time and backward. The physics allow it. It's the energy limitation that does not. As you approach the speed of light, you move forward in time.

If you sit on your couch eating Twinkies you move forward in time. Moving forward is easy, you just have to live long enough.

Once you reach the speed of light, time stands still, and once you surpass it, time runs in reverse.

Surpassing it using the model that is commonly used to speculate about what happens at velocities faster than light requires the application of an infinite amount of energy. If you can surpass it without doing that then the model is wrong and whatever it says about what happens at velocities faster than light is highly questionable.

You can say it's impossible for anything with mass to surpass the speed of light using today's technology, but you can't say there's nothing scientific that allows traveling back in time. It's just far more difficult to execute. Scientists have been able to send neutrinos beyond the light-speed barrier, albeit very slightly, but those kind of subatomic particles have no mass and pass through everything.

The returns on that experiment are not all in. They've found a discrepancy between what they measured and what they expected to measure. That doesn't mean that it's not an error in measurement. And if it's real then what it means has yet to be determined--perhaps the speed limit is the speed of neutrinos, not of photons, and then the question becomes what slows down photons.

reply

[–] [email protected] 13 years ago

The only way we can theoretically time travel is to go faster than the speed of light (which cannot happen because the massive G force will completely destroy our bones and internal organs, no matter what 'armor' we have on our bodies), or to go around or inside a black hole (which is impossible to either survive in, or impossible to come out of it because it sucks you and there is no way to just get out.)

There is no need to go faster than the speed of light and there is no reason that "the massive g force will blah blah blah". According to relativity there are trajectories involving large black holes that are achievable and survivable and result in closed timelike curves that allow travel into the past. This is disturbing as it results in an internal contradiction in relativity theory, and every physicist who has tried to close that hole has ultimately failed to do so.

The problem is not the trajectory, the problem is getting to the black hole, which is a very, very long way away.

reply

[–] mythbustfan 13 years ago

another good example of this is the stargate sg-1 movie "continium" three people went into an altered timeline and even though they explained what happened to the government about an emminent alien attack, the government refused to let them repair the timeline because "life is better in this timeline than it is in yours" and forced them to stay out of time travel

when the alien invasion came one year later, it was an "I told you so" situation and Earth wasn't ready for the invasion like they should have been

Ich bin ein berliner, I am a jelly doughnut, JFK june 26, 1963
if you don't like this sig, tough

reply

[–] MrGoneJediKnight 13 years ago

While I love Stargate, and can deal with it, that movie wasn't my favorite. I'm not a huge fan of the idea of the "time wave", in which someone goes back to change something and the changes slowly ripple forward, so you end up with people suddenly dissappearing as the like.

But, as much as I wasn't a fan of the way they did it in that Stargate movie, it was 1000000 times better then how they did it in the movie version of A Sound of Thunder. The time travel so awful in that flick.

___
Our Universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic. -Dexter

reply

[–] mythbustfan 13 years ago

yeah you got that right

if you kill one butterfly that lived wwwwwwwwwaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy back in the Jurassic, you completely screw up evolution?

Ich bin ein berliner, I am a jelly doughnut, JFK june 26, 1963
if you don't like this sig, tough

reply

[–] MrGoneJediKnight 13 years ago

I don't mind that aspect of it, as thats the basis of the short story.

What I hated in that movie was that they kept time traveling to same stop to kill the same dinosaur, never running into duplicates of themselves. But once the future gets screwed up, the main character travels back in time to stop the guy who steps on the butterfly. How would that be possible if they were run into themselves? Yet by the end of the movie he goes back in time and there they alll are and he stops it. Which makes no sense with the way they were time traveling earlier in the film.

I have no issues with the killing a butterfly/changing the future thing, it's the butterfly effect: change one thing, change everything.

;)

___
Our Universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic. -Dexter

reply

[–] aye_ 13 years ago

The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror 5 episode. When homer sneezes on that dinosaur and changes the entire future hahaha

reply

[–] mythbustfan 13 years ago

"I have no issues with the killing a butterfly/changing the future thing, it's the butterfly effect: change one thing, change everything"

how could killing one butterfly, 120 million years ago have affected ANYTHING today, in this timeline, dealing with evolution?

the meteor still struck the Earth 65.5 million years ago, right? we evolved from mammals that survived that impact, not dinosaurs, fish, amphibians or butterflies and not whatever the hell that thing was that the woman turned into in the movie

ok, maybe it you kill a butterfly, say, 20 years ago, it would affect the timeline slightly, but even the people who came up with the butterfly effect paradox believe that the further back in time you change a minor occourence, like killing a single butterfly in the Jurassic (which I don't even know if they existed back then or not) it wouldn't affect the present as much as it did in the movie "the sound of thunder"

Ich bin ein berliner, I am a jelly doughnut, JFK june 26, 1963
if you don't like this sig, tough

reply

[–] jconn426 13 years ago

If the butterfly's death causes something else to happen, then anything is possible on any given scale.

You stepped on a butterfly in 1912, the same butterfly your great-grandfather, an avid butterfly studier and budding physicist, was supposed to catch the following week and proudly mount in a frame bought from the local frame shop, which he never visited before and would have no reason to visit ever again, except to talk to the cute young lady behind the counter who would not become your great-grandmother because he never met her as he had no butterfly to mount, and therefore he eventually decided to go back to Germany where he joined the Kaiser's army and befriended a young artist who was an ultra-nationalist with extreme racist views that he eventually found himself agreeing with, leading to the two of them going on to join what became the National Socialist Party and working their way up the ranks as its two top men, one as the eventual Fuehrer of the country, the other as the father of the Nazi atom bomb instead of one of the leading scientists in America's Manhattan Project.

===
And He has on His robe and on His thigh a name written:KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.

reply

[–] mythbustfan 13 years ago

ok, I understand that.

but what about killing a butterfly 100 million years ago, like the scenario of the movie "a sound of thunder" which alters the course of evolution 100 million years later

Ich bin ein berliner, I am a jelly doughnut, JFK june 26, 1963
if you don't like this sig, tough

reply

[–] jconn426 13 years ago

Sorry 'bout that. As I said, it would have to be at a time and place where it can directly affect something. I'm with you: I doubt one less butterfly among thousands or millions of the same type millions of years ago would affect a thing.

===
And He has on His robe and on His thigh a name written:KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.

reply

[–] ZAROVE 13 years ago

But he did change the past, he just didn't change the outcome that needed to happen for the machine to be built... but how she died changed each time. Also, Well's didn't cook up this idea, as Well's original Novel is nothign like the 2002 Film version.

reply

[–] Mrpinkeye 13 years ago

how did the back to the futures do!?

reply

[–] gompcreature 13 years ago

Happy Accidents. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0208196/

It treats time travel a bit like K-pax is treating aliens, but the script and acting is simply wonderful. Incidently the star of this flick is Vincent D'Onofrio, the alien bug from MiB I, showing what an amazing actor he really is. Highly recommended, even if it might be (or might be not, I won't spoil) slightly on the side of the subject.

When it comes to "hard" time travel I support the recommendation of Los Cronoscrimenes. The film's logic is next to flawless, but it's still going to be a possibly frustrating challenge to wrap your head around it.

Don't breathe air. Birds *beep* in it!

reply

[–] dlancer 13 years ago

What many don't realize is that traveling back in time always enters you into a totally different universe (timeline), which there are an infinite amount of. When traveling forward, you stay in the same universe, but obviously further along it. Traveling back to yesterday may seem like you are "changing" the past, but all you are really doing is entering a universe where its the day before and there are now two of you (one of you just appearing out of nowhere from an alternate future). And if the next day you decide to go back in time again, you'll enter a universe where there are three of you (two of you appearing out of nowhere from an alternate future). The problem with that kind of time travel is there is no way to get back to the original future that you left at the beginning.

Another way to look at it is, if the world was about to be destroyed by aliens, going back in time to stop the invasion would only work for the one that is doing the time traveling. Your endeavor would be pointless for the rest of the people that stayed in the future as they would all continue to be destroyed by the aliens. The bottom line is, it's impossible to save everyone else unless they go back in time too. And that's where movies usually get it wrong.

The easiest way to get it right would be any movie that has a doorway connecting the two universes that stays open. Then you could pass back and forth between the past and the future without one affecting the other. By entering the past through the doorway, you wouldn't be able to "change" anything to the future you just left, but you would be free to observe the past and create whatever kind of chaos you can imagine while retaining the option of returning to the exact future you came from.

There is no paradox that would doom the universe as Doc Brown proclaimed since nothing is actually being changed. It's just very problematic for a 3rd dimensional being to fully understand and navigate multiple universes when we can only perceive one universe at a time.

If you can read this then you are trying too hard.

reply

[–] notalone86 13 years ago

Source Code
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0945513/

reply

[–] antiglobe 13 years ago

'Infinite parallel universes' is just a nonsensical idea of theoretical physics and it's massively unlikely (can be safely considered impossible). None of our practical experiences support the idea. Every existing thing in reality tend to move towards the most stable state and not towards experiencing all the possible states they can achieve. So our experiences support one universe with the most stable actual states of objects within and not a multiverse with all the possible states. (for an interesting exercise of thought it's good though)

reply

[–] dlancer 13 years ago

None of what you said makes any sense. It's likely "impossible" just because we (3-dimensional beings) cannot experience it?

It's all theoretical, but so is anything that touches on the same subject. However, if you do manage to go back to yesterday, there would be two of you. Since there wasn't two of you yesterday, you would have to be in a different universe than the one that you left.

With the single universe theory, you will always run into a paradox with backward time travel. With the multiple universe theory, there is no paradox.

If you can read this then you are trying too hard.

reply

[–] antiglobe 13 years ago

Yes but you just rape physics for the sake of a fairy tale.
Accept physics as it is and accept tales as they are.

Btw i thought your're speaking of the multiverse theory where all possible variantions of everything exists in infinite parallel universes. Now that's utter nonsense. My answer was directed towards that.

Now i see you try to create theoretical possibility for the popular conception of time travel. It's a bit less nonsense but still is.

The problem is not that "we (3-dimensional beings) cannot experience it" but that you and basically all popular time travel stories misunderstand the basic nature of the universe. The universe is actually a 'relativity', defining all the relations of events, and time and space are actually just two aspects of this very same thing (also called spacetime).

You can't go back to the past as if it was the present. It cannot happen in this system. You can't kiss hand to Queen Victoria ever. The past actually exists, all of it, but it is buried in the universe in the form of EM radiation. All activity emits some EM radiation so every events of the past have an imprint today in this form. If you look at it in reverse they build up the present. If there would be some beings in outer space with vastly superior knowledge they could theoretically look into our past, reconstruct it if they have some unimaginably advanced radiation analyzers. This is a theoretically possible way of 'time travel' (still unimaginable but at least logically valid) the same way as we can see today how galaxies looked like billions of years ago.

But we can't jump into that ancient galaxies as if it was the present. We can just examine them. Time travel can work only this way. You can't exchange the present with the past. Logically impossible. I hope you understand what i say. (i'm not an English speaker)

reply

[–] [email protected] 13 years ago

What many don't realize is that traveling back in time always enters you into a totally different universe (timeline), which there are an infinite amount of.

And we have another one who thinks that he's Doctor Who. Grok the concept--you do not know how time travel works. I do not know. Stephen Hawking does not know. Kip Thorne does not know. Nobody knows. There are some calculations taht suggest that it might work a particular way. Those calculations may or may not be valid and the model on which they are based is known to be incomplete, so even if they are absolutely accurate according to the model, the model itself may be wrong.

The notion that time travel leads to an alternate universe is interesting speculation, but it is not something that is known to be true and there is no calculated result from any established physical model that suggests that it is the case.

reply

[–] 13 years ago

[deleted]

[–] dlancer 13 years ago

You're b!tching because I said something that is theoretical? Seriously, how butthurt can you possibly get?

Do you get your panties in a bunch whenever someone explains evolution?

If you can read this then you are trying too hard.

reply

[–] antiglobe 13 years ago

Evolution, good point.
You won't find any lifeforms jumping back in time. You won't find any plants or animals in the precambrian ever. Since this way of time travel is a human abstraction, not reality.

reply

[–] voyagerandsouthpark 12 years ago

but if you travelled back in time again to a day before again then surely as its another universe you wouldn't meet another you appearing out of nowhere

"sir, sir, i gotta check and see if you've soiled yourself, I'll get to you in a moment, sir!"

reply

[–] Man_Who_Lived_Twice 13 years ago

Twelve Monkeys didn't get it right.

reply