Time Inversion Entropy (spoils)
The way they tackle time in this movie is interesting in the sense that instead of the typical slowing things down to speed yourself up or dodge bullets or limited time reversals or time jumps, we're reversing actions, an inverse if you will. Every action has already happened and what's playing out is just the past. All one needs to do is step in the time inversion chamber to see your doppelganger play out actions that have just previously occurred before stepping into one. It's a bit awkward seeing everything rewinding walking backwards, driving backwards, talking backwards and the likes. The cool part of inversion explosives is when exploding, instead of spreading fire and shrapnel, it collapses in on itself and freezes the victim exposed to it instead.
The part that confused me is the final battle where both normal team and inversion teams were sent in but both needing masks when only the inverse needed a mask to not suffer the distortion effects of inversion. I'm not sure how they're countering something that has already happened like one team shoots a rocket at building blowing the top part while the other shoots a rocket at the bottom toppling it just as it inversed. I'm guessing they're shooting just those who are already masked up which can create one confusing fubar battle. One selves shooting past selves and vice versa. One messed up grandfather paradox.
Grandfather Paradox:
A potential logical problem that would arise if a person were to travel to a past time. If a person travels to a time before their grandfather had children, and kills him, it would make their own birth impossible. So, if time travel is possible, it somehow must avoid such a contradiction.
Bootstrap Paradox:
A theoretical paradox of time travel that occurs when an object or piece of information sent back in time becomes trapped within an infinite cause-effect loop in which the item no longer has a discernible point of origin, and is said to be “uncaused” or “self-created”. It is also known as an Ontological Paradox, in reference to ontology, a branch of metaphysics dealing with the study of being and existence.
Closed loops in time in which ’cause and effect’ repeat in a circular pattern, resulting in a self-created entity with no point of origin. Despite being an oddity and apparently conspiring against our understanding of causality, this ‘self-caused’ event, like the Big Bang, does not appear to be an impossibility. Nor does it imply any inconsistency with the timeline’s history. In fact, all the events in the time loop are “fixed” and take place on a single unchangeable timeline.
ie:
A time traveler went back in time and taught Einstein the theory of relativity, before returning to his own time. Einstein claims it’s his own work, and over the following decades the theory is published countless times until a copy of it eventually ends up in the hands of the original time traveler who then takes it back to Einstein, begging the question “where did the theory originate”. We cannot say that it came from the time traveler as he learned it from Einstein, but we also cannot say that it is from Einstein, since he was taught it by the time traveler. Who, then, discovered the theory of relativity?
Predestination (2014) is a decent movie watch about bootstrap paradox.