10 Years of Bitter Posts - Looking at Time-Travel movies and Sex Comedies

I had forgotten about some of my early attempts at theme weeks on this blog. In addition to deep dives on specific movies and TV shows, I also occasionally did weeklong looks at particular genres of films.

Time-travel films were the first to get this feature, starting with Lessons from The Terminator, and contrasted it with Lessons from Back to the Future. Using these two movies, I explained the difference between closed-loop time-travel and multiple timelines time-travel. A closed loop is when the movie reveals that the time-travel only made possible the history that was always meant to happen. The multiple timelines version of this is when the characters can actually alter history.

Then, to make everyone's head explode, I explored how parallel and alternate timelines worked, using J.J. Abrams's STAR TREK. If you're writing a time-travel movie, you MSUT be consistent about which type of time travel you're operating under, otherwise the audience will end up more confused than you want. (And yes, the Terminator film series doesn't stay consistent film-to-film on this, though each film is internally consistent on its own.

Sex Comedy Week took a lot of cues from bad scripts I'd seen over the years. In Furries Aren't Funny, I groaned at the overuse of the furry fetish to get a shocking laugh out of the audience. There are so many odd kinks and fetishes out there that it felt lazy to go for the same "Ohmigod! He/She is a Furry!" joke. Be creative about this - or better yet, make up a fetish whole cloth.

Along the same lines, I ranted against cheap titillation and gross-out sex gags. If you guessed this means I'm not a fan of AMERICAN PIE, reward yourself with a cookie right now. I'd seen so many gags about bodily fluids in scripts that I had to devote an entire post to it.

I kinda feel like I should go back and cover some of these topics in greater depth, but the way I blog now, I'll probably wait until the subjects are relevant to a movie or show I've just seen and go in on a deep dive.

EDGE OF TOMORROW is the kind of sharp action film we need more of

I've been seeing promos for EDGE OF TOMORROW for about six months now, and it's rather embarrassing that it took a couple comments during Tom Cruise's interview with The Daily Show last week before I woke up to a major aspect of its premise.  The film stars Cruise as a solider named Cage who is part of a battalion of ground troops taking on an alien force in Europe.  When he dies in battle, he suddenly wakes up a day earlier, quickly realizing he's now part of a time loop that resets the day each time he dies.  This gives him the chance to learn from his mistakes and try to last longer on the battlefield, hopefully eventually scoring a victory.

It's a perfect metaphor for the nature of a video game character/player.  It is perhaps the most literal translation of what it's like to play something like SUPER MARIO BROS, where Mario gets sent to a new land, and - thanks to extra lives - gets a restart from the beginning every time he dies.  If EDGE OF TOMORROW didn't exist, it's whole hook would be a clever enough conceit to actually take another run at re-adapting MARIO BROS for the big screen.

I haven't read any reviews yet, but early chatter seems to use GROUNDHOG DAY as shorthand when describing the concept.  EOT uses the time loop in an entirely different way than that earlier film, though.  In GROUNDHOG DAY, Phil Conners is trying to find a way out of the loop. He needs the repeating day to stop.  In EOT, the loop is a tool that the protagonists use to gain information and experience that will let them achieve a deciding victory in this war with the alien occupiers.

When we first meet Cage, he's a Major in the military's PR department.  He had a hand in creating a propaganda star out of Emily Blunt's Rita Vratski, who won a major battle on her first day in the field and became the poster girl for their new recruitment drive.  Cage is a pretty boy, a glad-hander with zero combat experience and no desire to get anywhere near a battlefield.  Most amusingly, Cruise seems to be playing him as an amplification of his own public persona rather than his action movie persona.

I don't want to get too much into the mechanics of how Cruise is able to reset, or too heavily into the specifics of what his mission becomes.  What is important is that after a few runs through the loop, he tracks down Rita, who's familiar with what's happening to him because she too used to be a repeater.  She trains him and through her we not only learn the rules, but figure out the road map to defeating the aliens.

One thing a lot of writers could learn from the script is economy of action. Cruise's first time through the repeating day is shown in fairly heavy detail.  During the second time, we see less.  There's a nice cut from Cruise telling his commanding officer, "Just give me 30 seconds and I can explain all of this" to him being dragged off kicking and screaming.  We don't need to see Cruise recap the previous fifteen minutes in a failed attempt to convince the commander he knows the future.  We just need to see the result - that he's disbelieved.

The timing of the cut also provokes a laugh and gets some comic relief in.  There are a few more moments of these that happen throughout.  Once or twice we see a scene end abruptly and then start over just seconds earlier, indicating that Cruise met an untimely (and sometimes darkly comic) death and we're catching up to him after he's already relived through the necessary preamble.  (I dare not spoil the best one of these but it involves Cruise trying to slip away from his platoon unnoticed.)

The film is peppered with moments like that.  We come into the second or third version of a scene much later than we did on the first go-round.  At times, we're only shown a series of events on the final time Cruise completes the event.  There's a moment late in the film where he's trying to convince a general that the ground mission will fail and that the only chance is for the general to release some contraband he has in a safe.

It's easy to overlook how challenging this performance must have been for Cruise.  Obviously a film a shot out of sequence, so actors are used to having to track their performances without the benefit of playing the film in any sort of emotional continuity. There's an extra degree of difficulty when an actor has to perform multiple versions of the same scene - often with near-identical dialogue - but bring a different emotional nuance to each version.  The cocky version of Cage whom we meet in the start slowly disappears over the course of the film.  "Press Junket" Cruise matures into "Ethan Hunt" Cruise.

The first scene in the loop is usually Cruise's confrontation with a commanding officer played by Bill Paxton.  We see that a variety of ways and each instance leads into a number of other scenes that follow that particular stage of Cage's development.  Cruise has to make sure all these jigsaw pieces fit perfectly, even though he might spend a week shooting 12 iterations of that scene, he has to make sure the version that fits with his 4th version of the loop is distinct from the others AND matches the later scenes from that version of the loop.

Of course, when he shoots the next scene in that sequence, it will be on a completely different day and also likely as one of many multiple incarnations of that scene.  And it's not as if he's playing one extreme to the other.  This is a gradual arc, a little like stepping up the musical scale one key at a time.  An actor gets little credit when they pull this off because the perfect continuity is invisible, but it's the sort of performance that you can only get from a dedicated professional.  That's just one reason why only a fool would dismiss this as a big dumb shoot 'em up.

It's soon apparent from the way that Cruise is anticipating every minor event unfolding during this meeting (sort of like Bill Murray masterminding his heist in GROUNDHOG DAY, or telling Rita about everything that will happen seconds from now in the diner) that he's lived through this many times before.  We don't need to see five failed attempts to win the general over - all that maters is this last desperate time where Cruise DOES say the right thing to get what he needs.  This is also the sort of scene that works better late in the film when the audience is so used to the rules the movie is playing by that it's easy to process what's going on.  There's a certain point where the movie stops explaining every last little thing and trusts that you're smart enough to keep up.

The break into the third act is another moment that underlines how perfect the structure of this film is.  Without betraying too much, all I'll say is that there's a clear "oh shit" moment where we realize that all bets are off.  One of the problems of telling a time travel story is that if the characters can always go back in time, the stakes are diminished.  This safety net is obliterated by a development that establishes a tight ticking clock on the end.  Just when we've finally gotten used to the idea of "Oh, he can just die and start over. No big," the film pulls the rug out from under us.

The only aspect of the script that doesn't totally track for me is the final ending.  And since I've been careful about not blowing other plot points, this is your final warning that what follows after this is nothing but SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

We cool?  Okay, so the team succeeds in destroying the Omega, and just before Cruise dies in the processes, he absorbs the Omega's blood, which is what sent him back in time in the first place.  He wakes up in the past, but somehow several hours sooner than he usually did.  What's more, despite time rewinding, the Omega is apparently somehow still dead even though those events haven't happened yet.

That seems a little weird to me. Cruise leaping back a little further I guess I could just chalk up to him absorbing a lot more blood before he died.  (I considered that it's just that he died a few hours sooner than scheduled, but the fact is even when he lasted well past his original time of death, he always bounced back to the exact same point in time.)  The Omega remaining dead I guess is just supposed to be one of those weird time-travel things, where I suppose if it's killed at one point in the loop it reverberates backwards.

It seems to be a deliberate paradox, but I'm a little thrown by the fact the film doesn't try to explain it.  There's not even a scene of Cruise or his science buddy making a theoretical guess as to what it all means.  It doesn't ruin the film or anything, but I do wish the ending were more airtight.

Still, I highly recommend EDGE OF TOMORROW as the sort of action film we need more of.  The characters take center stage and the movie is intelligent about every one of its developments.

Friday Free-for-All: Built a Time Machine to kill Hitler

In honor of Time Travel Week here I thought I'd find an undiscovered comedy bit dealing with time travel and illustrating some of the paradox and causality issues we've discussed this week. This is called "Built a Time Machine to Kill Hitler" and is from the people at Funkanomics.com

Using time travel - lessons from J.J. Abrams' Star Trek

In two earlier posts this week, we've covered the most basic approaches to time travel, so why not confuse the hell out of everyone and try to explain the notion of alternate timelines?

Back to the Future part II dealt with an alternate timeline in the form of Biff's distorted future (though technically all of BTTF, save for the opening of the first movie in 1985, happens in timelines that get altered by Marty's actions in the past.) The notion here is that there's one timeline and it is completely mutable. In changing things, you're really creating an altered timeline rather than an alternate timeline, despite the language Doc uses in Part II.

A truly alternate timeline would likely exist parallel to the "real" timeline. Thus, if you do something like going back to 1963 and saving JFK, you would have no impact on the history you just left. Instead, your changes would cause a new timeline to branch off from the old one, effectively creating an entirely new universe without wiping out the old one. I mention this because it can be a great way around the "paradox problem" one might encounter when writing time travel movies.

According to writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, this is the approach they took to time travel in last summer's Star Trek. Star Trek is also novel because it's a time-travel movie set entirely in an alternate timeline, with the characters themselves not becoming aware of that fact until at least midway through the script. In other words, it's a time travel movie told from the point of view of the people who have been impacted by changes the others faced. Supposed that the assertive George McFly we meet at the end of the first Back to the Future learned that he was actually supposed to be a wimpy nerd married to an overweight alcoholic and you'll get a sense of what I'm trying to explain.

Star Trek's approach is smart because it found a way to honor over 40 years of existing canon without making it a flat-out reboot that erases everything to start fresh. The film starts when a Romulan ship from the future ends up in the early 23rd century. This triggers a battle with the Starfleet vessel Kelvin, which in turn causes Jim Kirk's mother to go into labor early. Not only that, in the course of the battle, Jim Kirk's father George Kirk ends up sacrificing himself and the ship to save the rest of the crew. This is significant because in the original timeline where this encounter didn't take place, Jim Kirk was born weeks later in Iowa, and his father George lived to see him become captain of the Enterprise 30 years later.

Thus, Trek history has been altered at the moment of Kirk's birth and everything that happens after this is an alternate timeline. This is confirmed later, when a now-adult Kirk is stranded on an ice planet and encounters a version of Spock from 130 years in the future - a Spock played by Leonard Nimoy, the actor who carried the role through the earlier incarnations of the series. This was smart on the part of the writers because not only does it allow them to say to fans, "That history you loved still happened. We're honoring it, not ignoring it," but it also makes clear that this new history that has emerged is going to be significantly different from that which is documented in the original series and movies.

To drive home the point, the planet Vulcan - a significant element in the original series timeline - is destroyed in the course of the film. Even though the film ends with all the classic characters in their familiar positions, it's clear that none of their fates will be the same as in the first series. Kirk could be killed in the next movie, if the creators saw fit.

The writers have said that the way they see it, the "original timeline" that the Nimoy Spock left still exists and marches on parallel to the new one. I'd argue that nothing shown in the film itself specifically supports that notion, but there's nothing that either disproves that either I suppose. Since it's unlikely we'll ever revisit the original, prime timeline again, it's probably a moot point.

I mention all this because it shows there's a way to use time travel without relying on the paradoxes, as Back to the Future does. Here, the time travel is a way of achieving and "in-the-box" reboot and giving all the characters a clean slate. So keep in mind that if you want to use time travel, you don't need to rely on the old "we have to put the future back exactly the way it was meant to be" chestnut. In Star Trek, the mission isn't really to restore the original timeline - it's to stop the Romulan Nero before he does further damage to this one.

Using time travel - lessons from Back to the Future

On Monday we discussed "closed loop" time travel, so today we're going to take a look at a movie series where the characters are able to use time travel to change history: Back to the Future I-III.

Back to the Future plays rather fast and loose with time-travel logic as the series goes on. The first film is built around the premise that Marty McFly travels back in time from 1985 to 1955 and accidentally prevents his parents' first meeting in high school. In doing so, he has a week to fix things and get them together before time gets screwed up beyond repair and he misses his one chance to get back to his own time. Thus, the logic is pretty simple - Marty messed things up, and now he has to put it right. Pretty simple, right?

First, let me say that Back to the Future is one of my favorite movies, but I have a feeling that if it was released today, it would be nitpicked to death, as audiences are a lot savvier about time travel logic 25 years later. For example, in the process of getting his parents back together, Marty ends up creating a situation where his father George not only stands up to school bully Biff, but actually beats him up, and he ends up encouraging his father to take a chance on his own dreams of being a writer. This evolution is a sharp contrast to the way his father was in the original timeline. The 1985 George seen at the start of the film is a complete wimp who is still being bullied by Biff, but when Marty returns to 1985 at the end of the film, George is a successful writer, his parents' marriage is stronger and now Biff cows to George.

So Marty's visit changed some major stuff. Yet amazingly all of these major changes apparently had zero effect on the nights where Marty's parents conceived him and his siblings and despite their fortunes being much better in this new timeline, they still live in the same house. If the movie was held to strict logic, this probably would seem cheesy. However, because writer Bob Gale and director Bob Zemeckis crafted the film with a fun, almost whimsical tone, no one is likely to cry foul.

This fudging works because the script's own approach to time travel has been pretty loose. It helps that when Marty prevents his parents' meeting it's a big moment. It's not a butterfly effect-like set of dominoes like "Marty taking too long to place his order at the diner results in George not getting his food until five minutes later than he was meant to, which means that he leaves the diner later, which means that when he falls out of the tree after peeping into Lorraine's window there is no car to knock him out." Marty makes a BIG mistake, and then makes a BIG fix, so that keeps the audience focused on the broad strokes rather than the tiny details.

I do have to wonder about the fact that all of Marty's memories of growing up belong to a timeline that doesn't exist. Shouldn't the people living in the house be total strangers to him, more or less? What happens when his mother says, "Remember that summer up at Uncle Todd's cabin?" and Marty has no memory of it? And what happened to the Marty that those people knew? We've seen that he leaves this timeline much in the same way that "our" Marty did, but I'm left to wonder about his fate, and his life.

Another thing I find amusing in looking back at the films is how the second film was probably one of the first movies to really play with the idea of an alternate timeline. See, while Marty and Doc are visiting 2015, old Biff steals the time machine and uses it to deliver a sports almanac to himself in 1955. Thus, his younger counterpart has the results of every sporting event until 2000 and is able to put that to use by betting on the outcomes and amassing a significant fortune. Becoming a wealthy industrialist, he ends up corrupting the town and vastly altering the 1985 that Doc and Marty know.

The interesting thing is that the movie actually stops for two or three minutes so that Doc can literally pull out a blackboard and use it to deliver a lecture to Marty (and the audience) on how time travel has resulted in this alternate 1985. If I read that in a script today, I'd probably accuse it of overexplaining things, or talking down to the audience. I assume that at the time, there hadn't been many alternate timeline stories. so the filmmakers felt it necessary. (It's a Wonderful Life is the most obvious example I can think of. Can anyone think of any other major "alternate timeline" movies pre-1989?)

I also have to wonder about why Doc and Marty don't disappear when Biff alters time - and especially why the Delorean doesn't. In the alt-1985, Doc is committed in 1982, before he builds the time machine. Thus, there should be a paradox that results from the time machine not existing to cause all these problems. Wisely, the film avoids raising this issue at all. In the first film a big deal is made about how Marty's changes will cause him to be eventually erased from existence. It's an additional ticking clock. In Part II, Marty and Doc are merely working to set things right to prevent Biff's horrible future from coming to pass.

This is why I recommend that time-travel writers be aware of these little details, but do what they can to keep the audience from thinking on that micro-level. As cool as it is to think on the butterfly effect/chaos theory level of tiny changes producing huge results, if you open that can of worms then you're inviting the audience to nitpick a lot more closely.

Pick a set of time travel rules and stick to them. Then do what you can to keep things from getting too complicated.

Confusing time travel movies

Since we're discussing time travel all week, I thought I'd ask not what your favorite time travel movie is, but which time travel movie you find most confusing.

For me, it's Primer. I don't doubt that if I was to sit down and diagram all the alternate times lines that it would hold together, but it's incredibly complex to the point of incomprehensibility.

So what's your most confusing one?

Using time travel - lessons from The Terminator

So you've decided to write a time-travel movie. Congratulations! Now you can look forward to all manner of story discussions about causality, paradox and other wonderful issues that will confuse the hell out of your audience if they don't make sense, and probably will confuse them even more when they do make sense.

The very first question you should ask yourself if time-travel is part of your idea is: "Am I dealing with a 'closed loop' theory of time-travel or a 'multiple timeline theory?'" Confused yet? Hold on, we'll take it piece-by-piece.

Closed loop time-travel is the easiest to explain. Essentially what it means is that your characters can't change history because there is only ONE timeline. Even if they go into the past to change things, those "changes are already accounted for in the history they left. In a closed loop, when one enters the past, they aren't changing history, they're fulfilling it.

The first Terminator movie is an excellent example of a closed loop. In an attempt to alter history, Skynet sends a Terminator back in time to kill John Conner, the future leader of the resistance against them. To do so, they actually send their machine after his mother Sarah before she becomes pregnant, the theory being if she dies, John won't be born. However, the Resistance sends back their own fighter to protect her, a man named Reese. Though he dies fighting the Terminator, he eventually preserves her life - but not before sleeping with her. At the end of the movie, Sarah is pregnant with Reese's child, the baby who will become John Conner.

See the closed loop? If the Terminator hadn't come back, than Reese wouldn't have come back and fathered John. Thus, the Terminator couldn't have ever succeeded in its mission because the mere fact that John's birth - a conception that the Terminator attack is a catalyst for - is a part of the future it left means that those events are set in stone. The Terminator could no more kill Sarah and alter its own past than Hitler could suddenly win World War II and immediately alter the history we know.

Another movie that plays well with this theory of time travel is Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, when the titular characters realize that their future selves can get them out of present jams so long as they remember to come back in time and make certain things possible for them.

When working with time travel it is essential that you lay down your rules at the earliest stages of plotting. I've read some scripts that start off with clear evidence of the closed loop theory, only to have the characters suddenly able to rewrite history in the third act.

One of my current scripts deals with characters who think they're dealing with a closed loop sort of time travel, only to have the events of the movie reveal the timeline is more malleable. It's been a tricky one to plot because I have to make sure all the evidence lines up the right way without any inconsistency by the end. It's a tricky thing to plot because I have to make sure that the characters' misunderstanding makes sense. The evidence all needs to track in the end, and I need to make sure that all the misinterpretations can be explained away.

On Wednesday, we'll discuss examples where the future is mutable. Bring your Advil. I feel a headache coming on.