Of all the technologies that humanity has yet to perfect, time travel and seedless cherries have been particularly captivating to the imagination of the average person. That's presumably why every sci-fi television series has to have the requisite time travel episode, and also why the Back to the Future flicks have grossed nearly 1 billion dollars in aggregate. Trivia time: in Back to the Future II, the era with the flying cars, hoverboards, and self-fastening shoes is 2015, just 5 years from now. Did anyone in 1989 really think that we'd have flying cars in just 26 years? Sorry to disappoint you guys.
Due to the nature of the time travel, it is exceedingly difficult to craft a story that actually makes a modicum of sense whatsoever. To wit: in Back to the Future III, Marty sees Doc Brown's tombstone from 1885 and goes back in time to prevent his death, which he successfully does. But if that is the case, then the tombstone will never exist for Marty to see in the future, so he wouldn't go back in time to save him in the first place. It's a strange paradox.
But some movies make an even greater (and preventable) mockery of time travel and our intelligence. I recently re-watched Star Trek: Generations, for which, as a kid, I possessed unabashed love, but has now been attenuated down to mild tolerance. Basically, a scientist named Soran walks around on the Enterprise for a while, escapes and blows up a star system to redirect a stellar phenomenon called the Nexus right into his face. The Nexus, you see, is kind of like a space cocaine gateway into dreamworld. Picard gets caught up in it too and frantically recruits Captain Kirk to come back with him into real life and stop Soran. When they do decide to go back to reality, they can choose any time, because "time has no meaning in the Nexus," whatever the fuck that means. Let me reiterate. THEY CAN CHOOSE ANY TIME IN HISTORY TO RETURN TO, and they choose the few minutes right before Soran launches his space missile. Of course, there's a frantic struggle in which the protagonists almost fail and Kirk dies (spoiler alert). But none of that would have even been necessary if they had just gone back further in time to when Soran was putzing around on board the Enterprise with nary a care in the world. Or hell, go back even further and kill his parents, I dunno. Really disappointing. And who cares if you fail anyway? Just get back in the Nexus, go back in time and then try again.
No comments:
Post a Comment