Time travel trouble

Time travel often comes across as gimmicky and is rarely tried to be done in an intelligent manner in movies/TV. They all are certain to collapse when you think about them in depth. Some of the better time travel uses are when they accepted how absurd the concept is (Bill and Ted) or actually put serious effort into the time travel aspect (Primer or Blink from Dr. Who). Btw, I swear I once read a Terminator comic where Skynet filled some poor human up with futuristic guns and sent him into the past to be torn apart by Terminators who needed to retrieve the weapons. Cannot remember where this was from though.

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Originally Posted by mazikeen72 

I go back and forth between hating and liking (rarely loving) the time travel plot mechanism.  Sometimes it revs my imagination and sometimes it insults my intelligence.  Sometimes it just has holes... like people, but different and sometimes more icky.

 

I spent the weekend glutting on the Terminator franchise.  All movies, both seasons of TV.  Most of it I enjoy and do wish the TV show had gotten another round or two.  But my problem is...

 

By the time travel "rules" of the Terminator-verse, if you can't take anything back in time but flesh/organic living being how do you send robots?  I don't know why it's taken almost 3/4 of my existence to question this, but it just hit me.  And the fact that the robot is covered in organic tissue doesn't hold weight.  That means you could stuff some weapon in a dog, send back the dog with someone and they'd have a plasma rifle with a 40 watt... well, you know. And yes, that would take an awfully big dog with substantial subsequent gastrointestinal difficulty, but you get my point.  Really, if you send a nice juicy T-800 back, all that should show up is a big wet bag of skin, hair, eyes, sweat and other assorted damp goodies.  How then do they manage to send Terminators of various makes and models?

 

And if this has been discussed ad infinitum (or nauseum), please accept my apologies.

I've always been frustrated by Terminators time travel more for the simple fact that the future can't create itself. Kyle Reese fathering John Conner only to be eventually sent back in time by his son so he could father him (again) is impossible.

In the case of Terminator its true that the whole concept is bit confusing.But if you watch the movie Dejavu then you will find a great logic behind the time travel.

Time Crimes.

That is all.

All I ask for in my time travel is consistency.

In sci-fi literary and cinema terms, there are a few time travel concepts:

1. The time loop/paradox - someone travels back in time and causes their own future to happen (Terminator, Twelve Monkeys, Time Crimes)

2. Destiny/Course Correction - You can go back in time and change things slightly, but some things are meant to be and are inevitable and Time (seemingly a sentient being) will force your hand (The Time Machine, Terminator 3, Star Trek 2009)

           2a. There is only one timeline, so if you alter things slightly you'll return to a future that still hit the bench marks but is is recognizably different (Back to the Future, The Butterfly Effect), but if you alter things too much you cease to exist (thus creating a time paradox, because if you cease to exist how could you travel back to alter things?)

3. Infinite Worlds - comic books mess around with this a lot, usually comparing the time stream to a river or roots of a tree. Alternate timelines running parallel to one another, so that if you travel back in time and alter things you're not negating your own timeline but creating a new fork in the river (Back to the Future 2, Terminator 2).

Obviously there's some bleedover between the concepts. All I ask for is consequences. Time Crimes, for instance, forces a provocative moral choice on the main character at the end. The Butterfly Effect not only hurts the main character every time he travels within his lifetime, but has a sense of karma to it. Yeah you may have a better life, but innocent people have been unjustly punished, or something happens to screw things up.

I asked the Terminator time displacement question in this thread  http://www.chud.com/community/forum/thread/121098/nerd-stench/250 . Post #291.

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE predicted the catastrophe in Japan. Time travel is real and not to be mocked.

"One little change has a ripple effect and it affects everything else, like a butterfly floats its wings and Tokyo explodes or there's a tsunami in like somewhere."

Very interesting. Time travel is possible. One can in fact go back in time, if one travels far enough away, instantaneously. As Samoa jumps forward in time in December. The country hopes that by switching where it is on the international dateline, it will improve its economy. Samoa will do this by switching to the west side of the international date line, which it says will make it easier for it to do business with Australia and New Zealand.

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Originally Posted by Bartleby_Scriven 

1. The time loop/paradox - someone travels back in time and causes their own future to happen (Terminator, Twelve Monkeys, Time Crimes)

 

I'd argue with you about Twelve Monkeys, but that's another thread.

Personally I find myself really loving certain time travel films especially those with a sort of poetic nihilism, in which the main character finds they can change nothing. Though I agree with you that there need to be more films where the paradoxes are addressed.