Movie Marathon: Time Travel

Even before I became a Doctor Who fan a year ago, I've been fascinated by the idea of time travel, and therefor, interested in any time travel movies. I think the reason it most fascinates me is because it is simply impossible. That's why most movies do a horrible job of using it in their plots; they just can't make sense. However, there are some really smart movies that work time travel into their story and manage to keep it comprehensive. Even if it requires a second or third viewing for you to understand it. See if you can keep up and keep track of these time travel movies.

The Dark & Twisty: The Butterfly Effect

After I watched this movie for the first time, I had to sit on my bed in the dark for a while and just take it all in. (I can be a bit dramatic.) It really will blow your mind, if you're clever enough to keep up. Evan Treborn suffered from blackouts, when he remembers nothing, throughout his childhood. Years later, in college, reading from his old journals, it triggers a jump back in time, where he is back in his thirteen-year-old body living the time during one of his blackouts. Evan continues to trigger these mental time leaps, going back in time to figure out what happened during those blackouts, and then trying to do things differently to improve the lives of himself and his friends. However, this movie demonstrates the theory from which it gets its name, the Chaos Theory, often explained with the saying "Something as small as the flutter of a butterfly's wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world." Which means we don't know what the consequences will be of even the smallest actions. This movie inspired me to want to learn more about the Chaos Theory and fun stuff like that.

The Romance: The Time Traveler's Wife

The problem with being in love with a time traveler; meeting in the wrong order. (*See Doctor Who, below.) Clare first meets Henry when she is a young girl and he is a grown man. When she meets him again, in college, she knows him very well, but he has not yet traveled back to those times when she was a child. Are you keeping up so far? They fall in love and all that, but all the while, he is- and here's what makes it different- involuntarily time traveling at random moments. It's a gift, it's a curse- Well, mostly it's a curse as it gets him into trouble most of the time and leaves her worried about him. You'll cry. Just warning you.

The 80's: Back to the Future 

This movie demonstrates the basic principle of why we know traveling back in time would not be possible: The Grandfather Paradox. The paradox is; if you were able to travel back in time and kill your own grandfather, you would never be born, so who went back in time to kill him? In this movie Marty McFly watches himself fade away as he tries to get his parents to fall in love so they can get busy and make him. Scientific flaws aside, I think we can all agree that, if time travel were possible, we would want a DeLorean to be the way to do it.

The Indies: Donnie Darko & S. Darko

Some people may shun me for including the "continuation" S. Darko with the original masterpiece, Donnie Darko, but I don't care! I like it, okay?! They both use the same time travel principles which include worm holes, rewinds, countdowns, fate, and creepy dead messengers. In Donnie Darko, the titular character is guided by a guy in a creepy bunny mask named Frank, who tells him to do scary things, but it's only because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, so time got screwed up and he has to go back to fix it. Basically. Seven years later, Donnie's little sister, Sam (played by Daveigh Chase in both movies) is experiencing the same time travel symptoms as Donnie, but so are other characters. It takes the original principles and makes it even more complex, not necessarily making it a better, smarter movie, but I still enjoyed it. (Okay, it may be mostly because the first scene is really pretty and I have a crush on Daveigh.)

The Anime: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

I don't consider myself an anime fan (I really don't know much about the art form/pop culture.) but I can say that I am a fan of Hayao Miyazaki, the Japanese writer/director of such moves as Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle. Oh, wait. This isn't a Miyazaki movie. But if you're a Miyazaki fan, like I am, you will also love Mamoru Hosoda. In this anime feature, a girl accidentally discovers a device that allows her to, quite literally, leap through time. It features the typical time travel movie tricks such as re-doing scenes several times to try to get it "right" and dealing with the consequences of using time travel to mess with people's lives.

TV Bonus

Doctor Who: There are two types of people in the world: Doctor Who fanatics and people who have never seen Doctor Who. For the latter, Doctor Who is a British series about a Timelord (called, simply, The Doctor) who travels throughout space and time usually just for fun but he also ends up saving the world (whichever one he's on). Go watch it right now or we can no longer be friends.

Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking: If you want to know the science behind these time travel ideas, watch episode two of this three-part documentary series. Stephen Hawking explains how time travel to the future is theoretically possible (if we could travel faster than the speed of light) and invites his future self to travel back in time to attend his own party (Spoiler Alert: It doesn't work.) 

The Butterfly Effect Sequels

The Butterfly Effect is one of my favorite movies. It’s absolutely fascinating and a very good quality film. [Click here to see my review of the DVD I wrote a long time ago.] So, when I found out that there were not one, but two, sequels made I knew I would want to see them. I could tell that they weren’t going to be very good movies before I even saw them. I don’t know why they even tried to make sequels to The Butterfly Effect. As far as I know it wasn’t exactly a blockbuster, it was more of a cult film, like Donnie Darko (whose sequel S. Darko I happen to love.) From the descriptions of the movies on IMDb.com, I saw that both movies weren’t exactly sequels to The Butterfly Effect, but movies that used the same time traveling concept as the original. There’s a 20-something guy who keeps going back in time to save a girlfriend but he keeps changing something he didn’t mean to. He comes back to his present with no memory of what happened between and his world is very different.

The Butterfly Effect 2

A year after all of his friends die in a car crash, which he was in as well, he time travels back and avoids the accident. He jumps back to a year after with no memory in between. Same basic premise as The Butterfly Effect. At first everything seems great, but he screws something up and goes back to another time to try and fix it. And so on, and so on. The basic “careful what you wish for” moral. Things in the new reality seem great at first, but then he discovers he’s sacrificed something to get what he wanted; ie. his girlfriend for his job.

There was no background to this story. The most set-up you got was that there were four friends, two couples, they’d been together a long time, the guys worked together. There was no history of any of the characters. There was nothing to work up to or explain his first time travel. He didn’t even have a reaction to it like he was surprised when it started happening, or if it had happened before. It was really just for no reason, out of nowhere, he time traveled.

Because there is no character development, the whole movie just seems weak. You don’t really care about anything the characters are doing because you don’t know them. All in all, it’s a lame attempt at recreating a story similar to The Butterfly Effect. Don’t bother watching it. Unless, like me, you are just curious to see the lame sequel to a movie you love.

Both movies, but mostly the second, included some unnecessary and quite graphic sex scenes. Sure, the sex made sense within the story line, but it was unnecessary for the scenes to go on so long (mainly in 2) and be so graphic (in 3.) Adding sex scenes to a bad movie isn’t going to save it. They weren’t even good sex scenes.

I was curious who wrote this disastrous attempt at a sequel, so I looked him up on IMDb.com. Turns out this is the literary genius who also wrote I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer. That gives you a good idea of the quality of this movie.

The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations

After watching the sad excuse for a movie that was the first sequel, this movie was a relief that it wasn’t nearly as bad. This one lies somewhere between the original and the second. Again, it doesn’t have enough back story of his time traveling. It is apparent that he has been doing it for a long time, but they don’t share much history of it. I felt that I got to know the characters in this movie, and therefor was more engaged in the story. It turned into a bit of a murder mystery with him jumping back to track a serial killer. In the end, the mystery is revealed. It’s such a strange ending, that it just seems a little unnecessary. It’s just a little too ridiculous. It’s interesting and unexpected for sure, but just little “Aw, geez, that is just too weird.” Overall, it’s not nearly as terrible as the first sequel. It’s actually worth a watch.

Cheese Rating: 3/5
Hilarity Rating: 1/5
Drama Rating: 4/5
Quality Rating: 3/5
For Fans of: The Butterfly Effect, time traveling movies, mysteries
Final Verdict: Don’t expect it to even touch the original, but it’s a decent dramatic mystery movie.

The Butterfly Effect: Director's Cut with Commentary

First of all, the commentary feature was very hard to find on the DVD because there are so many special feature menus with all the Infinifilm features and extras. Which is awesome, because I love me some special features and behind-the-scenes stuff, but it took some digging to find the commentary.

The commentary is only on the director's cut because the commentary is by the co-directors and co-writers, Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, and of course they prefer their cut. I've seen both versions of the film and I prefer the director's cut because it has extra scenes which add interesting plot points and the theatrical version had a very Hollywood ending where everyone lives happily ever after, but the director's cut has a darker ending in which Evan saves everyone else by sacrificing himself. (Hope I didn't spoil the movie for anyone there.)

The commentary was really interesting. They talked about technical aspects of making the film, specific scenes that were hard, what was happening behind the camera, etc. They also had lots of jokes to tell about things happening on screen as well as behind the camera stuff. I found out about a lot of themes in the movie I didn't realize before, like the color Miller Red that only appears on screen when the scene has something to do with the kids' molestation by their father. A lot of digital color correcting happened to the film, especially for flashback scenes which get increased or decreased saturation, and all the different worlds Evan creates has its own digital color treatment.

As far as commentaries go, this one is really good. They talk consistently throughout the film. You'll learn a lot about how the film was made and get more insight into the complex story.