The greatest measure of a film’s success is the test of time. Something about this film works even though it breaks conventions.
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Escalation is where the Terminator franchise went wrong. The writers kept enlarging their world until it became contradictory.
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To keep the story under control, the time machine itself should be a hard system even if the concept of time is soft and pliable.
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Time travel into the future is not as tricky as travel into the past because altering the future does not create so many complex story problems.
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Shrouding the story rules in mystery only works with soft magic systems where the story focus is on something other than the system.
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Terminator 3 crossed into hard magic territory when it added the concept of fate to time travel, which means that specific rules began to matter.
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Soft magic is vague and incidental; hard magic imposes rules on the story. Too often in science fiction, these rules get broken.
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The writers of Time Travel 2002 merely use Wells’s story’s name and reputation to tell a less satisfying tale of their own making.
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The answer to the traveler’s dilemma is provided by an Uber-Morlock, unique to this version of the story and perhaps the most interesting character in the film.
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The time traveler, good-natured gentleman that he is, ignores the hologram’s snootiness and continues asking urgent questions.
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Good and bad writing are on a spectrum. Underlying this spectrum is the suspension of disbelief. That is, viewers should forget where they are while watching.
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By making the Eloi more hearty and capable of surviving on their own, the writers destroy the seriousness of the threat the Morlocks represent.
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In this film, the time traveler has a girlfriend whom he is trying to save from death. But can time travel really alter the course of events?
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In the 1895 novel, Wells was working out a Communist-inspired theory of evolution but the 1960 film’s screenwriters chose an anti-war narrative instead.
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The time traveler is alarmed to discover that all the knowledge and achievements of man have been lost and he almost despairs.
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We remain confronted by the same old mystery: who, or what, imagines the birdhouse in the first place?
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Over the last several months, I’ve talked about time travel. Originally, I’d planned to discuss the trope in more detail — when and how to use it, when and how not to use it, and whether it was better to rely on fate as a stabilizing force in the narrative. Or is it better to play around with various paradoxes? But then I realized that no in-depth discussion about the trope would be complete without reviewing the novel and subsequent movie that started it all. The Time Machine (1895) by H.G. Wells (1866–1946) can only be described as the most notable work on time travel. In fact, Wells is often thought of as the man who invented science fiction itself. Read More ›
Avian is perfectly clear: There is no mind at all in Coordinated Avian Models (CAMs). And yet, they’re behind a staggering number of new designs.
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There are kernels of a good movie in A Sound of Thunder (2005), if one is willing to look past the poor production.
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Dr. Avian was sure that he had found a formula for intelligence without anything like a human mind, and his program appeared to be working.
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