Time Travel
Oct. 17th, 2003 08:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerI wrote this for the film discussion board when T3 came out and I came across it again recently. Don't think I've LJed it before.
There are two kinds of time travel - either the past can be changed or it's permanently set.
If the past is inviolate then everything has to tie itself back together at the end and it turns out that by trying to avoid their future people have in fact merely caused it to occur. These tend to be cleverly written and leave you shouting "No! Don't do that! You'll just end up stopping yourself killing Hitler!" at the screen. My favourite version of this is the Heinlein short story "All you zombies" in which a character ends up being both their own mother and their own father through a delightfully complicated series of events.
If the past is changeable then either you end up with paradox ("my name is Inigo Montoya! I killed my father before I was born! Now everyone in the audience has a headache!") or parallel timelines ("So, Kirk1 came back from future1 and told Kirk2 not to do it, which means that our future (Future2) is now safe for all mankind. Shame about Kirk1's future.").
It seems obvious to me that the original Terminator is a "past is inviolate" story, in which everything ties together at the end. The second film is a parallel timeline story, in which terminators come back from Future1 but are successfully destroyed, causing Future2 to come into existence. T3 is a mixture, in which the existence of parallel timelines is a given (Arnie says as much) but the future is only postponable or twistable, not entirely escapable.
The real question, of course, is "What was that computer virus that was infecting everything?"
There are two kinds of time travel - either the past can be changed or it's permanently set.
If the past is inviolate then everything has to tie itself back together at the end and it turns out that by trying to avoid their future people have in fact merely caused it to occur. These tend to be cleverly written and leave you shouting "No! Don't do that! You'll just end up stopping yourself killing Hitler!" at the screen. My favourite version of this is the Heinlein short story "All you zombies" in which a character ends up being both their own mother and their own father through a delightfully complicated series of events.
If the past is changeable then either you end up with paradox ("my name is Inigo Montoya! I killed my father before I was born! Now everyone in the audience has a headache!") or parallel timelines ("So, Kirk1 came back from future1 and told Kirk2 not to do it, which means that our future (Future2) is now safe for all mankind. Shame about Kirk1's future.").
It seems obvious to me that the original Terminator is a "past is inviolate" story, in which everything ties together at the end. The second film is a parallel timeline story, in which terminators come back from Future1 but are successfully destroyed, causing Future2 to come into existence. T3 is a mixture, in which the existence of parallel timelines is a given (Arnie says as much) but the future is only postponable or twistable, not entirely escapable.
The real question, of course, is "What was that computer virus that was infecting everything?"
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SPOILERS
Date: 2003-10-17 12:46 pm (UTC)My first response was to say 'duh' before this, but that's not all that nice.
I think that the virus was Skynet. I believe that Claire Danes character at some point says as much, talking about how Skynet engineered the situation in order to bring about the events that would free it to rampage across the global network.
As bad as parts of that film were, I still enjoy it for a variety of reasons.
1) It had bits of the feel from old sci-fi stories. Especially when Skynet starts killing everyone at the complex, and when Arnie has his moment of emotion.
Note: IMO, this film features the worst acting ever done by Arnie, period, ever. I discount Hercules Comes To New York, because he didn't actually act in that film, again IMO.
2) It had a dark ending, something that I think was good for this film.
3) The whole time travel thing presented some interesting questions and explainations. For one thing, their postponement of the events of Judgement Day created some interesting side effects. Events described by Reese in the first film never came to pass, as for one thing, Skynet was online and fully operational in this timeline, and rather than taking everything over, required the intervention of human beings to fully enact its plan. Something else I just remembered was that Skynet was originally a complex, and actual computer, and in this version of the T universe, it ends up being a distributed network that has no single 'location'. Way to go BitTorrent! Little changes like that were a good thing, I think.
no subject
Date: 2003-10-17 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-18 01:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-17 05:38 pm (UTC)I'm missing a point, right? :)