Hollywood filmmakers really do know how to get on your nerves. They may use a lot of fancy special effects, get the most photogenic actors to prance around like saintly superheroes and dress up all of their movies with the snazziest of technology and production values, but at heart they're only really out to surprise, confuse and thoroughly irritate their unsuspecting audience. In the midst of all this, if the audience are lightly entertained for even a second, then it's a monumental victory for the average Hollywood moviemaker, and is taken as his cue to start work on a string of similarly logic-defying scripts, or better still, to make a sequel. Okay, that may sound a little insane, but at least it can explain the stream of movies based on time travel constantly coming out of Hollywood studios, and with all top drawer actors, no less. I just finished watching Deja Vu, a movie based on time travel, which stars Denzel Washington, of all people, as the main lead. And to be very honest, after two hours and six minutes of fairly entertaining, fast-paced thrills, I was only left wondering who on earth could have written such an outrageously ludicrous script, and why in God's good name Washington ever agreed to be a part of it.
The thing with time travel is that it is inherently such a ridiculous idea that when Hollywood scriptwriters take the concept and try to construct intricate plots replete with loads of sci-fi hogwash around it, they end up thrusting the most insanely unbelievable tripe at their audience. I know that sci-fi is supposed to be unbelievable, but most sci-fi movies do have a central logical theme to their plots that at least makes some sense with a degree of imaginative leeway on the part of us watchers. But time travel! It makes no sense whichever way you look at it.
Now I don't claim to have watched all of Hollywood's time travel movies, but I have watched a fair few - The Terminator movies, The Time Machine, Kate and Leopold, Deja Vu, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and The Butterfly Effect, the last of which was a surprisingly high quality product for a genre of such fatuousness. The Terminator series concentrated more on the robot/cyborg element, with time travel being just an auxiliary part of the plot, so I guess we can forgive the utterly crazy premise of humans and evil robots sending ultra-stylish marshals to the past to protect and destroy, respectively, the future leader of the human race. Kate and Leopold is a romantic comedy, and frankly speaking, is actually more believable than the slew of mindless, coincidence-abounding fairytales that are the norm for the genre, even with the 'crack in time' theory and Hugh Jackman playing the inventor of the elevator who somehow finds himself in the apartment of the remarkably unflustered Meg Ryan, who incidentally exists 120 years in the future. The Butterfly Effect, a completely fanciful venture that is mainly preoccupied with human emotions and fate, is darkly depressing yet unexpectedly stirring, and would certainly have had a very large cult following had Ashton Kutcher been a little decent at acting. It manges to get away because of the underlying supernatural theme, but only just.
It is when the filmmakers try to bring science into the equation that the plots fail spectacularly. In Deja Vu, for instance, Denzel Washington uses modified satellites to travel to the past and prevent a terrorist attack that he knows has killed hundreds of people. The trouble is, he also has to reverse the death of a beautiful young woman who conveniently yet bizarrely is crucial to the attack. And this, as you may very well have guessed, sparks off a series of confounding and fantastically ludicrous events that only the director can fully explain (though I'm not sure even he can). Apparently, the story moves through four different and discrete timelines, with Mr. Washington existing in two different forms in any given timeline, and each of these two forms is wholly oblivious to the existence of the other. At one point, we are even told that there is a 'dead' Washington who somehow managed to take along his mobile phone through the time machine even though he was strictly advised not to carry any extra baggage when making the leap, and an 'alive' Washington who notices, to highly amusing effect, that a victim of the attack (in other words, the dead Washington) receives calls at exactly the same time that he himself does. So in the la-la land of Deja Vu, mobile phones can travel through time too. If you think all of this is stunningly laughable, you should check out the 'theories' about the film at www.imdb.com. They'll leave you in very pleasant splits, I assure you.
I know this may sound a little biased, with me being such a big Harry Potter fan and all, but I honestly believe that J K Rowling's version of time travel is far saner than most other theories. In Potterworld, 'reality' cannot be changed no matter how much anyone may fiddle with 'time turners'. There can only ever be one timeline, and even if somebody does go back or forward in time, his or her actions will somehow be aligned with the existing reality as we know it, so that there can never be alternate universes or bringing of the dead back to life, thus eliminating at least two of the most worryingly unbelievable phenomena of time travel. In short, 'destiny' cannot be changed in Potterverse: Time is only a function of Fate, and no amount of time travel can bring any sort of disharmony to this fundamental truth. In spite of this rosy, intellectual-sounding explanation, however, the fact remains that the time travel part of the Harry Potter books and movies is still the most misunderstood and hotly debated Potter concept. Which just goes to show how terrifically inconceivable and needlessly confusing a concept time travel is: people are willing to accept flying on broomsticks and storing parts of one's soul in many different inanimate objects, but they refuse to accept time travel, even in as perfectly imaginary a work as Harry Potter. Something for Hollywood to think about?
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