Post 4 - Science Fiction and Time

30 Jul 2025 15postsin30days · movies · primer · sci-fi

Science fiction is a great genre. Within science fiction, the subgenre that manipulates time is my favorite. Movies based on the warping of time, the invention of a time machine, or the strange effects of a single episode of time travel are some of the best. (The other subgenre that I really like is the investigation of fictional accidents, such as the one that is conducted in Airframe, by Crichton) Interestingly, warping time does not need to resort to fiction: the best examples would be Memento, 500 Days of Summer, and the Seinfeld “backwards episode”.¹ These depict the events of a character’s life through an odd, nonlinear narrative. If the linear flow of time is the basis for everything, then it is fascinating to explore the alternate realities and the questions that it raises.

A few science fiction movies that have stayed with me over several years are:

1. Arrival
2. Primer
3. Dark (TV show)
4. Timecrimes
5. Looper
6. Minority Report

**EVERYTHING BEYOND THIS POINT IS A SPOILER FOR ONE OR MORE OF THE ABOVE. READERS BEWARE!**

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Arrival is at the top of my life because it introduced me to a great movie and a great writer (Ted Chiang). I can clearly remember how I ended up watching Arrival in the theater: It was the only English movie playing in a nearby theater during a summer or winter break from college; the trailer gives no hint that the movie itself is based on time: deliberately focusing on the aliens who arrive. I later discovered that the day I watched the movie was also the last show in that theater. The scene in the movie that truly hit me was the one where it is finally revealed that the protagonist has understood the aliens’ language, and is now able to look into the future, just as easily as we are able to remember the past. Even though the movie’s “punchline” was not this revelation but the choice that the protagonist makes, it was this scene where what was going on dawned on me. I have watched the movie over and over several times in the past few years, so the feeling of that fresh dawning is gone for me now. I will perhaps find it again with another movie at some point.

The rub in all these movies is the choice that the creator makes: Will time travel enable the characters to change the past or future, or will it just be a tool that they can use to look into what is always going to happen? In my opinion, the former is easier to sell, but the latter is more appealing to create. Minority Report does it best; the movie begins with complete confidence in the system, but through the chief proponent’s own experience, a flaw is revealed and we are lead to question whether such a system to prevent anything before it happened really is worth it; the world that exists before and after something happens is different enough that the thing being prevented from happening is just as big of a deal as the thing happening. Minority Report still confuses me; was the movie in support of the fictional idea or against it?

An aspect of time travel movies and dramas that keeps me engaged for a very long time is that many of them are utterly inscrutable: No matter how many times you watch them, there is always more to unravel. Primer was a great example of this. I was fairly obsessed with the movie 8 years ago (!!!) I am still unclear about several aspects of the movie, which makes rewatching the movie rewarding experience. Primer was also the first movie which convinced me that a great script could come directly to a movie; I searched for a long time to find a novel which had the model of time travel shown in Primer: a character can travel back to a specific point in time, and from that point until the point at which they travel back, there will be two copies of the same person. The other geeky thing about Primer is the meta aspect of its hero: The hero of the movie uses this power to repeatedly travel back to a party that he visited once, in order to play the hero at the party. Delightful!

I wonder whether time travel is the most popular form of philosophy (or a mixture of pop-science and pop-philosophy, if there were such a thing.) It poses the question “What if this was possible?” It’s not an answer; it’s not catharsis; it’s not an explanation; it’s an endless series of questions: what if time travel was possible? would you travel? why? when and where? what then? … I don’t know enough about the categories of philosophy to know which branch of philosophy asks these questions, or if there are people out there mulling over these questions. Pointed introspection at the personal level has been rewarding for me.