Monday February 23, 2009
Time twisters on the silver screen
By AMY DE KANTER
It’s a concept that constantly intrigues and baffles at the same time. The silver screen has somehow always made sense of time travel, though.
I haven't seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button yet, but I can’t wait. A man who is born old and grows young with age? Cool.
There is something fascinating about films that play with time. The ones that explore time travel, turn the rules of time on their head, or tell events out of sequence.
Journey to the past
By now, time travel is nearly as common as love stories on the silver screen. They used to primarily involve the distant past. Characters would romp with dinosaurs, hang out with Julius Ceasar and come home to an unchanged present. Travel through time became infinitely more interesting when characters went into a more recent past, where their actions could change their present.
Fast, furious, and funny as heck, Back to the Future was groundbreaking for its time and is still a classic today. A teenage boy – played fantastically by Michael J. Fox – feels like fish out of water in his loser family, whom he loves, pities and is ashamed of, all at once. A mad scientist, a DeLorean and a van full of angry Libyans send him back to right before his parents fell in love. By being there, he interferes with the natural order of things. If he doesn’t put things right, he will never be born.
Somewhere in Time double bills as both a great time travel movie and one of the most romantic films ever made. This is in part thanks to the actors – Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeves at the height of their gorgeousness – and a sublime theme song by John Barry. It is more willpower than science that sends Reeves into the past after he becomes obsessed with an old photograph of a beautiful woman. Somewhere in Time answers most of the audience’s questions but it also leaves us with some tantalisingly delightful puzzles.
No one, but no one, does clever plot twists like J.K. Rowling. In the film, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – the very kiasu Hermione uses a little time travel device that allows her to attend twice as many classes. Travelling back a mere hour in time to avert catastrophe, Harry, Hermione and Ron have to both stalk and avoid their past selves. The audience is treated to a stream of satisfying “a-ha!” moments as mystery after mystery is explained.
Visitors from the future
Guy Pearce and Carrie-Anne Moss in Memento. I’ll be back. In time, that is. We’ve spent enough reel time messing around with the past. How do we like it when someone in the future has the same idea and messes with our present?
The Terminator is so familiar to us now that it may take effort to recall the suspense. Why were all these women, all with the same name, getting murdered? The surprises are even better than another futuristic time-travel film: Twelve Monkeys (in this film, the time traveller is Bruce Willis, who also does his share of time-tripping in Walt Disney’s The Kid).
Again and again
Groundhog Day was one of those movies I attended without expectations, but wow. In the film, Phil, a very unlikeable character, is forced to live the same day over and over again. We follow Phil (Bill Murray at his comedic best) through days and days as he tries to pull himself out of the cycle. When even diverse attempts at suicide don’t work, he starts to change, accepting this new reality, shedding his cynicism and finally discovering a way to be happy.
Phil has no control over his situation, but in the excellent 1998 German film Run, Lola, Run it is young Lola who is in control. Her boyfriend has been put in charge of a huge amount of money, which he then loses on the train.
The people he was guarding it for will kill him when they find out. Lola has only a short time in which to figure out how to help him and do it. Following each failure, she somehow goes back in time and starts over.
The brilliance of this film lies in the massive changes that occur over the tiniest delays. As Lola races by people on the street, their entire future is revealed to us, futures which change completely, depending on whether this red-headed girl (the stunning actress Franka Potente who later becomes internationally known for her role as Marie in The Bourne Identity) rushes past a second earlier or a second later. Full of surprises and revelations, this is time twisting at its best, a million times better than The Butterfly Effect and other weak imitations.
Personal time
Big scary bunny. I love saying that. So unexpected, so very Donnie Darko. This cult favourite barely broke even at the box office but has a faithful following. Donnie (Brokeback Mountain’s Jake Gyllenhaal) is a schizophrenic teenager who decides to stop taking his medication. From then onwards, we are not sure what to believe when we see things through his eyes – including, yes, a big scary bunny. Is Donnie hallucinating, foreseeing the future or travelling to the past? Each theory has a ton of evidence supporting and negating it. Yes, I am part of the Donnie Darko cult.
It could be argued that in this article, Guy Pearce should be mentioned for his role in the ultra-terrible Time Machine. Not a chance. However, he was in one of my favourite psychological thrillers, Memento. In this film, time travel is limited to how the audience experiences reality through Pearce’s character, Leonard. An accident left Leonard with no short term memory, so he forgets things almost as soon as he experiences them. Masterfully directed by Christopher Nolan (now also known for Dark Knight), Memento is told both backwards and forwards. More and more is revealed to us, the audience. Leonard stays stuck in his bizarre time bubble as we slowly start to understand how tragically alone he is.
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