bstempleton@watmath.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (07/01/85)
Just saw "Back to the Future", a new film starring Christopher Lloyd and with Spielberg as executive producer. Nano-Review: See it!! This film is certainly not a hard-sf time travel story, but it is a lot of *fun*, and you will enjoy it. It's professional in quality and is full of truly wonderful time travel situations. While there have been many time travel stories, none have exploited the humour of paridoxical situations (like dating your mother) as well as this one. It's true there are lots of inconsistencies and paradoxes, but the movie isn't really making a pretense at accuracy in time travel, whatever that is anyway. For a while (after the Goonies) I was worried that Spielberg was just putting his name on sf/adventure films for a quick buck without making sure they were of the best quality. This film, however, is top quality, superior to Goonies and Gremlins. And now on to the inconsistencies... (S P O I L E R) You heard me, I said SPOILER!!!. Why are you reading any further if you haven't seen the movie? Too curious? Don't read this I tell you, it will spoil the plot!!!!!! The mistake this film makes is it tries to use both the "parallel universe" time change scheme and the standard "change in history takes 'time' to propogate forward" scheme. Either of these allows the protagonist to change his history and then change it back. They make it clear that he is affected by the change - he starts to fade from existence. In the end, he gets his parents together, but leaves his father a changed man, resulting in tremendous changes in his present. Yet when he returns, these changes have not affected him. So you must have Marty I and Marty II. Now Marty I returns ten minutes early to see Marty II speed off back in time. What happens when he arrives? Does he meet Marty I? They didn't in the movie, but perhaps they do a second time around, talk it over, and decide to stop interfering. But with both present, WHO GETS TO GO BACK? Or is the Doc clever enough not to set the time controls to the same time? But if Marty II goes somewhere else, now seperated from his much nicer parents, he either never returns or creates yapu (yet another parallel universe) and so on ad infinitum. Of course perhaps Marty II goes back and he and Marty I agree to let their parents meet normally, and they simply switch universes with Marty II losing his 4X4. If not, Marty I has no remorse over effectively killing his real parents and the universe they lived in. The moral of the story is, you can't mix parallel universe paradox resolution with propogating change paradox resolution. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software, Waterloo, Ont. (519) 884-7473