One of the basic tenants of the Back to the Future series is that the DeLorean does not travel through space as it travels through time. This is a major plot point in Back to the Future: Part 3 as Doc Brown must pick places to travel through time which he knows will be safe to travel to in the destination time. But, an effective time machine must also be capable of moving instantaneously through space as well. (And as space and time are actually different ways of perceiving the same thing known as space-time, a device capable of instantaneously moving any direction and amount through time should be capable of doing the same in space.)
The general problem is clearly illustrated in this comic.
It's easy to forget, but that thing you're standing on is always moving. The Earth orbits the sun at about 66,600 mph. It rotates at about 1,040 mph. There is also the matter of eccentricities in the Earth's orbit and rotation. And plate tectonics are not a trivial consideration, if you want to see some dinosaurs.
If you want to safely return to the Earth after a journey though time, you must hit a target that is a thin roughly spherical shell between the surface of the planet and about 20 feet above it. (Too low- materialize within the planet and get crushed; Too high- fall and then get crushed) And as you probably wish to land over a solid surface in one of the habitable zones of the planet, your target is even smaller. The idea that you could simply return to the same point relative to the surface of the planet without moving through space, as suggested in the movie is ridiculous, no matter how short the jump. To safely travel though time on the surface of the Earth, you must move relative to the surface of the planet based on a fixed reference at the center of the Universe. And if you can do that, you don't have to worry if a bridge will be finished by 1985 because there's no reason you can't just land on the other side of the canyon. The calculations for changing the destination a few feet would be very simple in comparison.
At this point, you are probably redesigning your time machine to function of part of a spacecraft, but that only solves part of the problem. The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way at 486,000 mph and the Milky Way is moving way from the center of the Universe at 1,234,789 mph. In other words, unless you move relative to a fixed reference frame, you will be lost in space and be in danger, Will Robinson.
One final thing to consider: momentum. We are unaware of all this motion, but if we carry any momentum into the journey, as the DeLorean clearly does, any accelerations (exiting one time or entering another) would likely be fatal, or more accurately, liquifying. And it's unclear how time behaves during the trip, which would have a significant effect on the safety of time travel.
For further reading on the subject, consult the works of Professor Eric Idle.
First of all, I'd like to thank the MPAA for giving this tale of teenagers hacking each other to death a PG-13 rating. It is perfect commentary for a moralistic story about a society desensitized to violence. The Hunger Games may not be the most violent picture ever made, but no amount of pure violence can garner an R rating. But, fuck, this fucking sentence is rated R. Show a nipple? That's an R. Gay stuff? NC-17. The MPAA has an anything goes attitude with regards to violence, but treats sex and cursing like cardinal sins. This is not how the rating system should work. They should be rating violence more restrictively than sex and far more restrictively than language.
What struck me watching the film is how poorly designed the Hunger Games were for their intended purpose. The Hunger Games are supposed to be the circuses part of the old Roman bread and circuses style government, but how they were managed the games were more likely to cause a rebellion than prevent one.
The first mistake of the Panem government is the hunger part of The Hunger Games. The Romans may have been brutal conquerors, but they were surprisingly benevolent governors. The Romans knew that hungry people are angry people. They always made sure that the basic needs of their people were met. The Capitol did not have such regard for their citizens.
In The Hunger Games, 24 children are taken away from their homes and forced to fight to the death. No matter how apathetic the people get, one of the few things everyone is willing to fight to the death for is their children. You want to get people angry? You want to start an insurrection? Try randomly kidnapping and executing the most adorable kids you can find. Just look at the riots in District 11 over cute, little Rue being cutely speared in the chest.
After snatching the children from the poverty and starvation they have been living in, they make sure they experience the finest side of Capitol life. They are given more food than they can possibly eat. They live in total opulence. They are given a true first-hand view of the great inequity of Panem society. And then, knowing that they are likely to die very soon, they give them the biggest microphone imaginable. They are put on live, national TV for days on end on a program certain to be viewed by nearly everyone in the country. They are offered effectively unlimited time to rail against the oppressive government and wealth inequity. And what could the government do to shut them up, kill them? Shut off their mics? They are probably dead already. And stopping them like that would only prove them right. The government could go after their family which is probably what keeps the kids in line, but at some point one of them will take the risk because the government has so effectively demonstrated how little they had back home and how much there is to fight for.
So for any aspiring dictators reading this, I suggest using adult prisoners of below average intelligence for your gladiatorial games. The criminals should be guilty of serious, violent offenses. This will prevent backlash at their deaths. It should also provide a higher level of competition than randomly chosen children. Should they chose to use the forum politically, which is unlikely from the less intelligent members of the prison community, they will probably be ignored. I'm not saying you should brutally oppress millions of people, but if you do, please be smart about it.
Now, all of this might have eluded me had this film not had one of the worst SAMs in cinematic history. A SAM, or Stupidity Awareness Moment, is the instantaneous conversion of a movie from an entertaining film into a laughable mess of illogic. A Stupidity Awareness Moment is a moment so stupid and illogical that it causes you to question not just the logic of the scene it is in, but the logic of every moment of the film. The SAM in The Hunger Games comes as Katniss is being chased by a pack of other kids and chooses to climb a tree. Katniss choosing to trap herself in a tree is SAM worthy in and of itself, but the true SAM comes a few seconds later when the pursuing gang after missing with a few arrows just stops firing. Here they are with their enemy trapped in range of a projectile weapon with effectively unlimited ammunition and they don't finish her off? It is the worst strategic planning I have seen in any movie. And, then they further compound their mistake by all taking a nap. One of the primary reasons for the gang to exist is that they can sleep in shifts and they all go to sleep within sight of the enemy? It is perfect execution of the very rare triple-SAM. For the record, this SAM is also in the book and it is the principal reason I never read the later books.
Oh, This is so unexpected...I'm so excited. Where do I begin? Well, first of all, I'd like to thank the Academy for the re-release of The Artist. One of the problems with Denver being a smaller market, is that limited releases tend to get here later, run on fewer screens, and leave pretty quickly. All that is to say I wanted to get to it the first time around, I just didn't have a chance. If you haven't gotten a chance to see The Artist yet, do so. It is very good and like a big 3D event movie, like Avatar, this silent film will not translate well to DVD.
The Artist is not truly a silent film. In fact, it uses sound more effectively than any film I have ever seen. The music is so engaging and the actors are so expressive that dialogue feels unnecessary and unwanted. Sound effects are rare and where they are it is typically as an outward expression of the protagonists fears. The first sound effects we hear are literally a nightmare with the cacophony reaching deafening levels while George is himself silenced. (See, I can do serious analysis. I choose not to.)
Up next for discussion: Is Peppy insane? She flirts with George between 1927 and early 1929, but the relationship doesn't quite get romantic before their live start to drift apart. During their last conversations in the twenties, George makes it pretty clear he hates her. But in 1931, she buys up all his things and then his Clifton. All to make him happy. When she takes in the injured George in 1932, we are getting into Misery territory. All of this could be dismissed as not totally unrequited love, if it wasn't for one little thing: her mole. George first drew on her beauty mark early on in the film and we see her apply it a few times later on before going to work, but towards the end of the film she is wearing it all the time in scenes where she is clearly not in costume or had her hair done. The perpetual mole and her obsessive tendencies towards a man she has not talked to in three years indicates a clear break with reality.
After George fired Clifton, there were a couple minutes I thought Clifton might get preserved in dolomite, baby.
The silent nature of this film also made me keenly aware of a grave threat to our nations multiplexes: Old people pointing out the obvious. What is it about being over 50 that gives you the license to talk during a movie? Is it one of the benefits of AARP membership? It might be different if they felt the need to point out subtle gags such as George waking under a sign which reads "Lonely Star" or they were making acute and cutting observational comedy. But senior citizens only feel compelled to speak when what they have to say is incredibly obvious. Here are some peanut gallery observations I was treated to during The Artist: "That's the dog.", "Noise.", and "It was her car hitting the tree, not the gun, that made the bang." Thank you, geriatrics, I could not have gotten those on my own.
I will keep this short because I'd much rather you read this account by Ron Jones, the teacher who started The Third Wave, than anything I could ever write.
Die Welle, or The Wave for those of us that don't know German, is a dramatization of an accidental social experiment which got out of hand as a teacher created a dictatorship in under a week. That part of the film is completely true and is incredibility frightening. Unfortunately, instead of telling a true to life accounting of events, like this one, the filmmakers felt it was necessary to crank the drama up to eleven.
Die Welle could share an opening scrawl with The Men Who Stare at Goats: More of this is true than you would believe. The problem with films that are based on actual events is the farther away from the real events the story drifts the more the audience believes that none of it is real. And, what happened in during The Third Wave was remarkably terrifying in its simplicity and the events should be much better known than they are.
The most obvious change from the real events was changing the location from Palo Alto, California in 1967 to modern day Germany. And while my personal prejudices says that this relocation, makes the story more likely and thus less scary, but Germany has its own unique history which makes it particularly cautious of dictatorships so all-in-all the change in location is basically a wash. And of course, this is a German film, so the German setting would have a greater impact on its intended German audience.
The movie was filled with obviously dramatized events: the logistically impossible graffiti, the financially improbable embroidery, the physical violence, the murder-suicide, and the teacher's arrest. And since none of these things actually happened and could be so readily picked as fictionalizations, it undercuts the reality of the true story at the base of the film.
Normally, No Spoiler Tags finds tiny flaws in otherwise solid movies and harps on them relentlessly until the whole film falls apart. But, today we flip the script and defend The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King for a perceived logical flaw that isn't a flaw at all.
Talk to someone who hasn't read the books about The Lord of the Rings and they will inevitably ask you this question, "Hey, you remember those eagles that picked up Sam and Frodo at the end of Return of the King? Why did I have to sit through fourteen hours of hobbits walking when they could have just flown in and wrapped things up in ten minutes?" The short answer: This...
That is called a Fell-Beast and to a Fell-Beast giant eagle tastes a lot like chicken. (A giant chicken, I tell you!) Had they tried to fly into Mordor, they would have had Nazgul all over them before they crossed the Black Gate. Tolkien was explicit about this in the books while Peter Jackson never chose to broach the subject probably because he felt it was mind-numbingly obvious. After all, it was pretty clear that the hobbits only made it to Mount Doom because they were able to travel inconspicuously. But one should never underestimate the stupidity of the movie-going populous, how else can you explain the fact that they are making a Transformers 4 (or the fact that I will probably go see it). So, the eagle question persists.
Let me put this in terms of Where's Waldo, as that is likely the reading level of the people who cleverly think they found a huge flaw in this movie. Trying to find two four foot tall hobbits walking through Mordor while wearing Invisibility Cloaks is like trying to find Waldo in this picture.
Whereas, flying elephant sized eagles through the skies of Mordor is like finding Waldo in this picture.
If you are thinking, maybe they could have gotten in anyway may I remind you of the humongous, orange glowing eyeball constantly searching Middle-Earth for the One Ring. The Eye of Sauron is not going to miss it if the One Ring buzzes the Tower of Barad-dur on a symbol of Mexico larger than Rhode Island. (It was also explicitly noted in the novels that nothing, but the
Fell-Beasts fly in Mordor, so the eagles would stand out even more.)
Well, time is slipping, slipping, slipping into the future, so take us out Steve Miller.
Update: I have gotten into several conversations lately with people who had trouble getting into these films/novels because they found the Ring of Power underwhelming as a MacGuffin. What's a MacGuffin? I'm glad you asked, guy I made up as a literary device. Here is a couple lines from the MacGuffin Wikipedia page explaining what it is and the views of two influential directors: In TV interviews, Hitchcock defined a MacGuffin as the object around which the plot revolves, but as to what that object specifically is, he declared, "The audience don't care".
In contrast, Lucas believes that the MacGuffin should be powerful and
that "the audience should care about it almost as much as the dueling
heroes and villains on screen". I have to agree with Lucas on this one. If the audience doesn't care about the MacGuffin, it means they aren't invested in the story. I also agree with the people who found the Ring of Power unimpressive, but only because the novels did a poor job explaining the true power of the One Ring (and the movies did it even worse). So here is the clear cut explanation Tolkien and Jackson didn't give you: The primary power of the One Ring is not invisibility, it is an amplifier of magical/spiritual powers. In the movies/books, we only ever see the ring used by hobbits so it's essentially just multiplying by zero, but if the ring was on the finger of someone with real power like Sauron or Saruman, it would become a powerful weapon. So that's why it was worth the fourteen hour walk.
Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home begins rather unsurprisingly with a voyage home. Upon reaching Earth, they find an alien probe destroying the planet because of the lack of extremely large krill eating aquatic mammals. Let's just pretend that makes sense and move on. (The film did.) So to solve the problem, Kirk does the Time Warp again. (They did it in the series.)
It's just a flight to the sun.
And then a spin right.
With your ship in warp.
You can change the night.
But it's the calculus.
That really comes from Spock's brain.
They did the Time Warp again.
They did the Time Warp again.
The problem of course is that it's a way too easy time travel devise, just like the Time Turner. I will now make a brief list of when the ability to travel through time would have come in handy: every movie and every episode of every series. But this flaw goes much deeper than the Time Turner flaw in the Harry Potter series, because while the Time Turner was clearly a rare, if not one-of-a-kind devise, warp capable starships, which are all that's needed to activate Time Warp, are extremely common in the Star Trek universe. They are used by the Federation, Klingons, Borg, Romulans, Ferengi, Dominion, Cardassians, Xindi, and pretty much everybody else. The series Enterprise occasionally had episodes dealing with something called the Temporal Cold War, but logically if time travel was so simple in the Star Trek universe, the Temporal Cold War would have permeated every bit of the franchise.
It should be noted at this point that according to the Theory of Relativity, any wessel capable of traveling faster than the speed of light is also capable of traveling through time. However, it is at least implicitly clear that the warp engine operates in such a way that it ignores relativistic effects and is not capable of time travel unless it's in the plot.
Now, let's discuss the serious flaw in their plan. They needed a humpback whale to save the planet and could have gone to any time to get one. Humpbacks have been around for a long time, possibly as long as 10 million years ago; however, Spock sets course for 1986 when the human population of the world was 5 billion, they were capable of detecting their spaceship, and the whales they were hunting were facing extinction. He could have just as easily gone back before the invention of radar during World War II and eliminated their chance of electronic detection and with 4 to 6 billion less eyes on the planet the odds of being sighted would also be significantly reduced. Even better, they could have gone back to before the onset of large scale commercial whaling in the 1600s to make it easier to find a whale. Better still, had they chosen a date before Columbus set off the Age of Exploration, the chance of setting off any temporal paradoxes by being sighted while flying over the Pacific drops to almost zero.
Now, you might be thinking that if they had gone back much earlier than 1986 they couldn't have gotten the materials for the whale tank and that's true, but the tank wasn't really necessary. After all, beached whales can survive for several days and when they eventually die, it is from a combination of dehydration, starvation, and sun exposure none of which should be a significant problem in the cargo hold of a Klingon Bird of Prey in the hour or two it would take to fly to the sun and back.
As it turns out, their poor planing works in their favor as they need to find a nuclear wessel to get back to the future. (Doc Brown's Pro Tips: Always keep your plutonium in your time machine and watch out for Libyans.) They are able to find a nuclear wessel and everything else they need through the magic of product placement with the Yellow Book ad being both a solid comic moment and a great example how avoiding a generic non-realism through product placement can make a movie better.
Chekov is captured and injured during his hunt for a nuclear wessel. And thus, Chekov's stupidity leading to his capture, questioning, and near death becomes both alpha and omega to the Genesis plotline. Six, Chekov, all you had to do was count to six.
3D- Discusses the 3D trend. A long time ago in a movie far away...- Star Wars posts. A Wrinkle in Time- Problematic cinematic time travel. Accidental horror- Scary implications of something which wasn't supposed to by horrifying Accidentally profound- The film makes an interesting philosophical point which is usually exactly opposite of the one it tried to make. Adaptation comparison- What it sounds like. Bait-and-switch marketing- A movie that was very different from what was I expected in a negative way. Boldly going to the cinema- Star Trek posts. Disney- About a certain movie studio. Favorites- I loved writing these posts and I think you'll enjoy reading them. Films- This motion picture is a film as defined in the welcome post. First viewing log- A list of every movie I've seen for the first time since late September 2011. Generic non-realisms- Use of a generic term that breaks the suspension of disbelief. Complete definition in the Tron post. Glaring logic errors- Something that doesn't make sense in the reality of the movie. Good concept/Poor execution- It was a good idea, they just didn't pull it off that well. Good Movie/Bad Ending- A good movie ruined by a terrible ending. Harry Potter and the Adaptation of Rowling- Harry Potter posts. Movie rules- How I, someone with no film making experience who is not a professional critic and has never even taken a film course, think movies should be made or watched because I totally know better because I have a blog. Movie-bending- My film adaptation outline of the TV series Avatar: The Last Airbender. Movies- This motion picture is a movie as defined in the welcome post. MPAA sucks- Comments about the actions of the Motion Picture Association of America No Complaints- A good movie which isn't hurt by whatever the post is about. Pixar- Glowing praise for a studio which has done no wrong. (Statement valid until Planes comes out in 2013. [Update: So it looks like Pixar is going to let Disney take the blame for what is sure to be a terrible mess.]) Planning Paradox- A plot too detailed to plan, but too detailed to work without planning. Skyfall is a good example. Politics- Warning: Exposure to political content can be hazardous to your soul. Read This First- The welcome post which you probably should have read before I ruined that movie for you. Reality fact-check- Something doesn't make sense in the reality of reality not explained away by the reality of the movie. Recursive commentary- Commentary about commentary. Scott's Razor- Unnecessarily elaborate murder plots. Defined in Skyfall. Perfected by Goldfinger. Self-help section- Actual advice that can be actually used in actuality. Stupidity Awareness Moments- Moments of utter inanity which cause you to become hyper-aware of any other flaws in the film. Definition in The Hunger Games post. Sudden endings-. Tag Key- Click this link and you will divide by zero and destroy the universe. The Bond Villain Guidebook- Every villain in Bond history (and many non-Bond characters) have violated at least two rules listed in the Skyfall post. Make sure your evil plots are compliant with these rules. The Forky Problem- A continuation which has no storytelling reason to exist. Defined in The Offical Pixar Rankings. Traditional animation rules- About the innate superiority of hand-drawn animation over the computer generated stuff. Warning: Science content- Discussions about science which may or may not be humorous. Weird omissions- Something missing from the film that really should have been there.
