I Love Time Travel - Part 15 - Seeing The Future Usually Sucks

Sometimes time travel stories have the smell and taste of the genre without any machines traveling through wormholes or historic fishes out of their historic waters. Characters learn knowledge of the future and are faced with similar questions as the time traveler.  Can we change the events that we see, or is this our destiny?  The trouble is, most of these stories fall flat.  Either the decisions made are dubious, or the premise runs out of steam halfway through the movie.  On television, where the waiting time is much longer, the effects are, well, shittier.

Minority Report and Paycheck were two movies based on Philip K. Dick stories.  I consider Dick to be one of the classic American sci-fi creators, although I don’t know if everything he wrote was meant to be a full length movie (Okay, Blade Runner...) Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, was a mostly satisfying futuristic action film, complete with fancy gadgets.  Paycheck was a cool concept that turned into a frightful mess, with lots of help from director John Woo.  I won’t break down the critiques of the films, there is plenty of that out there anyway. It is the simple plot point of the ability to see the future, often reserved for time travel films, is just too problematic to ignore.

In, Minority Report, There are “precogs” enlisted by the future police bureau who are humans with special abilities to see murders before they happen.  They are so efficient that all premeditated murder is eradicated and only crimes of passion are now detected.  Cops, with knowledge of the impending future, storm in and interrupt murders before they happen.  The would-be murderer is put in jail.  The thrust of the movie is Cruise’s character wrongfully accused of a future crime.  Okay, but that is not where the story is most interesting.  Cops prevent crimes, so there are no crimes.  If there are no crimes, there should be no criminals.  The movie spends a minute on this discussion and moves on.  Take seeing the future out of it, is this constitutional?  Why would a future society allow people who almost commit crime go to prison?  If we truly had the ability to alter future events in the present, why would anyone pay for crimes that occurred in an alternate reality?  The thrust of the movie is a an extended chase seen with cool effects, but missed an opportunity. The movie ignored the most interesting wrinkle.

The premise of Paycheck is kind of fun.  Ben Affleck is a computer dude in the near future.  He works on top secret projects and then has his memory erased.  These projects can last months or even years.  He wakes up from one and something has gone wrong, he doesn’t remember the past three years, and all he has is an envelope of junk he left for himself. But, as his day progresses, the junk comes in particularly useful.  The project he just left was some sort of telescope into the future.  He left himself the materials he would need to survive.  Okay, fine.  It’s a nice little idea that is more loop time travel. But, now what?  Right.  That is pretty much it.  This is a sweet little short story premise with a chance to be expanded into something special that goes nowhere. John Woo turns the last thirty minutes into a kung fu fight between goons and scientists; complete a bunch of explosions and bullshit. 

Speaking of bullshit, remember FlashForward? This was a show that lasted one season and rightfully so.  It was just not good.  FlashForward was the first post-Lost show that tried to drag the die-hard fans kicking and screaming into a new sci-fi based drama.  There were even actors from Lost that filled out the cast.  The problem was that the premise was really dumb.  Everyone in the world blacked out for 137 seconds and saw what the future would be in six months.  This caused a lot of personal trauma as well as a lot of bus crashes, apparently.  There could be a pulse in that premise, but it is hard to find.  Keeping the total amount of seers to a minimum instead of the entire world might have helped.  I don’t know.  Everyone sees the future and tries to reconcile why they saw a murder or someone different in bed next to them.  I’m guessing most people saw themselves eating lunch or taking a leak. Truly, the premise could have been saved but the writers obviously suffered the fate of what so many people thought the problem was with Lost.  They had no idea where the story was going, because the premise had no steam.  Lost had a writer’s bible, with touchstones and major events that kept things moving.  FlashForward made it up as they went along and never hooked anyone.

Then, there’s Heroes.

There were 10,000 problems with Heroes but my eye will focus on one and only one:  The comic book that revealed the future.  If it was so important to see what was going to happen, events that would somehow destroy the world, and someone has already meticulously plotted it out in a comic book, and you needed to know what to do to change the inevitable future, SKIP TO THE LAST FUCKING PAGE!

I have to stop.  Boy that show sucked.