The Rules Of Time Travel
CBS News Sunday Morning contributor David Edelstein is a sucker for a sappy time-travel story.
Time travel movies: they're the refuge of fools who daydream of rewriting the past rather than solve their problems in the present.
The fantasy is pathetic and like most people I can't get enough of it.
I even loved the incredibly dumb time-travel romance "The Lake House" in which Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock send letters back and forth between 2004 and 2006. It couldn't be less believable if they used the mailbox from the kiddie show "Blue's Clues."
Mark Twain and H.G. Wells used time travel to do barbed commentaries on the present, but Hollywood always goes the dopey tearjerker route. Take "Somewhere in Time." Christopher Reeve is a playwright who hypnotizes himself back to 1912, where he falls for the exquisite Jane Seymour. Then he comes out of his trance and, well, I was blubbering so much I had to change my shirt.
But it brings up the question: What are the rules? How do you hypnotize yourself back in time? Can you shake your own hand? In "Timecop," Jean-Claude Van Damme goes back to save his wife and finds out if you touch yourself in another time you spontaneously combust-which comes in handy in disposing of bad guy Ron Silver.
In "Frequency," it's sunspots that allow son Jim Caviezel to talk to dad Dennis Quaid 30 years ago through a radio and keep him from dying in a fire. Only there's a ripple effect and now his mom is dead at the hand of a serial killer.
The math gets so complicated.
It's even more mind-bending in "The Butterfly Effect," where Ashton Kutcher discovers that changing one teeny thing in the past -- the flutter of a butterfly's wings -- causes billions of permutations. Ashton Kutcher becomes the Einstein of stupid time-travel pictures.
It's simpler for Keanu and Sandra in "The Lake House," especially since they only write to each other about their feelings. If I could send mail to someone in 2004 I'd suggest, oh, paying closer attention to the voting booths in Ohio, but that's me. Anyway, as they proved in "Speed" these two have so much chemistry you happily wait for them to overcome their temporal hurdles.
After my screening, an old guy peppered some poor junior publicist with questions about the movie's logic. And I thought, "Dude. She doesn't know. The writers don't know."
If you want to fry your brain, there are more fun ways than trying to diagram a senseless time-travel picture. As the Buddhists say about the river that is time, "Just go with the flow."