[Weekly Update] May 1, 2022

Currently knee deep in preproduction for a short film. If everything goes right, this channel will have an eventful summer!

CHANNEL UPDATE

With the increasingly packed schedule, some of the video ideas have been swapped around again. We are planning a couple shorter videos, such as a video on why kung fu movies always have such patriotic tone.

We'll also be talking about more horror movies this summer. Expect a video on Ring, an a video on Audition soon-ish. Outside of that, the schedule remains mostly the same.

Lastly, after 3 years of doing YouTube, I have officially filled up a hard drive. I'm in the process of transferring necessary assets into a new hard drive, and my computer looks like it's on life support, with all kinds of dongles and hard drives connected to it. It feel like an end to a fun chapter. Hopefully there is more fun to be had in the future.

MEDIA TALK

What's your favourite time travel movie?

I've been playing this game called 13 Sentinels, and it has some of the most interesting time travel stories I've seen... sort of. In that game, time travel is easily accessible and is used by many characters very frequently. Added with its non-linear narrative structure, every time two characters meet, you aren't struggling to understand how much time has passed for either of the character. Sometimes you even suspect you are meeting the same character for the first time, again.

It's a lot more difficult for a film to tell this complex of a story in just 2 hours, but people have definitely tried. Time-loop movies are generally more complex like this. 

One of the best film in this genre would be Edge of Tomorrow. Adapted from a Japanese light novel, this high concept film does an excellent job at making the loop feel complex without it being convoluted. The main complex city comes from having multiple characters capable of looping. Although only one loop is ever performed in the film, the knowledge of such event allows viewers to piece together a complex backstory, which is always fun.

Another time-loop film that I did not like one bit is Looper. I know a lot of people like this film for its style. Rian Johnson is, indeed, a pretty stylish director. But the rules in Looper just makes no sense. In the final moment of the film, it is revealed that the main character's actions throughout the film is exactly started the chain of event in the first place. It's a deterministic time-loop. Like 12 Monkeys, another Bruce Willis movie with time loop.

But then the protagonist casually breaks the time-loop upon this realization by taking himself out... so it's not deterministic? But if that is the case, then what caused the time loop in the first place? It creates this nasty chicken or the egg problem, which infuriates me every time I think about the movie.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but somehow Bill & Ted has one of the best depictions of time loop I've seen. In the first film, Ted's father has been looking for his car key for the entire movie, and accuses Ted of stealing his key. Later, when Ted needs the car and laments the fact that he doesn't have the key, he comes to a realization that maybe he WILL steal the key in the future and give it back to himself at this exact moment, which it does happen. Such a surprisingly complex time loop for a teen comedy.

Too bad the time travel doesn't stay consistent, as the third film swapped to a multiverse interpretation of time travel.

A lot of films do that, actually. Terminator is another example. The first film is clearly a deterministic time loop. John Conner sends Kyle Reese back in time. Reese falls in love with Sarah Conner, who gives birth to John Conner.

But then in Terminator 2, the future is changed. Sarah Conner prevents Skynet from being invented in the first place, and laughs in the face of the grandfather paradox. From that point on, the time travel in the series has always been wishy washy. The TV series uses a multiverse set up, where people from different possible future can travel back into the same past. Terminator Salvation, on the other hand, insists that Kyle Reese needs to stay alive for John Conner to exist.

Finally, there is Back to the Future, one of the most famous time travel movies ever. Its interpretation is rather interesting, as it follows a singular timeline interpretation, which is pretty rare. In the film, Marty goes back to the past, and accidentally causes his mom to fall in love with him, thus preventing his own birth, and begins erasing him from existence.

This logic is somewhat consistent in the second film, too. As Doc Brown explains, when they go back into the past and changed history, a new timeline is created and the old one is erased. Interestingly, though, because Marty is still born in this new timeline, Marty can still exist as is, even though he'd be a completely different person with a different upbringing. In this series, there is something sacred about the human identity that it can transcend the multiverse.

Anyway, that's enough techno babble for the night. Do you usually think about time travel as much as I do? let me know if Looper annoys you as much as it annoys me.

New video is coming on the 12th!