7 Stupid Movie Time Travel Mistakes
Temporal anomalies and other tosh…
BY Jul 10th 2009 8:08AMFILED UNDER: Features
User Comments (3)
Sci-fi movies and fantasies like Land Of The Lost love to indulge in trips across time – back, forwards, sideways, whatever.
But usually the journeys throw up no end of troubling questions and scientific inaccuracies (and no, we’re not including “time travel’s not possible" – this is fiction, folks).
So – with the help of quotes from famed relativity expert Albert Einstein, who watched the movies through totalfilm.com's special movie wormhole – we decided to look at some of the sillier examples of time-slip slip-ups from movies in the past/present/future. Whatever...
The Movie: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
The Time Travel Scenario: Kirk, Spock and the rest of the gang (back when they were still being played by the likes of The Shat and Leonard Nimoy) must SAVE THE WHOLE WORLD when an alien probe, distressed at not finding any whales to sing with – don’t ask – starts to destroy Earth.
So what do they do? In their rickety Klingon Bird Of Prey, they employ an old Trek trick and slingshot around the sun, which, we’re told, handily sends you back in time.
In modern day (well, 1986) San Francisco, they locate a likely pair of whales, pick up a comely marine biologist with big '80s hair and slingshot home after scaring the living crapmeat out of some nasty whalers trying to hunt the beasts in the wild.
The Problem: Though everyone in Starfleet Academy is warned about not disrupting the flow of time, the crew tinkers like toddlers with Lego.
No only do they leave both a communicator and phaser in the hands of the military (we’d like to credit them with the iPod and blame them for Johnny 5), but they make an elderly woman grow a new kidney with a pill and snatch a young woman out of time.
Granted, they didn’t mean to take Dr Gillian Taylor, the Whale expert (she jumps Kirk as he’s beaming up) but they could’ve easily ditched her before flying back to the 23rd century.
Albert Einstein Says: “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.”
In Other Words: Be more bloody careful!
Next: A Sound Of Thunder
Print Comments (3)
1: Desperation says
" (we’d like to credit them with the iPod and blame them for Johnny 5), "
I'm sorry, you appear to have got these the wrong way round.
Posted: Jul 10th 2009 // 10:21AMAlert a moderator
2: sowasred2012 says
I always refer back to the parallel outcome idea in time travel movies these days - it's the only way to stay sane. Kudos to Terminator Salvation for running with the idea that they could be in an alternate timeline now, but I have a big problem with some of it's internal logic - (SPOILERS, kinda) as the movie opens Connor is freaking out cos he's discovered Skynet has started R&D on the T-800 model, yet Marcus, a guy who signed his body over to Cyberdyne upon his execution FIFTEEN YEARS ago, displays way more advanced tech then we've seen in previous terminators. Why put R&D into a model that can be beat by a unit you created 15 years ago?
I was almost expecting this to be addressed, or at least hinted at, in the movie with some sort of time travel explanation - but I saw nada. Unless you count the stunt casting of Helena Bonham Carter, and the extra notice she makes you pay to that opening scene might suggest that story will be told in a sequel, but I'm not confident that's the case.
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