7 Stupid Movie Time Travel Mistakes
Temporal anomalies and other tosh…
BY Jul 10th 2009 8:08AMFILED UNDER: Features
User Comments (3)
The Movie: A Sound Of Thunder (2005)
The Time Travel Scenario: Ben Kingsley’s businessman has made a mint by offering trips back through time to hunt the biggest game going – dinosaurs!
For a hefty fee, Scientist Ed Burns will lead your party back 65 million years, where you’ll be able to shoot already-doomed terrible lizards with frozen nitrogen bullets that melt away leaving nothing to disrupt the timeline.
But something goes terribly awry on one such trip: they’re charged by an Allosaurus and Burns’ gun fails. In their panic, one of the party steps off the special path created by the wormhole and kills a butterfly.
Soon, time is shifting in waves, massive creatures are invading the present day and mankind itself could be changed! Oh no!
The Problem: Aside from the glaring error that the Allosaurus lived 145 million years ago (way to offer value for money, Sir Ben), the big problem is that evolution and time really don’t work that way.
There wouldn’t be great waves of time sweeping across changing everything one element at a time – just look at when they restore matters: everything blinks back into place perfectly.
Also, since each dinosaur that’s hunted is close to death anyway (the one they’re after at the start is about to perish thanks to an exploding volcano) wouldn’t the butterfly get caught too? Ruuuuubbish!
Albert Einstein Says: “God does not play dice.”
In Other Words: Stay away from sci-fi films featuring A) Ben Kingsley and B) Ed Burns.
Next: Back To The Future
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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