I just saw Looper. Is time travel hard to write?

because science likes to fuck fiction in the ass. and i'm all for it.

Back to the Future has giant plot holes, but it makes the movies better if you just don't think about it too hard. Looper does the same. Both those movies are "about time travel", but both movies only use it as a means to have other things happen. It's not really a focus of the movie, if you know what I mean.

Primer is the only time travel movie that doesn't have significant plot holes because everything they will do, they have actually already done or are already doing. That's the only real way time travel can make sense. Otherwise, it just becomes a butterfly effect of paradoxes and unfathomable, unwritable possibilities.

Multiple timelines are lame and uninteresting, because they rip away any consequence. I'd rather deal with the plot holes of linear time travel

@golguin said:

When you have so many different rule sets to choose from why is it so hard?

Sometimes one ruleset won't facilitate the story you're trying to tell and you've got to make your own. That's one of the nice things about time travel: at some point you're free to reject aspects of one ruleset and incorporate features of another. As long as the execution doesn't step all over itself within the confines of those rules, everything's kosher.

The problem of course is that some people go into it with a bunch of these rulesets already swimming around in their head, and so everything gets muddled together into a bubbling mess of paradoxes and apparent plot holes.

@GinjaAssassin said:

People get rally butt hurt over SCIENCE FICTION!

I loved Looper, but having to listen to people break it apart because it has plot holes based around something that DOESN'T EXIST kind of ruins it.

Not trying to start an argument but I just wish people weren't so cynical sometimes.

Except that time travel does exist and it exists today. Astronauts are technically traveling through time in the International Space Station. Time is relative after all.

@XChairmanDrekX: ie, the Dragon Ball Z theory. Seriously, DBZ perfected Time Travel 15 years ago

It's tough, certainly.

Speaking of time travel, I highly recommend To Say Nothing Of The Dog by Connie Willis.

It depends on the type of time travel.

Most "plot holes" involving time travel are people enforcing their own rules and bitching when the movie doesn't conform to them.

Case in point, Chrono Trigger. Most people point out the grandfather paradox, since it's never brought up in the game past the tutorial in 600 AD. Other than the fact that the writer of that part of the game literally quit after finishing that section, the real reason the entire game doesn't explode is because it simply uses a different set of time travel rules, involving a frankly terrifying place where aborted timelines (and in some cases people) get shuffled off to that, admittedly, only gets explained in Chrono Cross..

@golguin: That was a great read. Thanks for the upload. I like the idea that a time machine can only go back to when it was originally built.

Back to the Future was pretty tight in the writing department.

See, told you it was easy.

No matter how hard you try it's quite hard to give a realistic account of time travel and make it exciting. Usually the "making it exciting" ends up in a bajillion plot holes(see Source: Doctor Who). If they tried to make a totally realistic time travel movie with zero plot holes it would be very boring. I suggest they just focus on making things entertaining and not too rediculous, chances are people will punch holes into it but that's just how time travel is. Well, not the real time travel. That's quite easy.

The only time travel done right is that episode of Community from the third season entitled Remedial Chaos Theory. http://www.hulu.com/watch/285095

I think it is because alot of people have their theories on how time travel should work. Let me just point this out, TIME TRAVEL AIN'T REAL!

Steven Hawkins should write a time travel movie

@GinjaAssassin said:

People get rally butt hurt over SCIENCE FICTION!

I loved Looper, but having to listen to people break it apart because it has plot holes based around something that DOESN'T EXIST kind of ruins it.

Not trying to start an argument but I just wish people weren't so cynical sometimes.

Except that time travel does exist and it exists today. Astronauts are technically traveling through time in the International Space Station. Time is relative after all.

@golguin said:

Except that time travel does exist and it exists today. Astronauts are technically traveling through time in the International Space Station. Time is relative after all.

That's not really what this conversation is about though. Hawking says traveling backwards through time is probably impossible.

...I trust that guy's opinion.

@TheSouthernDandy said:

@golguin

@GinjaAssassin said:

People get rally butt hurt over SCIENCE FICTION!

I loved Looper, but having to listen to people break it apart because it has plot holes based around something that DOESN'T EXIST kind of ruins it.

Not trying to start an argument but I just wish people weren't so cynical sometimes.

Except that time travel does exist and it exists today. Astronauts are technically traveling through time in the International Space Station. Time is relative after all.

You're talking completely different orders of magnitude. You can't use that as a reason why writing a time travel story should be easy. That's crazy talk.

I'm using that as a reason to show that time travel does exist. We can at the very least be able to travel forward in time and if we had that technology to accelerate at a sufficient enough speed to make a difference then it would be legit time travel.

I would also say that since we probably live in a multiverse we wouldn't encounter any time travelers if it was possible to travel back to an existing past.

I believe the main issue with time travel in fiction is that the author doesn't decide on an established idea of time travel and write from there, but rather writes a story and then tries to throw in time travel elements. Time travel stories that involve a multiverse are able to hold their tension despite people claiming in this thread that their actions would have no consequences.

The only time travel done right is that episode of Community from the third season entitled Remedial Chaos Theory. http://www.hulu.com/watch/285095

@Breadfan said:

@RuthLoose said:

The only time travel done right is that episode of Community from the third season entitled Remedial Chaos Theory. http://www.hulu.com/watch/285095

Darkest timeline!

@golguin said:

@TheSouthernDandy said:

@golguin

@GinjaAssassin said:

People get rally butt hurt over SCIENCE FICTION!

I loved Looper, but having to listen to people break it apart because it has plot holes based around something that DOESN'T EXIST kind of ruins it.

Not trying to start an argument but I just wish people weren't so cynical sometimes.

Except that time travel does exist and it exists today. Astronauts are technically traveling through time in the International Space Station. Time is relative after all.

You're talking completely different orders of magnitude. You can't use that as a reason why writing a time travel story should be easy. That's crazy talk.

I'm using that as a reason to show that time travel does exist. We can at the very least be able to travel forward in time and if we had that technology to accelerate at a sufficient enough speed to make a difference then it would be legit time travel.

I would also say that since we probably live in a multiverse we wouldn't encounter any time travelers if it was possible to travel back to an existing past.

I believe the main issue with time travel in fiction is that the author doesn't decide on an established idea of time travel and write from there, but rather writes a story and then tries to throw in time travel elements. Time travel stories that involve a multiverse are able to hold their tension despite people claiming in this thread that their actions would have no consequences.

Yeah I see what you're saying but I don't think Rian Johnson set out to write a time travel movie. The time travel was ancillary to the plot of the movie, it was basically used to set up the conflict between both Joe's and it went from there. He acknowledges the fact that you're not supposed to think real hard about it twice when Jeff Daniels and Bruce Willis say something to the effect that thinking about it is a waste of time. Somebody could write a time travel movie that makes sense I'm sure but that's not what Looper was about.

My big problem with Looper was the accolades it got for being a Sci-fi movie when it pretty much did say "Ignore this" when it comes to the science portion of it. The movie turned its rules on and off as it went on, and its characters didn't seem to know what they wanted at some points.

Primer, even if it had dull acting was basically a case for "if time travel was real, it'd be really annoying and fucked up".

But Christopher Nolan's next movie, Interstellar, is about space time-travel alternate dimensions, based on Kip Thorne's work. So we'll see.

Yes. It's very difficult to explain to an audience something that is, and will always be, impossible.

Now, I've looked over some of the other posts on this thread, and I am not getting pulled into a heated discussion about time travel, so I'm just going to say this: if regressive time travel will be possible in the future, why won't any one come to visit the last several thousand years? The scientific abolition of the linear timeline is just another example of the mathematicians and physicists locking the logicians in the cold.

It is simply because time travel is illogical. It's fun, but doesn't make sense.

@wewantsthering said:

It is simply because time travel is illogical. It's fun, but doesn't make sense.

We can at the very least travel forward in time. We can look back at the past when we look at the stars because of the nature of light. The current state of the universe is nothing like what we can actually observe. Black holes are able to distort time when you approach the Event Horizon.

@golguin said:

@wewantsthering said:

It is simply because time travel is illogical. It's fun, but doesn't make sense.

We can at the very least travel forward in time. We can look back at the past when we look at the stars because of the nature of light. The current state of the universe is nothing like what we can actually observe. Black holes are able to distort time when you approach the Event Horizon.

I understand those concepts, but that are too many things that just wouldn't work. You cannot transport someone through time and have a "new" and "old" version of a person. I loved Looper, but it doesn't make a lick of sense. The dialogue even makes jokes about this at least three times to ease the logical tension created by the logical inconsistencies.