Time Travel Shenanigans

This Sunday was kind of an unusual night now that I think about it. As a complete coincidence I ended up watching three movies that night dealing with time travel in in form or another: Terminator (1984), Primer (2004) and Next (2007). And oddly enough, I watched them in chronological order. Weird.

I actually didn't watch Terminator alone as I usually do with rad movies from the 80s. Thanks to the sick looking trailers for the upcoming Terminator Salvation, Em wanted to check out the Terminator flicks. I had recently added the movie to our Netflix Instant Queue, so we finally checked it out.

The first Terminator movie I ever saw was T2 on TV with my parents. I remember them letting me stay up late and watching the end of the movie in their bedroom. Later, when I got my Family Video membership, I checked out the original and wasn't too impressed. Stupid kid. Even though some of the Arnold masks don't look that great, first off he's a robot and second off it was '84. And damn those exoskeletons and robots look real, even if the stop motion gets a little shaky. Plus, I like to think that Linda Hamilton's crazy hair is a special effect all its own.

[Potential LOST SPOILER coming up if you haven't been watching this season.] It's actually kind of funny that the time travel mechanics are very similar between Terminator and Lost. You've got people heading back in time and affecting the future. Reese heads back and fathers John Connor. He always did that, he just didn't know his role yet. It's the "Whatever happened, happened" idea (which I have to toot my own horn and say I voiced a few weeks before the saying popped up on the show).

From there I went on to finish Primer, a low budget (supposedly made for $7,000) time travel movie that I heard about on both Horror Movie A Day and The Totally Rad Show. I won't pretend like I understood the movie (I had to look it up on Wikipedia to get a better idea of the plot and mechanics), but it made me feel like I did when I was 16 working at Barry's and Drew (whose last name I don't know and haven't seen in almost 10 years now) told me about Reservoir Dogs and The Usual Suspects and then later when I saw Lost Highway and Clerks and some other flicks. Aside from feeling incredibly original and new, Primer showed me you can make an amazing movie that doesn't talk down to its audience. Now, the above-mentioned movies don't seem to have much in common on the surface, but the all showed me different ways of looking at movies, from a story standpoint and general presentation to how much you need to let your audience know.

Primer's beautifully confusing (there's so much jargon and science in there, it'd make my freshman year roommates jump for joy, what's up Bryan and Hatem, you guys especially should check this one out). One piece of advice I'd give anyone trying to watch Primer (and understand it), is, don't drink too many beers and try not to fall asleep halfway through. I fell asleep and then tried watching it a week or so later and had an even hard time remembering the whole story. I can't wait to check it out again.

I will not, however, be watching Nic Cage's Next again. As I've mentioned again and again I have a strange relationship with Nic Cage movies. Sure The Rock and Con Air are awesome, but somewhere along the lines, Cage seemingly went crazy and has been playing a kind of caricature of himself since then. Or has he? Maybe I'm the one that expects him to be crazy (there's good crazy like in the National Treasure movies which I love and bad crazy like the amazing Whicker Man YouTube video).

Well, the last two Cage movies I've watched from the past few years (Next and Bangkok Dangerous) have just been boring. Even Cage's craziness can't save a fairly boring movie with some really bad CGI effects that breaks my cardinal sin of storytelling: don't make everything I've just seen pointless, even if it is a tale of what could happen.

You might be wondering how this fits in with the time travel theme and it kind of doesn't. But it kid of does, because, as Cage explains early in the movie, he can see a few minutes into his own future and just by seeing the future you're changing it. Sure, it's a tenuous connection at best, but it's there.

Now I've just got to get Em to watch T2 which I have on DVD. But the last time I tried watching it, I wanted to rip Edward Furlong's squeaky vocal chords out of his throat and feed them to the T-1000. Ah well, I'm sure I'm a lot more mature now (eh, not really, this was only a few months ago). Also, I might mine these flicks for a Live Blog post or two as I took copious notes.