 Starring: Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Thomas F. Wilson, Mary Steenburgen
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Year Of Release: 1990
Plot: After Doc Brown disappears in the Delorean at the end of BTTF Part II, Marty receives a letter from the scientist, telling him that he ended up in 1885 and has left the time machine in a mine so Marty can get back to 1985. However while fixing the Delorean, Marty discovers Doc was shot shortly after sending the letter, so despite the scientist have written that he shouldn’t, Marty goes back to the Wild West to save his friend, which leads to Doc finding love and yet more problems with getting back to 1985. |
It’s never a good idea to think too hard about time travel movies or they collapse into a morass of paradoxes and inconsistencies, where people’s effect on the past mean certain things can’t have happened in the present or which create a time loop where cause and effect disappear out of the window.
The Back To The Future trilogy is riddled with them, although at least its ‘rippes in time’ theory does cover up most of them. However the most basic in the films is that as it’s possible to change the past if you travel back from the present, rather than Marty having to worry that he’ll disappear from existence if he doesn’t get his parents to kiss at the Enchantment Under The Sea dance, chaos theory suggests his mere presence in Hill Valley 1955 would make it statistically almost impossible that the same sperm would have met the same egg to make him and his siblings. As that’s true he’d have never been born to go back in time and change events, and so he should have disappeared the moment the Delorean first got to 1955. Like I said, it’s best not to think about it too much.
No time travel movie completely escapes the paradox problem. 12 Monkeys probably comes closest to getting past it, with its theory that you can’t change the past, as if you travel backwards, you were already there and any effect you had would already be incorporated into the present. Got that? However there are still problems, mainly involving time loops.
For example, Bruce Willis’ James Cole is sent back in time to search for info about something called the 12 Monkeys, which is believed to be connected to the death of most of the human population. While in a mental asylum he asks Brad Pitt’s Jeffrey Goines about it, which gives the slightly unstable Goines the idea to create a group called the 12 Monkeys, which is what Willis came from the future to search for. You’re stuck in n chicken and egg loop, where the cause is also the effect. Nobody ever actually comes up with the idea for the 12 Monkeys group, as Goines can’t create it without Cole suggesting it and Cole can’t suggest it if Goines hasn’t created it.
One of the worst time travel paradoxes is the premise of The Terminator and its sequels. Skynet sends the terminators back in time to kill John Connor and/or his mother, as the films suggests you can alter both the past and the future. However if they succeed, John Connor will never become the leader of the resistance, and so they’d never know they had to send a robot back in time to kill him, which would mean he’d survive, but if he survives they’ll send a robot etc. etc. etc. You’d have thought a brainy computer like Skynet would have realised the never-ending paradox.
Except of course it’s far more than that, because John Connor can’t and shouldn’t exist in the first place. He’s alive because Kyle Reece comes back in time to fight Arnie and ends up impregnating Sarah Connor, which means that John is only conceived because robots are sent back in time to kill his mother, but robots won’t be sent back in time unless he’s conceived – so where does he actually come from? Basically, before the start of the first Terminator film, if that timeline had continued forward, John would never have been born and therefore wouldn’t have grown up to be the leader of the resistance. It therefore makes no logical sense for Skynet to send a cyborg back to stop someone being born who didn’t exist until they sent a cyborg back to stop him being born.
I could go on all day, as the entire Terminator series is absolutely crammed with paradoxes, time loops and things that make your head hurt if you think about them. It’s because of this that the first three films swerve between how much the future is preordained and how much it can be altered, because it needs both to be true at the same time, even though that makes no sense.
However the one time travel paradox that’s always annoyed me most is one in Back To The Future Part III.
Some people say the whole thing about having to push the Delorean with the train is unnecessary, because there’s already another Delorean in 1885 that Doc Brown has hidden in a cave and which has petrol in it. However I don’t see that as a problem, because if they use that car, it wouldn’t be in the cave in 1955 for Marty to use to travel back to 1885 in the first place. It would mean if they took the car out of the cave, Marty would disappear as the effects rippled forwards through time. As a result it makes more sense to use the broken car.
No, the paradox that annoys me is small but stupid, and involves Doc Brown’s love, Clara Clayton, played by Mary Steenburgen. The film insists that the changes in the timeline only ripple forwards once the time travellers have used the machine and effected the past, however there’s a problem with that in the case of Clara.
In 1955, Doc and Marty find the scientist’s gravestone, which it says was erected by his beloved Clara. The problem with this is that in the timeline as it exists at that point, Clara was killed when she went over a canyon in a horse and buggy (they know this because the canyon was later named after her) and therefore never met Doc. The only reason she survives is because Doc and Marty save her, but as Marty hasn’t gone back in time yet to do this, Clara should have died before she got to Hill Valley and therefore couldn’t have erected the gravestone Marty finds.
The only possible solution is that even if Marty wasn’t there, Doc would have saved Clara on his own, but this is incredibly improbable, because there would be no reason for Doc to be out in the middle of nowhere if Marty hadn’t gone back in time and given him a reason to visit the canyon in order to find a place they can get the Delorean up to 88mph. It means that between when Doc accidentally goes back into 1885 and when he and Marty save her from going over the canyon, Clara is essentially both alive and dead at the same time, and not in a Schrodinger’s cat way.
Like I said, it’s only a minor point, but it does annoy me, because otherwise the Back To The Future films may be present numerous paradoxes, but they normally have their own logic to hide these, or the problems only emerge if you start to think past what you actually see in the movie. However in the case of the alive and dead Clara, it creates a paradox that is totally unnecessary and that wouldn’t exist if it didn’t specifically bring it up.
Time travel is always a problem for films, because while it’s undoubtedly very cool, it almost inevitably creates endless logic problems, as it’s very difficult not to set up time loops, paradoxes and other logical inconsistencies. Normally you just have to look past these and not think too much about it, but for some reason the Clara paradox has always particularly annoyed me. However hopefully now that I’ve got it off my chest, I can learn to move past it.
PS: Sorry if any of the explanations of the time paradoxes are confusing, but by their very nature, paradoxes are difficult to explain and they were doing my head in thinking about them.
TIM ISAAC
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