"Step on a mouse and you crush the Pyramids. Step on a mouse and you leave your print, like a Grand Canyon, across Eternity."
So goes the warning of the Time Safari leaders in Ray Bradbury's classic short story A Sound of Thunder, the latest in a long line of time travel adventures to hit the big screens later this year. While time travel stories were among the first to be told on film and have never truly left our screens, the Bradbury adaptation also reflects a more recent trend in Hollywood . Although we still have space ships and ray guns in films such as The Chronicles of Riddick (2004) and George Lucas's ongoing fairy-tale-in-space there has been a noticeable move towards the more serious side of science fiction. Filmmakers have sporadically turned to writers such as Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and Phillip K Dick in the past with films such as Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Bladerunner (1982) but it seems that every other science-fiction film of the last five years has its origins in 1950s literature. While Phillip K Dick has been the most popular of the three with adaptations of Minority Report (2002), Impostor (2002) and Paycheck (2003), Asimov's work provided a very loose basis for the effects heavy Will Smith vehicle I, Robot (2004). And though A Sound of Thunder is the first of Bradbury's works to be adapted for the CGI generation it will be followed by a new adaptation of Fahrenheit 451.
What separates these stories from the more conventional sci-fi blockbuster is an emphasis on the consequences of scientific endeavour and the social and philosophical questions that arise from those consequences. The time travel sub-genre is perhaps the most intellectually ambitious of them all and notoriously the most confusing for an audience. However, when broken down the time travel narrative is actually one of the most universal and straightforward examples of Hollywood story telling.
The Shape of Things to Come
The first science-fiction stories were naturally born from a growing awareness of science in the late nineteenth century. Genre pioneers like Jules Verne and H G Wells used the possibilities these new discoveries opened as springboards for more imaginative and forward-thinking adventures. Written in 1895, Wells' The Time Machine is the inevitable starting point for any discussion of the genre, although it did come a few years after Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, written in 1889. The Time Machine tells the story of a man referred to only as The Time Traveller who invents a device which enables him to travel through time, eventually finding himself stranded in a nightmarish future in which society is divided into two tribes - the beautiful, peace-loving Eloi and the vicious, cannibalistic Morlocks.
While The Time Machine itself has been filmed twice, first by George Pal in 1960 and then by the author's great grandson, Simon Wells in 2002, its basic storyline has been adapted and expanded by a variety of filmmakers over the years. Some have taken the same route from the present to the future, such as Planet of the Apes (1968), and Back to the Future Part II (1989), while others have gone the other way, from the present to the past, in films such as Somewhere in Time (1980) and Army of Darkness (1993). More common are stories that begin in the past or future and have a character travelling to our present, such as Time after Time (1979), The Terminator (1984), and Twelve Monkeys (1995). Yet another route is to have the time traveller move within his own lifetime, as seen in films such as Donnie Darko (2001) and The Butterfly Effect (2004). Such a wide range of films and stories could almost be seen as separate sub-genres themselves, but they all share three common elements - a destination (past, present or future), a device (whether it is a machine like the DeLorean in the Back to the Future films or the pages of a journal in The Butterfly Effect) and, most essentially the time traveller. While the destination and device vary between films it is the character of the time traveller that provides the clearest link. Whether the time traveller is Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg assassin or Michael J Fox's slacker high school student, they all share at least one of three characteristics, as established by Wells.
The time traveller is initially an outsider - in Wells' case a character so involved in his experiments that he has cut himself off from the outside world. This outsider status leads him to becoming and explorer, not only motivated by curiosity but also looking for answers to the questions posed by his present existence. Wells' time traveller finds this in the future. While at first glance Wells appears to use this future world as an adventure space for his time travelling adventurer, there was, like most science-fiction narratives, a socially and politically relevant subtext behind the madness and monsters. The division between the Eloi and the Morlocks acted as both an extreme representation of the class system in England at the time whilst also managing to relate that system to Darwin 's survival of the fittest theory. Perhaps more interesting is the positioning of the time traveller within this system. At first he is an impartial observer, amazed by the peaceful harmony in which the Eloi live. However, when he discovers that the Eloi are quite literally preyed upon by the physically superior Morlocks he sees the price that society has paid for its apparent utopia. It is at this moment that he ceases to be an observer and becomes a participant - the third characteristic of the time traveller.
These three essential characteristics appear in some form or another in all time travel narratives. The Terminator, while intending to change the future, is also an outsider in his very nature and in the second film becomes an explorer as he learns what it means to be human. Even Bill and Ted begin as outsiders in their own time, become explorers and, when things start to go wrong, alter the present with the mere intention of going back in time to overcome the smallest of obstacles. Overall, no matter his destination, the nature of his time machine or his intentions, the time traveller is a single universal character.
On a larger scale the time traveller can also be seen as the protagonist at the heart of all stories. From folk-tales to high-concept Hollywood , the protagonist of any story begins as an outsider, a status that pushes him into exploration and ultimately an attempt to change something in his life. This is the basis for every story ever told, but the time traveller pushes it to its literal limit. Similarly, the consequences of the time traveller's actions are also sent to extremes, allowing writers and filmmakers to ask philosophical and ideological questions far beyond those of conventional fiction.
Future Shock
In A Sound Of Thunder Bradbury takes the intervention of Wells' time traveller as his starting point whilst adding a dash of chaos theory - the idea that the smallest action can have infinite unpredictable consequences. In the story a group of rich hunters pay to travel to prehistoric times and hunt dinosaurs. Despite the warnings of the safari leaders the trip goes badly wrong with a number of the meticulously calculated environmental factors being disrupted. They return to a present forever altered by the consequences of their actions. Here it is not the time traveller himself that is central to the narrative; it is the very act of time travel and the questions it poses - ultimately the story asks the same questions posed by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - is the mere ability to play God justification for doing so?
Wells' time traveller and Bradbury's philosophy were successfully intertwined in the 2004 film The Butterfly Effect. Ashton Kutcher plays Evan Treborn, a man who discovers the ability to return to various pivotal events in his childhood. By altering their outcome he finds he can change his present life and the lives of his friends and family. However, each new timeline he creates has its own new set of consequences, every one more devastating than the last. What separates The Butterfly Effect from other time travel narratives is its focus on philosophy as opposed to science. Treborn is a psychology student rather than a scientist and is able to travel back in time by merely triggering memories in his mind. And the question he intends to answer by doing so is always 'What if.?' - a question perhaps more appealing to audiences than our curiosity about the past or future.
The Butterfly Effect echoes Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, published in 1969 and filmed in 1972, in which a man becomes 'unstuck in time' and finds himself randomly travelling between a variety of brief moments in his lifetime. The opposite of this is the character that becomes 'stuck' in time, an idea pioneered in Jonathan Heaps' short film 12:01 (1990), which would later provide the inspiration for the 1993 film Groundhog Day. Like Treborn, these time travellers have the unique opportunity to experience the consequences of their actions over and over again and ultimately serve to emphasise the importance of minor actions and the unpredictability of our daily lives.
Despite appearing to broaden the scope of the time travel narrative by questioning its very nature, these stories actually bring their characters back to the questioning outsider at the heart of every story - essentially dragging Wells' time traveller kicking and screaming back from the future. This progression is perhaps reflected by the changing state of scientific endeavour over the decades. While Wells was writing at a time when science was pushing the boundaries of our imaginations, we live in a time where these limits have been accepted; a world where the science-fiction of the past has become the scientific truth of the present. We have seen men travel into space land on the moon, developed computer technology that seems to advance in giant leaps at an astounding rate and have even cloned the odd sheep or two. It is clear that we have practically ignored the warnings of Wells and his peers over the years; even the financially superior Morlocks are perhaps more apparent than ever and can often be seen casually munching on a few dozen Eloi as we move into a world increasingly dominated by single corporations. But while Wells' future society held an unpleasant but stable harmony, ours is still forever questioning its own fragile existence, and perhaps now more than ever we need science-fiction to explore the consequences of our actions. Whether the latest batch of science-fiction blockbusters dare hold up the mirror to our progress remains to be seen.
Chris Regan
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