Hollywood Time Machine -- The Outer Limits

Hollywood Time Machine – The Outer Limits

Time travel has been a staple of Science Fiction from the very beginning, and indeed from even before there was Science Fiction (Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court).  As with many other themes in Science Fiction, it was H.G. Wells who first set the pattern that has been followed by writers and filmmakers alike ever since.  (War Of The Worlds for alien invasions, The Time Machine for time travel, and The Island Of Dr. Moreau for science gone horribly wrong.)

Rod Taylor as H.G. Wells in the 1960 film The Time Machine

    

Hollywood has embraced time travel with gusto and even a cursory examination of IMDB reveals several hundred feature films and TV series, or episodes, that deal in some way with time travel or time manipulation.  Sometimes time travel takes center stage and is the focus of the story, while in other films it is simply a plot device to get “the fish out of water” and set the plot into motion. 

Often, the struggle in a time travel story is to avoid changing the time line or, having done so inadvertently, trying to put time back onto the original trajectory.  H.G. Wells avoided this issue by sending his protagonist far into the future, however most films delight in going back in time and upsetting the time line.  In some films the hero is trying to stop the villain who is attempting to change the past for his own nefarious ends, though more often than not the hero has taken a seemingly innocuous action that has significant, even disastrous, ramifications.  The most famous of this latter story arc is the Back To The Future film trilogy. 

Marty McFly, in an act of understandable human nature, saves his future father from being hit by an automobile.  However, in saving his father he altered the time line.  That alteration becomes worse in the sequel when the villain, Biff Tannen, discovers the time machine and decides to improve his unhappy lot in life by altering his past.  Once again Marty and Doc Brown work to correct the time line, but it is not until they go even further back in time that they can finally set things to right, almost…

Although Doc Brown and Marty try their best to restore the time line to its original course, their corrections carry with them more distortions.  Back To The Future I-III

 

There is a theory that views time as a river, and while you might, through your time travel adventures or misadventures, cause ripples in the flow of time, like tossing pebbles or even large rocks into the river, the time current is so strong that it will correct itself and continue to flow on the path it has always followed.  You cannot, in fact, change the time line. 

Perhaps the most humorous take on changing the time line, both by accident and on purpose, was the Simpsons episode, Time And Punishment.  After trying desperately, and failing miserably, to avoid changing the time line, Homer begins changing it with abandon until he returns to a future, much like Marty McFly, that while not exactly the one he left, is close enough for him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1IKioDLEh8

Another theme, sometimes coupled with time travel, is the teleportation of matter.  This concept is perhaps best know from the Star Trek TV series where the Transporter was used because the producers needed to get their characters to/from a planet but did not have the special effects budget necessary for landing the ship every episode.  Occasionally, having a limited budget can result in very imaginative solutions.

Although the new 3D scanners/printers are demonstrating a very simple and rudimentary form of matter transmission, they are a far cry from the transporters used on Star Trek.  These printers are actually more akin to the Tesla transporter, used to great effect, in the film The Prestige, where the original was not transported at all, but an exact duplicate was created at another location. 

David Bowie, as Nikola Tesla, invents a device which can teleport matter to any location, but at a cost, in The Prestige.

Not surprisingly, both time travel and matter teleportation are themes that were explored on the seminal TV series, The Outer Limits.

The Outer Limits – 1963 – 1965   Two Seasons, 49 Episodes

Seven episodes deal either with Time Travel or Time Manipulation.

Season 1

Ep5     The Sixth Finger

Ep6     The Man Who Was Never Born

Ep16   Controlled Experiment

Ep32   The Form Of Things Unknown

Season 2

Ep1     Soldier

Ep5     Demon With A Glass Hand

Ep16   The Premonition

One episode from Season 1 (Ep15 The Mice) deals with the teleportation of matter, the original goal of the students in Geeks In Time, while another (Season 2 Ep3 Behold Eck!) features a tear in the space-time continuum.

 It is indicative of Hollywood’s love affair with time travel that of the 49 episodes of this very influential series, more than 10% of them involve time travel in one form or another.  Two of the episodes star David McCallum as the time traveler while another two were written by Harlan Ellison. These two episodes in particular, Soldier and Demon With A Glass Hand directly inspired the film Terminator, so much so in fact that when Ellison pointed out these similarities he received a monetary settlement from the filmmakers and a title card, giving Ellison story credit, was added to the film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwyyJ3D3g1E

 The Sixth Finger

Starring David McCallum, sporting make-up by Stan Chambers,

who would go on to receive an Academy Award for his work on

Planet Of The Apes.  McCallum travels forward in time genetically

while remaining physically in the present.

The Man Who Was Never Born

Featuring Martin Landau trying to change his bleak present

by altering the past.

Controlled Experiment

Written as a pilot for a proposed Sci-Fi comedy series, a pair of alien

anthropologists use their technology to manipulate time allowing

them to study more closely the human act of murder.

The Form Of Things Unknown

David McCallum, once again a time traveler, uses his discovery

to bring the dead back to life.  The results are not always as intended.

Soldier 

Written by Harlan Ellison, two soldiers from the distant future

are caught in a time warp and whisked back to 1960’s America

where they continue their battle.

Demon With A Glass Hand 

Also written by Harlan Ellison, alien invaders, seeking to complete

their conquest of Earth, travel into the past to capture the one man

who knows where the entire population of Earth is hiding. 

The Premonition 

An Air Force test pilot and his wife become ‘unstuck in time’ and must

find a way to not only rejoin the time line but also save the life of their daughter

who is destined to die unless the parents can alter the time line.

The Outer Limits is still considered one of the most influential television series ever broadcast.

Hollywood Romans #13 The Immortals

SEE: Titans In A Box!

Immortals (2011) 110 minutes

Directed by Tarsem Singh      Screenplay by Charles and Vlas Parlapanides

Staring: Henry Cavill, Mickey Rourke, Freida Pinto, Luke Evans and John Hurt

This film's poster should have a banner headline screaming: SEE: Titans In A Box!

The story, in brief:

The Heraklion king, Hyperion, has declared war on the Olympian Gods and all mankind.  To this end he is searching for the Epirus Bow, a divine weapon that will allow him to release the imprisoned Titans and with their help defeat the Olympians.  Why?   Well, it seems that when his wife was stricken with a fatal disease Hyperion called on the gods for help but his pleas went unanswered.  So now he has decided to destroy the Olympians and punish them for ignoring his prayers.  The gods are listening now.

Mickey Rouke as King Hyperion

Not surprisingly the Olympians are disgusted by Hyperion’s cruelty and disregard for the “accepted rules of engagement.”  They are eager to teach Hyperion a lesson or two but Zeus, in his infinite and unfathomable wisdom, has forbidden the gods from intervening directly in the affairs of man.  Zeus has instead selected Theseus as his instrument for the salvation of mankind.  In this it would seem Zeus has chosen wisely. 

The Olympian Gods, roused at last, prepare to battle the Titans

Though of humble birth, whose mother is treated as an outcast and father is unknown (it is said his mother was raped by other villagers but there is every indication that Zeus is the actual father) Theseus has grown into a mighty warrior strong of limb and stout of heart.  The problem is that Theseus is badly out numbered in every fight and is constantly in danger of being killed. 

Zeus unleashes his anger on Apollo for intervening directly to save Theseus

Luckily for him the gods are constantly breaking Zeus’ commandment (with and without his knowledge) and intervening in miraculous ways to save Theseus from certain death.  The real question is: Can the Olympians save themselves from almost certain destruction?  That will be answered in the all too obviously set up sequel.

Titans in a box!  The Titans endure their strange imprisonment

Re-working myths is fine and it often serves to avoid all of the carping about historical accuracy.  Certainly we have been treated to numerous versions of Homer's Odyssey (including the rather imaginative version by the Coen Brothers with George Clooney as Ulysses) or the Jason myth (the seminal 1962 film showcasing the stop motion work of Ray Harryhausen being the noteworthy entry here).  However ...

There is little here to recommend this latest re-working of Greek mythology, and the level of violence is not so much gratuitous as it is pornographic.  As director Val Lewton so ably demonstrated, less is often more, but here the director, Tarsem Singh, clearly believes more is not enough.

Poseidon considers the fate of Apollo for aiding Theseus

Costumes are by the famed Japanese costume designer and fashion artist Eiko Ishioka, whose signature headgear is on display here from the fanciful helmets worn by the Olympian Gods to the seemingly Time Bandits inspired travel hats worn by the Sibylline Oracles.  Ishioka-san won an Academy award for her work on Bram Stoker's Dracula, and while her designs for Immortals are imaginative, and one of the film's better aspects, they are not served well by the film itself. (For a better example of a fashion designer's costume work in a feature film see The Fifth Element with costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier.)

One of the Sibylline Oracles in her “travel” attire

Likewise the acting and fight choreography are, at best, ho-hum, though not from lack of trying.  The film is going for the look of 300 but unlike that earlier film (noteworthy for its faithful rendition of Frank Miller’s comic book stylization) Immortals is a very pale imitation. 

The production team for Immortals appears not to have understood the parameters of that style unlike, for example, the production team behind the Starz cable series Spartacus.  The violence and sex are so stylized in that cable series as to be almost cartoonish and thus more easily dealt with by the viewer.  Immortals, on the other hand, seems caught somewhere between this highly stylized look and a gritty realism (particularly with the violence) that leaves one confused, and not a little bit disgusted by the cruelty that seems plainly out of place in a fantasy film.

Theseus fights with the Minotaur

The idea that Theseus fights not a literal Minotaur but a man in a bull shaped helmet is not new but certainly works within the context of this story.  Likewise, I give the actors credit for working hard with the material they are saddled with, but therein lies the problem -- the story.

Zeus and his daughter, Athena

The story here, such as it is, does not engage the viewer on any level deeper than the most superficial.  The film's director, Tarsem Singh, has said that what he is attempting is:

"Basically, Caravaggio meets Fight Club. It's a really hardcore action film done in Renaissance painting style. I want to see how that goes; it's turned into something really cool. I'm going for a very contemporary look on top of that so I'm kind of going with, you know, Renaissance time with electricity."

All that being said, my disappointment with the film is not that it plays fast and loose with the Greek myths or mixes together art and artifacts from a dozen different eras/countries/cultures or even that the arms and armor have little to do with ancient or even mythic Greece.  This happens all the time in Science Fiction and Fantasy and often to good effect (The Lord Of The Rings comes to mind).  No, the problem here is that at its most basic level, Immortals is boring.  It fails to engage us and indeed actually repels us with its needlessly graphic splatter porn violence.

Theseus and his fellow Greeks prepare for the final battle

Immortals does achieve the impossible by making Zack Snyder's 300 seem Oscar worthy.

My humble recommendation: Save your money - Wait for Immortals to play on cable TV, and then watch something else.

Immortals is currently playing in movie theatres and should make its appearance on DVD and Blu-ray in the first half of 2012.

This review was first published on the Ancient Warfare Magazine website in November of 2011.

(c)2011 by David L Reinke