A Time Travel Movie that Should be Seen and Thought About
I chose the title for this article because I do not believe in there being an identifiable best of anything, or perhaps there is a best of some things, some things that are already rare and so you can identify the best out of an extremely limited set, but there is no best time travel movie because there are a lot of them. We can definitely say which ones are in the running but not which is the absolute best.
And anyway I don’t think anyone would put this movie in the best rank, other than me when I first saw it, if you look at the image above it is not there in the Google Image Search for time travel movie, and whenever I have heard it mentioned I have either heard that some people thought it was nice enough or they hated it with a passion. The people who hated it were generally people who love time travel movies and had some very clever observations to make regarding such classics of the genre as Twelve Monkeys, or Back to The Future but nothing but contempt for this movie. I’m not going to take the time to find these opinions as I consider them not worth the finding or quoting even if I had them here in front of me. If you must know I think anyone who disparages this movie is at best not able to consider whether something is good even if not to their taste.
Most time travel movies are about time, and about the in-universe rules the movie has made for how to tamper with time, how to make it work to your advantage, how to play little tricks with time and how to figure out the little tricks the movie is playing with time. Most time travel movies are tricky little puzzles that you need to sit there with a pen and paper to keep track of the various ways the movie is rearranging its narrative as it goes.
But About Time is not like most time travel movies.
So that is the reason for this article’s title, because a creative work that is recognizably in a specific category but also recognizably different than everything else in that category invites some examination — why the difference and what does that difference mean about everything else in the category.
But who should see and think about this movie? Well if the reason to see it is how it differs from its genre then we should think it is people who are familiar with the genre that should see it. And that seems fair, if someone exists that has never seen a time travel movie and they saw this movie they could see this movie and still not really know the tropes one encounters in time travel movies.
I really believe this — if About Time is the only time travel movie you ever see I would argue you have not really seen any time travel movies, you will at least not know any of the major tropes of the movies and what are the generally acknowledged problems in time travel movies. Watch Back to The Future and 12 Monkeys and if someone asks you what time travel movies are like you will be able to give them a pretty good idea. Hell, Idiocracy lays out a better overview of the problems of Time Travel in Joe’s speech to Frito than About Time does (if you haven’t seen Idiocracy you’ll just have to take my word on this)
As noted Time Travel movies ( and with this I throw in Groundhog Day recurring event type movies ) tend to be about the mechanics of the situation and how the protagonist can turn those mechanics to their advantage or get out the situation that they are in by following the mechanistic rules.
The rules of time travel movies tend to be complicated and often the thing that allows the time travel itself is complicated, a mechanism or scientific discovery that requires a good deal of explanation to be understood. The original Groundhog Day movie of course was original in that it had no complicated science or reasoning why it worked the way it did, but spent most of the the movie torturing its protagonist who wanted to escape but could not. Most other variations however have added complicated mechanisms to explain how the loop can be broken.
About Time’s time travel mechanism is so slight and ridiculous as to indicate a sort of offhand contempt for those head-scratching difficulties the usual time travel movie lays out for its audience to be bewildered by.
IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN ABOUT TIME AND ARE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO AVOIDS SPOILERS — STOP HERE.
In About Time the men of the Lake family (A Good solid Fantasy name if ever there was one) , are able to travel back along their own time line by going into a dark quiet place (a toilet can do in a pinch), clenching their fists and closing their eyes and imagining the place in time they wish to go.
The ability of the men to do this is never explained, there is no mechanism to it, just as there is no mechanism to Groundhog Day — it just is that way. For a mechanist or a puzzle solver, which most time travel afficionados are likely to be this absurd power is probably maddening. I know I can start thinking about genetics and wondering how far outside the Lake family the ability can extend, is the power only patrilineal, or can the daughter of a Lake pass it to her son? But no, these urgent questions are never answered because the movie does not care.
About Time also throws away one of the main tropes of a large number of time travel movies, which is using time travel to get rich. Even in the TV Show Dark which is mainly about how time travel sucks and Germans getting upset about the tiniest things one of the characters uses time travel to get rich — of course in order to amass enough wealth and power to be able to destroy time travel because it leads to people having sex in the wrong decade.
How does it throw it away? Immediately!
As soon as Tim Lake has learned he can time travel he says it’s good he won’t have to worry about money and his dad warns him off using time travel to get rich as being at best counterproductive.
In fact About Time isn’t concerned with how to use Time Travel to get rich, rule the world, stop some awful thing from happening, keep from dying, get rid of time travel, or anything I have ever seen any other time travel movie concern itself with — About Time is concerned with how to lead a happy life and I guess also how to be a good person, coincidentally using time travel to do so.
Leading a Happy Life is a radical idea for Time Travel Movies
This is the first reason I say the movie should be thought about, and thought about in the context of Time Travel movies as a genre. Because it suggests using time travel for something no one else does, although most thinkers throughout history have been concerned with specifically this question. In comparison it is very few people who have pondered deeply how to conquer the world, sure I did it when I was 12 and would spend hours a day with an Atlas trying to figure out what countries I would conquer first in building my empire but I was perhaps a weird kid.
The numbers of would be world conquerors and people trying to be happy are reversed with Time Travel stories, most people when corrupted by time travel move first to amass worldly power. Only the Lakes try to live happily.
The two Lake men with the power in the story had different ideas on how to be happy. Tim wants to fall in love and have a girlfriend, and while his father is interested in that he seems to prefer mainly reading. As he explains to his son he has read everything one could want to read twice, Dickens three times — which I don’t know what is wrong with the man — Dickens only three times? Really?
He says basically the same thing later in the movie about having read double as many books as he could otherwise, which of course makes sense, one of the features of this brand of time travel (a feature of most time travel) is that they remember what they did before they changed their past, but another feature here is that they do not get older via time travel.
In most movies if you take a time machine into the past and spend a day there you are a day older when you come back, but when the Lake’s go back they do not age. In this their time travel is very like a groundhog day movie, of course something you see with a lot of time travel movies is the knowledge of what will happen is a superpower — like Groundhog Day — but another is that by reliving the day over, in essence going back in time to the start of the day, and not aging you are functionally immortal.
So the obvious way that Tim’s dad (amusingly enough I don’t think he is ever given a name, and in IMDB he is listed as ‘Dad’) reads twice as many books as he could otherwise is that when he has had an uneventful day where not much went on he reads a book, and when he is done with that book (assuming it takes him a day to read a book which it generally took me for an average length book when I had the time to devote to just reading) then he can just go back in time to the beginning of the day and read another one.
Realistically he could just go back and read a third or a fourth book on that day as well, he could have a day every year in which the wife is away with the kids doing stuff most of the day, he has the house to himself and go over that day for weeks at a time catching up on his reading. The mechanist in me wants to point out he could just do all his reading for the year on that one day and spend the rest of the year never reading a thing. He could go through three days in a row doing handyman jobs and at the end of each day go back in time to his reading day and read a book go forward and have a well earned rest for all his exertions. But this is evidently not what Dad Lake does, and I can’t help but think that if it were pointed out to him that he could do that he would probably take a tentative posture in the middle of the room as if he were going over all the possible ways in which he might gently let you know you were an idiot.
Why an idiot? Well he obviously hasn’t done it because he has at best only read twice as many books as he would normally have read. But why not?!
I would guess this comes to the rest of the whole being happy idea, in that sure he could essentially spend months or years cut off from human existence reading every book ever written, learning ancient languages so he could read the originals and all that, but as interesting of a power idea that is to a reader probably he would get lonely for his family, and if he didn’t keep in close contact with them and only came back after several years of reading all of Italian literature he might find that he was somewhat alienated from them, and of course they would feel hurt by how distant and unapproachable he would feel. So, he cleverly only reads twice as many books as he could otherwise and does not get tempted to allow the bonds of human affection to lapse by indulging in reading 5 or 10 times as much.
As long as you have a groundhog day to repeat you are functionally immortal, and the Lakes are potentially immortal, but if I were to guess how long Dad Lake has lived with time travel I would say maybe slightly less than 2 times as long as he seems to be, that is to say if he dies at 70 he is at best 140 years old in experience, but I would guess maybe 120 years old (based on the Lake’s first finding out about their power when 18). Of course I could be wrong, maybe he is thousands of years old. But I doubt it.
But enough about Dad Lake for now, on to Tim Lake. Let’s start with a wrong description of the movie from IMDB:
At the age of 21, Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleeson) discovers he can travel in time… The night after another unsatisfactory New Year party, Tim’s father (Bill Nighy) tells his son that the men in his family have always had the ability to travel through time. Tim can’t change history, but he can change what happens and has happened in his own life-so he decides to make his world a better place…by getting a girlfriend. Sadly, that turns out not to be as easy as you might think.
Whoa, wait a minute there: “That turns out not to be as easy as you might think”? Actually it turns out to be really easy with the power of time travel to get an extremely hot girlfriend that is the love of his life, it is so easy he does it before the movie is halfway over!
Yes, ostensibly this is marketed as a romance with time travel elements but most movies in romantic genres wait until the end of the movie to achieve the happily ever after, so you don’t actually see the happily ever after you just have to assume it, which of course allows the cynical amongst us to imagine the divorce of Snow White and Prince Charming. But here we see the happily ever after.
Just as the movie, by focusing on achieving happiness, functions as a critique of time travel movies, it also functions as a critique of romance movies by showing how easy it is for him to achieve the perfect happiness romance movies advertise by having an impossible superpower — implying of course that such a perfect happiness is actually unachievable. Probably this double edged critique was unintended, but it exists nonetheless.
Here I thought I might discuss the time travel tricks and issues in the movie, but really it isn’t very worthwhile, most of them are fun but not tricky like most time travel movies. The one difficulty in the movie around time travel is that if you have kids you can’t go back before your kids were born to change things because the random nature of genetics and conception are such that if you do change something another sperm might win its way to another egg and BOOM your first child is gone from existence and a stranger takes their place.
Because of this limit on what time travel can’t do, later on when Dad Lake dies Tim can go back and see him after death, but then his wife wants another child, which means after the conception he will no longer be able to go back and see his dad.
Before Dad Lake dies though he tells Tim the even bigger secret about time travel — go through each day normally and then at the end of the day go back through it again from the start and enjoy all the little things that you couldn’t really enjoy the first time around. Essentially being happy is like living in one long Hallmark movie made possible by time travel, enjoying the little things, having a perfect romance (with the best sex ever first time because Tim can just go back again and again perfecting his moves — groundhog daying — until the girl thinks OMG this guy is perfect!)
But then at the very end of the movie Tim has achieved a sort of time traveler’s satori, he no longer time travels and goes over the day a second time to live in the moment he instead just lives in the moment, enjoying the little things the first time around! So evidently Tim will not live 120 years of life the way his father did.
Here’s where the movie becomes rather tricky, in it’s arguments it verges on the paradoxical nature of time travel itself…
- We should use time travel to be happy.
- Happiness exists in living a comfortable upper middle class life without major shots with a loving wife and family where everyone is happy and romantically fulfilled.
- This idyllic existence seems impossible to have been achieved without time travel.
- But the true happiness is to have the impossible to achieve happiness without time travel.
The movie is really the story of someone born on third base with superspeed, but thankfully they don’t let their good fortune turn them into a dickhead, so good on Tim Lake.
Here the mechanistic side of me comes up though, as we are edging out of the movie, very far into the happy every after but not completely. I mean sure we have seen the end of Dad Lake’s life and we can assume Tim will have a long uneventful good life, there won’t be any major financial disruptions, they will always save a good amount for retirement and if the market crashes somehow they will have cleverly moved their investments just before, at some point his son grows up and Tim has the talk about time traveling, and so forth.
Still, I am too much reminded of the story of Solon and Croesus, and not quantifying the happiness of a life until its very end. Tim has the perfect happy life but he could still walk out one morning and get run over by a car, be pleading with the ambulance driver no just put me in a dark closet or a toilet if you like to no avail and die en route to the hospital.
Has Tim made the proper preparations with all his living in the moment? A sealed document for his son to read on his coming of age? He is a lawyer, so I would think the family has wills made up and when he made the will he would think, hey I better give my son the information he needs if I’m not around. Should the son then go back in time and save Tim? What if Mary, Tim’s wife, had remarried and had more children? Tim’s son would essentially be killing these other children of Mary to bring his father back to life.
I don’t know, one of the common tropes of time travel movies is that reality is actually messy and when you think your power gives you control over it unexpected events can still sideswipe you and make you lose that control, and one of the common criticisms of the fantasies that romance fiction sells is that the world is a messy place and that happiness is potentially fleeting, the fact that the movie does not in fact wrap it up conclusively makes the open ended nature of Tim’s happiness clear.
And that’s maybe why the people who like time travel movies should watch it, and think about it.
This article was written by IG Agents 77 and 19.
If you are one of the people who dislike About Time and think it is a bad movie you may get some benefit from this article:
A sort of follow up to this article was written here