LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN!!!! and again and again and again and again...

May is national Time Travel Awareness Month!

... that is not true at all, but I'm running with it. Especially as I just spent a night with a pacifier-less child who spent 3 achingly long hours of the night telling me in no uncertain terms that she, in fact, wanted her binky. So we're hitting the coffee again today like it's meth and I'm some sort of crazed addict.

She's lucky she's an adorable child. 

But - her binky-less, cry fest got me thinking about time travel. Because, OH HOLY SHIT how great would it be to travel back in time to when she lost the binky - and make sure it didn't go missing!?!?

It also helps that I'm currently reading Paradox Bound for the 2nd time... It's a pretty excellent time travel story by Peter Clines... so time travel is on my mind ALREADY... and her pleas just added to that. And I don't just mean traveling forward in time - I mean jumping around, doing stuff... time is, after all, a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey thing...



Time travel is done 1 of 3 ways in literature and film:
1: REALLY well as in The Time Traveler's Wife(book), Looper, 12 Monkeys, Paradox Bound and a few others.

2: Done in an entertaining way as in Back To The Future, Groundhog's Day, Star Trek IV, and, yes, Hot Tub Time Machine... don't judge - it was funny. 

3: The "Are You Fucking Kidding Me?" use of Time Travel... like Time Cop, Timeline, Millennium, Star Trek: Generations, and Star Trek: Enterprise 

This is where you all start saying "What about (insert your favorite time travel movie/book/tv show here)!?!?!  It's a goddamned masterpiece!" - and it probably is. So go write a blog post about it like I did! BOOM! See what I did there?

The problem with time travel in fiction is that it's SUCH an easy thing to throw in... but such a difficult thing to master. Audrey Niffenegger rocked the shit out of her time travel story!  She had cause and effect nailed down! She had temporal relationships worked out like it was something she was relaying to others as opposed to a story she came up with on her own... Hmm... wonder if it's actually NON-fiction, but she sold it as fiction... clever.

GREAT SCOTT!

The fun movies can do time travel without giving it too much thought because - duh - it's all for fun. Back to the Future is the best example of being good AND fun in my opinion. And Groundhog's day, while technically NOT time travel, is great. (it's a temporal loop...). Star Trek IV rates up there with several of the different time travel episodes from TOS, TNG, and DS9.... Enterprise sucked. Sorry. They royally screwed the pooch on time travel in my opinion.

The bad movies for time travel, though, are just... well, bad. They seem to be written by high school freshmen... which, also in my opinion, is what I believe most of the screen writers in Hollywood are. They're bad at their jobs. They write cliché shit and throw in elements of sci-fi to try to make it fun... but they fail miserably.

My point of this rambling, incoherent mess, is this: if you're going to do time travel you should either spend the time (no pun intended) and effort to make it good. Like, really good. Think about what is actually happening in your timeline...  like Audrey Niffenegger and Peter Clines did.  If you can't make it good - then at least make it funny and entertaining.  And if you can't do one of these two things - DON'T EVEN TRY IT. You'll cause a butterfly effect of events leading up to an over-caffeinated 39 year old writing a blog post about how shitty your movie is.

"No no... she loves my sausage fingers!"

Also - do not get me started on the Star Trek reboot with JJ Abrams. You could drive a planet through the giant time travel plot-holes he's left hanging about in that thing. I mean... come on, man... It's like you didn't even try!!!

Nero has 20 years to wait for Spock and rather than, I don't know, SAVE HIS PLANET, he just sits there and broods!?! It's like you just collected paycheck and stopped caring... 

I promise - after this read-through of Paradox Bound, I'll be moving on to new material... I just went through "14" and "The Fold" - and since I like to ride out a theme until it's done - "Paradox Bound." I'm open to suggestions for something new... or I might go back through my collection and hit up some Fantasy Novels for a while... I do have the entire "Cycle of Arawn" and the current 4 books of "The Cycle of Galand" to read again... But I think I might go for the "Mortal Engines" series for a bit. Who knows where the caffeine will take me in the coming weeks.