Traveling in film – Why does cinematic time travel always fail because of logic?

Why are we enlightened, modern people so proud of our ability to think logically? That ultimately ruins any fun!

I’ve been a science fiction fan since I was a child. True to the name of the genre, I liked the stories the most where the heroes used science to get out of trouble rather than laser blasters or photon torpedoes. One such highlight: the Star Trek episode “Déjà vu”. In it, the crew of the “Enterprise” notices that they are stuck in a constantly repeating “temporal causality loop.” Triggered by a collision with another spaceship, she relives the same day over and over again, until the collision that causes everything to start again. Luckily, the android Data can send a message to the next loop via his positronic brain, thus preventing the collision, and both ships leave the time phenomenon.

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A few weeks have passed in the rest of space during the “time captivity” of the “Enterprise”. Free! However, the other ship was stuck in the loop for a good 90 years. This is exactly where the logic gets in the way: How can the collision of both ships be the trigger for the phenomenon when the second ship required for this had not yet been built 90 years ago? There’s something wrong at the beginning.

Once you recognize this problem, it doesn’t just hurt you with time loops like “Groundhog Day.” Often someone travels back in time to prevent a disaster before it even happens. The happy ending principle demands that this also succeeds. The most famous examples of this are probably “Back to the Future” and “Terminator” – both of which were so successful that they received several sequels.

Central question: Can you prevent your own existence?

Let’s start thinking about the problem using the example of Terminator: A Terminator that has jumped into the past ensures that the AI ​​system that created him is not invented at all. Wait a moment! Then the Terminator will never exist. Ergo, he doesn’t travel back in time, the AI ​​is never stopped, but creates him and so on and so forth. Yes, the circuits can burn out because the beginning is missing here too. The Terminator’s mission can never succeed. If she had succeeded, he would never have existed.

The thing about the beginning is almost always the crux of filmic time travel. A colleague recently said: “Everything is right in ’12 Monkeys’.” So I immediately watched the really exciting classic from 1995 with Brad Pitt and Bruce Willis again. After all, the attempt to change the flow of time actually fails. So it’s not a chicken-and-egg problem?

Unfortunately, this is only true for the catastrophe itself. But that hardly plays a role in the film. Rather, protagonist Kathryn Railly meets the time traveler James Cole, falls in love with him and then leaves a message on an answering machine whose number Cole had given her. However, that message will ensure that Cole travels to her in the future. Well, does it ring? Without his trip, the news would never have happened. Once again two events are mutually dependent and thus exclude a beginning.

Yes, logic can be really annoying. Film critic Christian Schäfer once wrote: “What causes problems for the viewer is the inability to break away from linear thinking. We overlook the fact that the story doesn’t need a beginning at all. We also accept that time travel into the past should be possible, even though we know: whether it’s wormholes or DeLoreans, in the end it’s all nonsense – but good entertainment. So the solution is self-deception.