Time travel and Hollywood

Time travel has always been a topic that has fascinated me to no end. The concept of moving through time and space to enter either the realm of history, or the vast unknown of the future is the dream of every science fiction enthusiast. Discussing the topic in class, opened my mind to interesting new facets of this coveted phenomenon.

Two Hollywood movies depicting the concept, that I feel captured the elements discussed in lectures are Back to the Future 2 and of course, Terminator 2.

The notion of 'changing the past' is a key element in both movies. In Back to the Future 2, through a series of complicated (but highly entertaining) events, a man from the future gets his hands on a sports magazine listing all the past victories in various sporting events. The magazine belonged to the time traveler and was therefore of his time (ie.. present day). The man from the future then steals the time machine and travels to the past (about 20 years before the present day) and hands the magazine to his younger self who proceeds to bet on all the winning teams and makes a fortune. When the time traveler goes back to his time, he finds that everything has changed, and that the man who stole the magazine is now filthy rich, and power abusive.

In Terminator 2, a cyborg is sent back in time to kill a child who would grow up to be the leader of the rebellion against the machine oppressors. Again, the intention here was to change the past and in doing so, the future.

In both cases we see how they revolve around ideas of utopian and dystopian societies of the future/past. In Terminator 2, glimpses of the future show a post-apocalyptic world over run by machines and cyborgs. In Back to the Future 2, when the time traveler returns to his time, he too sees a dystopian world.