Five movies that mess with time

  • dali-clock_1.jpgAlice sighed wearily. “I think you might do some­thing bet­ter with the time,” she said, “than wast­ing it in ask­ing rid­dles that have no answers.”

    “If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hat­ter, “you wouldn’t talk about wast­ing it. It’s him. … Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost any­thing you liked with the clock.”

    – Lewis Car­roll, “Alice in Wonderland”

    I rented the DVD of “Pre­mo­ni­tion” because it sounded like an inter­est­ing premise, but when I started watch­ing it I couldn’t help feel­ing like it was — as Yogi Berra said — “déjà vu all over again.” But then, that can be a good thing.

    You have to sym­pa­thize with the goodly souls who try to make movies seem weird and sus­pense­ful. Ever since “The Sixth Sense” everyone’s been mad for a movie with a twist. But how can you sneak up on an audi­ence that is men­tally cov­er­ing every pos­si­bil­ity, second-guessing even the most ser­pen­tine plot twists? There aren’t that many dif­fer­ent ways to put together a tale of sus­pense — how in the world do you sur­prise view­ers with what they’ve seen over and over again? I’m not sure who was the first sly­boots to fig­ure it out, but it’s sim­ple once you tum­ble to it — you mess with time. If your premise includes mak­ing time stand still, go back­wards or do flip-flops, you could make one of the draw­backs of movies seem like a plus. If you exploited the fact that peo­ple knew (or thought they knew) what was going to hap­pen, you could turn their expec­ta­tions to your advantage.

    For extra credit, if you took it a step fur­ther and dis­man­tled the chronol­ogy, you could really play with people’s heads. Just make it so that the end of the story comes first, the mid­dle near the end, the begin­ning com­ing in here and there, and even the most advanced second-guesser won’t have a clue what’s going on.

    So, just for fun, here are the five movies I thought of that messed with time. They get pro­gres­sively more tor­tu­ous with the chronol­ogy as well, with the last two being ones you have to close all the cur­tains, turn off the phone and pay total atten­tion to. I thought they were all worth watch­ing, back­wards or forwards.

    1. groundhogday1.jpgGround­hog Day (1993) — Of course. I assume everyone’s seen it by now, but if you haven’t, the basic ques­tion is: if you lived the same day over and over and over, what would you do? The moral of the story is really very pro­found and doesn’t have the forced feel of being a moral. Chronol­ogy: Piece of cake. In spite of the day-after-day idea, it’s pretty easy to see the build-up of events.
    2. dejavu.jpgDéjà Vu (2006) — Den­zel Wash­ing­ton is a cop that starts to find clues to a tragedy that indi­cate some­one knew what was going to hap­pen. More inter­est­ing, the clues seem to indi­cate that that per­son was him. Chronol­ogy: A lit­tle dif­fi­cult, but noth­ing you can’t parse out if you try. And usu­ally you’re a step ahead of the char­ac­ters, which makes you feel like a smarty. I love that.
    3. premonition.jpgPre­mo­ni­tion (2007) — San­dra Bul­lock is told her hus­band died in a car crash. Then the next morn­ing, he’s alive and it didn’t hap­pen. Then he’s dead. Then he’s not. How do you stop some­thing ter­ri­ble from hap­pen­ing? How do you live with your­self if you stop even want­ing to try? Chronol­ogy: Bit of a work-out. It’s worth watch­ing the spe­cial fea­ture on the DVD called “Mak­ing Order out of Chaos” that just puts the events back into chrono­log­i­cal order. It gives you a dif­fer­ent appre­ci­a­tion of why things hap­pened the way they did.
    4. memento.jpgMemento (2000) — How would you get by if you’re one of those rare suf­fer­ers of a dis­ease that affects your mem­ory, mak­ing short-term mem­o­ries impos­si­ble? You’d prob­a­bly leave your­self a lot of notes and say the same things to peo­ple over and over. Now, just to make things more inter­est­ing, what if you were that per­son and you were try­ing to find out who mur­dered your wife? Chronol­ogy: Intense. I loved this movie, but don’t try to multi-task while you’re watch­ing it or you’ll lose the way and never make it. (BTW, I’ll men­tion that it’s a gritty movie, but not graphic. And, because things like this make me ner­vous, I’ll also men­tion that a rape that is referred to from the begin­ning is never shown.)
    5. primer.jpgPrimer (2004) — If any movie was ever going to make you believe that some­one could build a time machine, this would be it. If any­one was going to do a really good job of show­ing how much it would mess up your life to have one, this would be it again. It’s not a com­edy, by the way. It takes itself seri­ously and man­ages to make you do the same. Great film for sci­ence geeks. Chronol­ogy: Just flip­pin’ insane. It starts off like a nor­mal thing, just to lull you into a sense of false secu­rity. But if any­one can explain the last hour of it to me, I’d be most grateful.

    There are oth­ers of this type, I’m sure. But these are just the ones that came to mind. Besides, it’s late now, and I’m out of time. Or am I??? (insert Dra­matic Ham­ster music)


    Related posts:

    1. Bad movies, high prices … what’s wrong with this picture?
    2. “The Hours” — Depres­sion in movies
    3. What’s wrong with movies these days?
    4. Twenty good min­utes out of “King Kong”
    5. 10:09 am — “I knew some­thing like this would hap­pen someday.”

    August 11th, 2007 | Grace | 11 Comments |

11 Responses and Counting...

  • DebD 08.11.2007

    I love movies that deal with time and altered dimen­sions and such (although I didn’t like Sixth Sense). Memento sounds espe­cially good. I think I’ll add some of these to my Net­flix queue.

    To add to your list: 12 Mon­keys and Fight Club. Both are very gritty and Fight Club is quite graphic.

  • Mimi

    I haven’t seen any of those, actu­ally. It must not be a genre I enjoy.

  • Grace

    Deb:
    If this is your thing, then I’ll bet you’ll really like “Memento.” And of the whole bunch it’s the only one that has an iron­clad rea­son for why time has to be altered.

    I’ve heard some stuff about “12 Mon­keys.” I may need to check that one out. Thanks for the recommendations.

  • Grace

    Mimi:
    Well, if you were inter­ested in dip­ping your toe in, I’d say “Ground­hog Day” is a good place to start, because the mes­sage is good enough that you don’t have to like the altered time aspect. (Only dis­claimer: I know peo­ple who don’t like a smark-aleck char­ac­ter under any cir­cum­stances. If so, you won’t like Bill Murray’s char­ac­ter, at least not at first.)

    And if the time aspect sounds like a guy thing and you’d rather see a good chick flick, try “Some­where in Time” with Christo­pher Reeve and Jane Sey­mour. Very romantic!

    Or skip it all and watch “Roman Hol­i­day” again. Doesn’t have any­thing to do with time, but what a great movie. :-)

  • Karl Thienes

    “Memento” is one of the best movies of the last 15 years, IMO. And I’d add “The But­ter­fly Effect” to this genre. Very clever, dark and dis­turb­ing, espe­cially the director’s cut. But the movie will stay with you for days.

  • Grace

    I heard some­one else men­tion “But­ter­fly Effect” some­time recently. All right, that’s one to add onto Net­flix. Thanks!

  • Michelle

    I also loved Momento! What a cre­ative and orig­i­nal idea for a movie! I have seen every­thing except Primer; so I will have to check that one out some time soon. Being home with an infant and a tod­dler all the time now gives me the need to find time to relax in at night when they are both sleep­ing. I’ll have to rent that movie while things are still pretty relaxed around here.

  • Michelle

    Oh, and I’ll echo Deb about Fight Club. It is a really good movie if you can stand to watch all the vio­lence and other things that go on in it. I wish they had an edited-for-tv ver­sion. It is a very unique idea for a movie.

  • Grace

    I think that was my reser­va­tion about rent­ing “Fight Club.” I don’t have a very high tol­er­ance for watch­ing vio­lence, and that’s par­tic­u­larly true of watch­ing peo­ple get the snot beaten out of them. For instance, I’m the only per­son I know who darn near walked out of “Shaw­shank Redemp­tion.” I know all kinds of other sen­si­tive women who appar­ently didn’t even notice that aspect of the movie, so I must just be an unusu­ally wimpy woman when it comes to that. FWIW, I’m glad I did make it to the end of “Shaw­shank”, because it’s really a very good movie. But I’m with you — there are a whole lot of movies where I’m look­ing for that edited-for-TV ver­sion (not that that’s all that much of an improve­ment these days. As I found out from think­ing I could watch “Scar­face” on TV, they can leave an awful lot of gore and sound effects in place and still pass muster, apparently.)

  • Mimi

    We own “Momento” my Dh likes it. I agree, I do like “Some­where in Time” but mostly because it is *so* romantic.

  • DebD

    If you can’t stand vio­lence then I would def­i­nitely rec­om­mend that you DON’T see “Fight Club”. I think it will be way over the top for you.

    Just saw “Primer” and it was excel­lent. Thanks for the rec­om­men­da­tion. I could say a few things about it, but I don’t want to spoil any­thing for others.

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