0436 – Looper (2012)

spacetime coordinates: 2044  Kansas City < 2074  Shanghai

Looper is a 2012 American science fiction thriller film written and directed by Rian Johnson, and produced by Ram Bergman and James D. Stern. It stars Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Emily Blunt. It revolves around criminal syndicates using contracted killers called “loopers” to kill victims sent through time travel.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1276104/

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James vs. His Future Self (2019)

spacetime coordinates: Sudbury, Ontario, in 2018

James vs. His Future Self is a 2019 Canadian science fiction comedy film, directed by Jeremy Lalonde. The film stars Jonas Chernick as James, a scientist researching time travel whose life is turned upside down when his older self (Daniel Stern) arrives from 17 years in the future to demand that he stop. The cast also includes Cleopatra Coleman, Frances Conroy, Tara Spencer-Nairn and Tommie-Amber Pirie. (wiki)

imdb   /   rottentomatoes

0429 – The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988)

spacetime coordinates: remote Cumbrian mountain village 1348 >> 1980s New Zealand

The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey is a 1988 feature film, an official Australian-New Zealand co-production, directed by Vincent Ward.

Ward and his production team based the look of the film on extensive research into the Middle Ages, particularly the mining industry, although this was then rendered imaginatively.  The colours of the film are based on medieval art and, in particular, medieval and renaissance artists’ ideas about heaven and hell. The blues in many of the modern-day sequences are based on the inks in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, while the reds and oranges of the motorway lights and furnace fires evoke images of hell in the works of Hieronymous Bosch, Pieter Bruegel and Matthias Grünewald.  Ward later said he had not achieved what he wanted to with the colour of the modern-day scenes due to the film’s short shooting schedule. Ironically, the colour in the medieval scenes, which were turned into black and white, was far better than that in the 20th century scenes. Some of the mining scenes were inspired by engravings from the German mining manual De re metallica, although it dates from two centuries after the time of those scenes. The angel of death seen flying across the moon at one point is based on a medieval engraving in Paris’ Père Lachaise Cemetery.

See also: Middle Ages in film

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095709/

0428 – Timeline (2003)

spacetime coordinates: wormhole to 1357 Castlegard, near LaRoque Castle in Dordogne, France

Timeline is a 2003 science fiction adventure film directed by Richard Donner, (loosely) based on the novel of the same name by Michael Crichton. A team of present-day archaeologists are sent back in time to rescue their professor from medieval France in the middle of a battle.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0300556/

0336 – Trancers (1984)

spacetime coordinates: 2247 Angel City >> 1985  Los Angeles

Trancers (also released as Future Cop) is a 1984 American science fiction film directed by Charles Band and starring Tim Thomerson, Helen Hunt, and Art LaFleur.  It is the first film in the Trancers series.

The film revolves around Jack Deth (Thomerson), a Philip Marlowe-esque police detective from the 23rd century who travels to the 1980s in order to bring his old nemesis to justice. The film portrays a unique method of time travel: People can travel back in time by injecting themselves with a drug that allows them to take over the body of an ancestor.

Trancers – Main Theme

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090192/

Trancers: City of Lost Angels (2013)

0330 – Arrival (2016)

spacetime coordinates: 2010s  Montana

Arrival is a 2016 American science fiction drama film directed by Denis Villeneuve and written by Eric Heisserer, based on the 1998 short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. It stars Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker, and follows linguist Louise Banks, who is enlisted by the U.S. Army to help translate communications from one of several extraterrestrial craft that have appeared across the world. She must find out why they have arrived on Earth before tensions lead into war.

The film received widespread critical acclaim, including praise for Adams’s performance, Villeneuve’s direction, and its exploration of communicating with extraterrestrial intelligence.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164/

0328 – Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

spacetime coordinates: 2020 London // France // Switzerland

Edge of Tomorrow (alternatively known by its tagline Live. Die. Repeat. and marketed as such on home release) is a 2014 American science fiction film starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. Doug Liman directed the film based on a screenplay adapted from the 2004 Japanese light novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. The film takes place in a future where Earth is invaded by an alien race. Major William Cage (Cruise), a public relations officer with no combat experience, is forced by his superiors to join a landing operation against the aliens. Though Cage is killed in combat, he finds himself in a time loop that sends him back to the day preceding the battle every time he dies. Cage teams up with Special Forces warrior Rita Vrataski (Blunt) to improve his fighting skills through the repeated days, seeking a way to defeat the extraterrestrial invaders.

Edge of Tomorrow Concept Art by Kev Jenkins

Gender roles

Comparison to video games        Battle suits

Sequel      IMDB

0280 – A Sound of Thunder (2005)

spacetime coordinates:  Chicago, 2055 > the cretaceous

A Sound of Thunder is a 2005 science fiction thriller film directed by Peter Hyams, and starring Edward Burns, Catherine McCormack and Ben Kingsley. It is a co-production film between the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, and the Czech Republic.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318081/

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a classic example of “failed return” or “no return” cautionary tales is A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury published in 1952. on a personal level i love both the EC comic book adaptation with artwork by Al Williamson and the 2005 movie adaptation by Peter Hyams that was a box office flop and has receive mostly negative reviews by critics. the original story features one of the first instances of the butterfly effect, in particular as applied to time travel paradoxes and uncontrollable evolutionary/ political outcomes. this was way before it became a meteorologic mainstay of chaos theory after its use by Edward Lorenz to describe stormy ripple-like effects on nonlinear systems, seemingly very sensitive to minute initial conditions.

the movie A Sound of Thunder features a time travel tourist agency from the year 2055. Time Safari Inc. is a chronocapitalist enterprise that organizes prehistoric retro-hunting expeditions to far-off epochs where dinosaurs roamed the earth. in order to do that, mankind is cheating on the big dinosaur mass extinction. long after humankind has killed most of the big game life on earth it tracks down other, more elusive and ferocious megafauna. the whole ‘hunting’ for the ultimate predator T-Rex (or an Allosaurus in the movie) turns out to be a very complex business. the paleo-poaching is based on hiding your acts under the cover of natural occurrences, trophy hunting pretending to be a mass extimction event. in order to fake the killing shot one must plan ahead every retro-killing move. practically Time Safari Inc. is cheating evolutionary history by trying to synchronize with ‘naturally’ occurring death events and extract entertainment value out of impossible inter-species encounters, normally separated by enormous gulfs of time. (…)

geohistory becomes a perfect crime scene – where the time traveling expedition has to erase all traces – all influence that might otherwise impact the future with definite catastrophic (especially anthropic future) results. as often, humans are kind of role-playing hide and seek with natural selection. in this bizarre and strange inversion of the anthropocenic stratigraphic proof – masquerades as natural force, where a devious human causality is trying to hide behind a pre-human mass extinction event. it is almost the same principle guiding the climate denialist that pretends to hide behind previous catastrophic climate fluctuations.

as one might expect, it’s a chronoclysm waiting to happen. all the clients of  Time Safari Inc. are prone to making mistakes, and not only do they leave marks (the absolute no 1 rule of time travel is non-intervention) but they also bring back something (the 2nd most important rule) basically invariably smuggling the prehuman past into the future. somehow a prehistoric dead butterfly makes it through the biofilter (a great example of what I would call New Wallace Lines) that is scanning every living reentry into the present, every possibility of warping the timelines. the alteration of the past produces a chronoclysm that manifests itself as a rhythmic, rapidly accelerating ‘time waves’ that transform the city and its denizens. more to the point in the Peter Hyams movie, the first divergence is a sudden appearance of teeming swarms of beetles and a gigantic strangler fig-like tree bursting through a Chicago high rise building, while the main characters Ryan and Rand make a narrow escape. it is by no means accidental that swarms and insect swarms in particular are associated with time waves. multiply proliferating and and highly distributed, swarms are chronoclysmic purveyors that help carry and suffer the radical effects of timeline distortion.

there are reports of global increases in temperature and humidity and plant life seems to prosper, while this time warped climate change suddenly seems to be echoing sweltering hot pre-human conditions of long gone geological epochs and dead jungles. (…)

stefan tiron – Cosm/c Dr/ft & T3mporal D/vergence (2016)- EXIT THE PORTAL: The Strange Comeback to a Weird Earth