Tag Archives: Time Traveler’s Wife

Review: The Time Traveler’s Wife

Movie released: 2009
Set: 1960s to present

Summary of future technologies / events

  • Technology: time travel
  • Likelihood: extremely low?
  • Time frame if it is to occur: 2030+

Approach to the future – exploration of single possibility

Ratings

  • Futurism rating — 2: limits itself to a rigorously logical but unscientific use of time travel
  • Entertainment rating — 8: not as good or as tense as the book, but captures (or at least borrows) some of its spirit
  • Plausibility — 2: verges on impossibility

Time travel
Some reviews of this movie have been been off-base. The Washington Post reviewer wrote:

The mind may boggle at the inconsistencies and logistical impossibilities posed by all of Henry’s disappearances, and tampering with the past, and his crisscrossing travels with his alternate selves. Einstein and H.G. Wells would have a few problems with this movie. Nora Ephron, probably not.

In fact, the movie — following the lead of the book — takes an unusually rigorous approach to time travel. Inconsistencies and “logistical impossibilities” are absent. See this approving examination by physicist Dave Goldberg in Slate.

That said, it cannot be called “realistic,” for two reasons:

  • Biology — The minor reason is that, while we don’t know yet how to manipulate space-time in a way that would yield time travel, it is quite unlikely that a genetic mutation would lead to this ability. Genes interact with bodily processes, and haven’t shown signs of doing anything more. The super-mutation that Henry shows puts him in X-Men territory.
  • Philosophy — The larger reason that this story is unrealistic is that it takes an essentially pre-Copernican view of the universe, with people, and the Earth, as privileged and central. The time travelers in the story materialize in places (on the ground, not inside other objects, etc.) convenient to humans, suggesting that our matter is somehow distinct from other matter. Human emotions and memories guide their travels, again suggesting a kind of centrality. And the Earth itself acts as if it is a single place in the universe, despite all its diverse motions through space.

Upcoming Futurist Movies

Moon jurvetson FlickrSeveral new futurist movies are due out in the next two months:


Movie: Moon
Release date: Out in some US cities, and due out widely July 10
Futurist element: Mining colony, at least at some scale, on the Moon


Movie: GI Joe: Rise of Cobra
Release date: August 7, 2009
Futurist element: Military exoskeletons


Movie: District 9
Release date: August 14, 2009
Futurist element: Aliens living in South Africa


Movie: The Time Traveler’s Wife
Release date: August 14, 2009
Futurist element: Time travel (though this version may have no scientific explanation)


Movie: Gamer
Release date: September 4, 2009
Futurist element: Brain implants and mental control


Movie: Splice
Release date: September 18, 2009
Futurist element: Genetic engineering runs wild


Movie: Surrogates
Release date: September 25, 2009
Futurist element: Virtual reality and robots, seemingly


Note that some of these dates could shift.