Day 24

Gasp! I'm back a day early! Quite surprisingly, after going to the movies with friends, I do not feel like going to bed and sleeping for a year. Success!

I've seen quite a few movies this long weekend (four, to be precise), which strikes me as awfully lazy and unproductive. But I was feeling crummy, and they were fun, so I think that makes it okay.

Anyway, I thought I'd write my thoughts about each of them, focusing on the writing. It's not really creative (I seem to say that a lot...), but it counts.

Maybe. ^_^

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TWELVE MONKEYS (Slight spoilers towards the end.)

Time travel! What's not to love.

I love science fiction, but I particularly love time travel stories. My favorite Doctor Who episodes aren't the ones with Cybermen and Daleks (though those are pretty fun), but the ones that actually use time travel, and not just as a gimmick to have a new setting every week but as an integral part of the story. Like "Blink" by Steven Moffat—not only do the monsters send people back in time, feeding off the energy of the life they could have had, but Sally Sparrow ultimately saves herself because of a time loop.

I like to think of time travel stories as fitting into two categories: those in which time can change, and those in which it can't. (Doctor Who, as usual, is a law unto itself; apparently time in its universe is a combination. Some events are fluid, but others, like Pompeii, are fixed in time. Changing these brings utter disaster.)

Now, both scenarios offer interesting opportunities, but I think I'm a bit more fond of the "unchangeable time" scenario. A character goes back in time to change an event, only to find that he can't, or that by going back in time he caused it to happen. Or a character goes back in time knowing he cannot change the past—he must either live with being unable to change it, or, even though he knows it's futile, try to change the event and fail.

Twelve Monkeys is a wonderful mix of all of these. James, a convict, goes back in time to collect information about a virus that wiped out 5 billion people in 1996. At first he's resigned to the fact that these people are going to die; there's nothing he can do but attempt to complete his mission. But this changes (of course), and in the end he tries to stop the spread of the virus. Along the way he also begins to believe the people in the past who say he's crazy, and also comes to fear that by going back in time he sent in motion the events that led to the catastrophe.

Brilliant plot. Watching it made me want to dust off that time travel story I wrote a while back and fix it up. I might just be able to make it work...

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Hm, that took longer than I expected! Ah well, I certainly don't have to ramble about every single movie I've seen lately.

Anyway, hopefully tomorrow I'll get back to one of the stories I'm working on. Yah, that would be good. ^_^