Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Science Fiction Movie Ideas

Two ideas for a science fiction movie dealing with time travel:

I have a solution for time-travel causality paradoxes, one that I haven't heard suggested before:

What if time travel paradoxes are resolved by the scenario adjusting to some sort of equilibrium? For example, if oyu go back in time and kill your father before you are conceived, everything shifts around so that it is someone else who goes back in time and kills your father, for some reason. Or so that you don't go back in time and he doesn't die.

The movie (actually a short story would work as well) would have someone traveling back in time, and for some reason shoot their father (perhaps just as an experiment). There would probably be a lot of stuff happening in the interim, of cousre. What the audience would see is the time traveler shooting, then the camera would pan away to the father getting hit and dying.

Then when the camera goes back to the time traveler, it is a totally different person. They say "darn, shot the wrong person" or something to that effect. Or perhaps when the camera goes back, it is a different person, not holding a gun, and then the camera pans back to the father, who is perfectly fine and who was never shot. The possibilites are endless.

The other idea would involve the concept that certain souls have to exist, regardless of who is born. What would happen would be that a bunch of people find a time machine in an old ruin that is rumored to be the site of an alien space ship crash. Activating it by mistake (it's like a watch that one of them wears), they become time travelers and travel further and further back into the past, unable to find a way to get into the future again. As they wind up altering events in their own lives, they keep changing; one character gets a tattoo, another loses an arm, etc. But the whole time they remember the original timeline. Finally they go back to before they were born. As they start altering things that prevent them from being born, they start turning into other people. One character, who was the product of a one-night stand, mistakenly gets his mother to choose a different guy (the two guys she chooses should be different races or somehow be very distinguishable from one another). He immediately changes so that this features resemble the new guy. Other characters change sex. But they all remember being the person they originally were.

Finally they go back to the time when the alien spaceship supposedly crashed. Desperate to return to normal, the one who is carrying the "watch" suggests that they find the watch in the older ship and destroy it. They do find the time device in the newly crashed ship, and after confronting the aliens on the ship, convince them to destroy the device (one of the time tavelers worries that if they destroy the watch themselves, they'll create a paradox, but reasons that the aliens who created the device would know how to avoid that - he is correct). They do, and the device on the guy's wrist dissolves and all of the time travelers are suddenly back at the alien ship in the present where this all started, all of them with a memory of what happened, but without any of it having happened. Everyone is back to normal.

That is all.

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