Deja vu?

Does the title of this blog ring any bells?

If you thought of the new film starring Denzel Washington, you would be correct. Alternatively, Val Kilmer also played a pretty key role in the film (he didnt show up in any of the trailers so this surprised me). The first thing I thought to myself was, "Man where did that hot stud go and leave this fat old middle aged guy behind?"

And no, the above comment should not be read as evidence that I'm becoming gay.

More interestingly than the movie (which I have to admit was somewhat of a disappointment. It left me desiring to go and watch a movie that had a really complicated plot and would make my mind do backflips trying to comprehend everything going on.... which was what I was expecting from this film. It was so... predictable... an odd charecteristic for a film that sells itself as a thriller talking about the manipulation of space time. Oh well. Wow, that was a long aside.) was the theories behind the main piece of technology in the movie, Snow White. Essentially, scientists had accidentally discovered a way to manipulate the fabric of space time so that they could look back into any point in the past to determine what was happening at that time. The situation in this film is that the scientist that had originally made this breakthrough along with many others that you do not see (the higherups if you will) were so afraid of what they had discovered that they were loath to do anything with technology other than use it as an observational tool to better understand what happened in the present (or use it as a crime solving tool.)

Denzel Washington gets all radical and demands to know whether the women they are watching is alive or not. (I'll let you decipher that one yourself. I'm not going to give away more of the film than that. As one-dimensional and unsurprising a film as I found it, it was still a pretty good story.) This leads into a discussion of various theories about time travel and the manipulatoin of the past.

Many movies have dealt with this film, but none that I have seen so far have actually juxtaposed the various "past manipulation" theories against each other as this film did. You have two MAIN theories, the rest just being offshoots or more or less extreme versions of these two main theories.

The first theory, and for lack of a better term, is the butterfly effect theory. The ACTUAL butterfly effect theory is the extremist end of this spectrum of theories, which holds that if a person were to go back into the past and change the slightest little thing (like swat a mosquito or something) that they would return to the present, only to discover that the ramifications of this one tiny little action had served to completely alter everything that happened in the future. Another film example is where this squad of hunters or something go back in time to hunt dinosaurs or something and they walk on a bed of air so as not to disturb the tiniest thing. One of the guys is scared off the bed of air by a T-rex and steps on a moth. The team returns to the "present" only to find that this guy, by killing this moth, had destroyed the parallel universe where the English languaged had developped and everyone spoke some sort of other language instead. (I think it was an Isaac Asimov short).

Personally, I think the extreme end of the above is ridiculous. It might make logical sense but it's incredibly difficult to believe that the "flutter of a butterflies wings on one end of the world will cause a hurricane on the other." (And by making logical sense, I mean that if one event were to change another and another, eventually WAY down the line you would have a divergent outcome. Think of drawing two rays that only differ by a couple of degrees. As the rays get longer and longer, the distance between them grows larger and larger. So maybe if the distance of time you were travelling was in the billions of years, then yes maybe this particular theory holds true.)

The alternate theory was dubbed the "tradionalist" theory in Deja Vu. This theory holds that the events in time are set in stone and plod ever on. What happened happened and always will happen whether you change something or not. Again, obviously this is the extreme view of things, and obviously makes little logical sense, seeing as how a tiny difference in a decision making process could lead to a drastically different outcome. What the moderate traditionalist might argue, however, is that yes you might change a tiny little thing, you might even cause some sort of significant event to happen... but by changing that one thing, you actually do not change anything and in the end, it all works out to the same ending, although the script might have been tampered with slightly.

What does Deja Vu suggest? Deja Vu actually (interestingly) suggests both theories. Again, if I told you how, I'd be ruining the movie, which I'm sure you don't want.

What do I think? First of all, let's make this clear... I don't think time travel will ever actually happen. God stopped the Tower of Babel, I'm sure he's capable of making sure that humans don't go screwing with the timeline while we still rely upon our limited understanding of where the actual interconnections with events actually take place and how those interconnections actually work. So pragmatically? I don't need to think anything because none of this will ever happen.

But because I love a good debate and I love science fiction, I would postulate that I am more of a traditionalist than anything, with some butterflist leanings (I used butterfliest to remain consistent with my own terminology.) Why? Because I believe in a God who is all knowing, controls everything that happens in this universe, and ensures that everything occurs because it will in the end work out to his penultimate plan. Although I was about to say the penultimate plan of the salvation of humankind, that would be speculating that I know what God's penultimate plan is and I refuse to do that.

If for some incomprehensible reason we do develop time travel and go back to try and correct wrongs and evils that we thought were preventable, I think that God would find a way to make sure that the results of those changes would lead us right back to where he wanted us. So what would be the point?

However, I throw in the butterfliest leanings portion because I think it makes little logical sense to hold that things would work out EXACTLY the same way as they did before. If you do something drastic in the past, clearly it will manifest itself in the present and the future. Clearly many of the decisions that I make at the very least influence the thoughts of others, which may or may not influence future actions taken by said others. It would be logically irresponsible to think that a change in the past would have no effect whatsoever on the unfoldings of time. However, it is NOT logically irresponsible to believe that those changes can be made irrelevant by the controlling hand of God, who can (and will) unfold things so that his perfect desires are met (see John Piper Desiring God.)

Do I have any biblical backing for the above? No. It was just fun to post the above because science fiction and the ensuing debates about theoretical things that have not been and may never be invented is just so awesome. And nerdy.