Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/09/06/trailer-for-netlixs-sci-fi-m.html
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Yeah.
I’ll watch that.
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Please? SF without time travel. Please? Any fucking lazy person with a keyboard, or chalk slate, can come up with a time travel plot. It’s irresistible junk food. The SF screenwriter can make up any technology, write about any time from before the dawn of man to the heat death of the universe, about anyplace in that universe, and populate the story with fantastical beings. Yet the majority choose to write about time travel.
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Looks like a retread of the Doctor Who episode Heaven Sent (which is inspired by many other looping ideas). Go watch it if you haven’t.
But then it looks like it degrades into a cluster frack with a renegade robot on the loose. WAT?
In independent thrillers with no budget, you can go either hostage or time machine. This has both, so you are getting double your money!
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If you haven’t read it I recommend John Varley’s novel Millennium, which is sort of a meta time travel story. It started with his excellent short story Air Raid, which turned into a wreck of a movie called Millennium, so Varley salvaged an essay on SF time travel out of the resulting mess and sold it as a novel.
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You left out the body snatcher, evil twin and amnesia plots, more screenwriter crack. Just watch the original Twilight Zone to see how to do dirt cheap SF. It can be done, it just requires that missing ingredient, creativity.
[quote=“Michael_R_Smith, post:7, topic:84799, full:true”]
If you haven’t read it I recommend John Varley’s novel Millennium, which is sort of a meta time travel story. It started with his excellent short story Air Raid, which turned into a wreck of a movie called Millennium, so Varley salvaged an essay on SF time travel out of the resulting mess and sold it as a novel.[/quote]
Read it. Sadly, Varley ran off the rails after a few very good novels and collections. Ophiuci Hotline is one of my favorite books ever, and The Gaian Trilogy is a lot of fun. But Red Thunder was pretty bad and the sequel was unreadable.
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Except that in Heaven Sent the looper didn’t retain memory, wasn’t randomly killed each time, and wasn’t really looping in time? Part of why that episode was so good is that it inverted most of the tropes.
This one doesn’t look like it’s trying to be nearly as clever, but it does look interesting…
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Some write about mushrooms and squid.
Those are pretty much the SF trifecta.
PK Dick’s Flow my Tears, the Police-squid Said is a stellar example; I highly recommend doing 'shrooms and going back in time to read it again.
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Ooooooh, I had read Air Raid and seen… at least part of the movie. I avoided the novel because I thought it was just the story repackaged, forgetting it was originally just a short.
Thanks!
Well, actually the Doctor, being the Doctor, figured it out. While not a direct remembering, he did pick up the clues and as it turns out, he was the one leaving the clues all along. It’s the bootstrap paradox…again.
He wasn’t randomly killed each time but did die each time. And while not a time loop, he was essentially reliving each day on the following day, getting a little bit better over time…a long long time. Closer to Ground Hog Day, just with each day being new, not a reset of the last day.
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Agggghhhhhh! Some kids in the family had this dreadful toy that sang this, over and over and over. Stupid lyrics:
“They say our love won’t pay the rent.”
If it pays the rent, it ain’t love.
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Ahem…
I mean, if you’re telling people to go see it if they haven’t, then maybe NOT put everything in the clear?
( [spoiler] like this, or use the gear icon and “Blur Spoiler” [/spoiler] )
Also, that’s not the bootstrap paradox: (since there was no time travel (other than the normal kind) there’s no paradox). And otherwise you’ve pretty much described exactly why this movie looks (based on the limited info in the trailer) more like a groundhog day retread than a retread of that episode.
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It would be interesting to take a tally, but I think there are probably far more sci-fi plots involving faster-than-light space travel and suspiciously human-like alien civilizations than there are about time travel.
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Trailer for Netlix’s sci-fi movie, ARQ
I’m imagining a transporter accident that melds Netflix and Star Trek: Voyager’s Neelix into one.
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The webcomic Skin Horse had a great story a few years ago about a minor character who got stuck in a time loop. Well worth the read if you’ve got the time.
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True, but those are usually enabling devices not the plot itself. Without FTL you simply don’t have much interstellar SF, relativistic interstellar TV plots are quite rare (Starlost?). Even in print it is almost a genre unto itself. Suspiciously human-like is usually just a costume & FX budget saver as far as the screen goes. But point made. I love David Brin for really alien aliens. Dark Skies had me going there for a while with the arachnid aliens til their humanoid overlords showed
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I haven’t read The Ophiuci Hotline but I’ve read a couple of others from his ‘Eight Worlds’ setting, including The Golden Globe which I thought was pretty good.
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several movies going back to at least groundhogs day called and they want their plot back.
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