So bored with time travel

The sci fi thriller Looper will be released on DVD on December 31, 2012, but apparently Netflix mailed it to me 2 days early. I wonder: has someone got hold of a time machine?

Generally with a few notable exceptions, I am tired of any time travel movies or TV shows. Although paradoxes can be fun, they often seem annoyingly self-indulgent.

The main problem is that plots are too easy to manufacturer. They go like this:

1. Character A  travels into the past and performs X.
2. Oh, no! The space-time continuum has been disrupted!
3. Character A must try to fix the disruption by performing Y (or Z, etc)
4. Oh, no!  Performing Y has caused another disruption in the space-time continuum.
5. Repeat step 3 as needed.

Pardon me for stating the obvious, but the movie genre by itself has no inherent chronology.  It’s just footage spliced and organized in an arbitrary fashion. I think actors have this sense as well. They say their lines out of order, and don’t think too hard about it. They just live for the moment.

To experience what it must be like to be a time traveler, all you need to do is to act inside a movie.

Postscript: Here’s another musical take on the issue.

Postscript 2: Now that I’ve seen the movie, I wish I could go back in time to warn myself never to see the movie. Seriously, it wasn’t a bad movie; it actually was pretty interesting, but I’ve seen so many elements of this movie already. I regard the movie as mainly  a love story between a man and his gun(s) where nothing can be allowed to come in its way — except an annoying child with powers greater than yours.  Here’s a challenge: make a time travel movie without a GUN anywhere. Or better yet: make a movie where a person travels in time for no apparent reason other than to have fun and meet  chicks (or watch a concert or two).

Postscript 3: It is decided: I will travel back in time and prevent myself from even writing this post.

Postscript 4. It is done. Any postscripts after this one will disappear after the time line has been fully restored.

Postscript 5: For reasons I cannot explain here, I need to undo my previous action.

Postscript 6: Any postscripts after this one are fake and can safely be ignored.