Well, to be fair, I also watched Logan, but this is not a movie review blog, and that one is totally irrelevant to my point.
First of all, I want to mention that I will mark the section when spoilers will start, so you can safely read until then.
There are a lot of styles of movies that I like. I enjoy, for example, watching an Avengers blockbuster movie, as much as anyone. But after the movie is over, that’s it. I might be hyped for a sequel, I might discuss it a little bit, but usually after a week or two I won’t think about the movie at all except when I see a reference to it.
I have seen many science-fiction movies about Robots and/or Time Travel, since I find those topics extremely interesting. I usually enjoy them, but again, that’s it.
Most of the time, robot movies either have a completely evil robot or AI controlling many robots and the point is to get rid of those, or the robot is nice and a victim of discrimination for “not being real”. Either way, they are either portrayed as a very human-like machine or as a metal monster. Sometimes both.
Time travel movies have, most of the time, very unclear rules.
Time travel, being a completely undiscovered technology, has very unclear rules by itself, but there are three popular theories. The first being Multiverse theory, where any time travelling would create an alternate timeline, and therefore avoid paradoxes. The second one is stable time loop theory, where any time travelling to the past would only contribute to creating events that already happened in the original timeline, since it already contained the arrival and actions of the time traveller himself. And the last one is the “you can change stuff” style, where your actions in the past will directly affect the present you knew and change it, possibly creating paradoxes if the time traveller is not careful enough.
But the problem is, many movies don’t subscribe to a single style. Those theories are exclusively mutual, but the movies switch between them for the sake of plot devices.
A good example would be Back to the Future. At first, it looks like its a “you can change the past” movie, but sometimes Marty’s actions directly contribute to the timeline he already knew, for example when he inspires a “Chuck” by playing the song Johnny B. Goode in 1955. He also inspires a janitor to become Mayor because he saw him being mayor back in 1985.
I didn’t really understand at first why I loved Ex Machina and Time lapse that much, considering that they are two indie movies containing lots of dialogue and little action. But then I realised it. They actually got it right. They did not sacrifice logic and research to, ironically, deux ex machina their way out of plot problems. It felt like the makers actually did research the subject and tries their best to create a fiction that fits the science, instead of changing the science to fit the fiction.
Only read if you have seen it or don't ever plan to
He eventually grows attached to Ava, and tries to help her escape her confinement. It is revealed that the Owner, Nathan, was planning to see if Ava would be able to manipulate Caleb into helping her escape. He has successfully predicted Caleb and Ava’s actions, but underestimated Caleb’s intelligence, the escape plan succeeds anyway, and Ava ends up killing Nathan. Caleb, still feeling Nathan was inhumane by keeping the AIs locked up and didn’t care about them at all, and still feeling like Ava has feelings and deserves freedom, seems to expect to run away with Ava and start a life together. Ava obviously had other plans, and abandons him locked up in the completely isolated compound with no chance of rescue or escape. It is revealed that she did indeed fake having feelings to manipulate him into freeing her and then escapes into the real world, leaving the viewer wondering what her plans are now. It is left to interpretation to figure out if Ava is just a very smart and manipulative machine, or has already reached a superior level, and would have actual feelings, just not for humans, who are insignificant to her.
The movie is incredibly accurate in showing us how an AI could probably escape confinement in the AI in a box experiment, no matter how well the box is designed. It also doesn’t make uneducated guesses as to what an ASI-level AI would do once free, since it is literally impossible for humans to guess it by definition.
In Time lapse, three roommates stumble upon an invention of their scientist neighbor, a machine that takes pictures everyday of their living room 24h into the future. They end up using the machine to earn money by gambling, but soon they get in trouble because of it.
The next part will spoil Time lapse
Only read if you have seen it or don't ever plan to
The characters in the movie are so scared of creating a paradox that they will, several times, go out of their way to actually recreate the pictures 24h later. The movie uses a Stable Time loop logic, and masters it extremely well. Whether they plan to recreate the picture or try to change it, it always ends up like it was printed, regardless of their intentions. It was so well done that, at some point in the movie, a picture actually changes following the actions of the characters trying to change the future, and my reaction was to instantly figure out that a character had switched out the picture for manipulation purposes, because it was so perfectly done until then that there was just no way the makers would make such a cliche mistake at that point. Many characters express a fear of creating a paradox during the movie, while the actual paradox-making circumstances never show up, which makes total sense in time travel theory simply because, paradoxes by their nature would erase all time and space, therefore if any paradox was ever created in our future, we wouldn’t be there today. We logically happen to be in a timeline containing no paradoxes, even if it could contain stable time loops. A character also goes to great length to try to create such a paradox (to change a past event), but fails miserably at it because of bad luck and bad planning (and kinda going crazy too), which is also how stable timelines are expected to play out if they contained time travel.
Just to be clear, I am not saying that using a causal loop (stable time loop) is “right” or “accurate”. I’m just praising the commitment to a single time-travel model, and a good understanding of how it would work if it was the “right” one, according to our extremely limited knowledge of time travel, which is basically just speculation.
Obviously, in the future, I’ll be looking for those kind of movies. I think that before, I had sort of given up on ever seeing one of those, because obviously movie-making and advanced science are very different fields of work, so I probably subconsciously thought that no one who would make movies would also have the time to study that stuff enough to make it accurate. I’m very glad to see that this was wrong.
EDIT: Triangle is a pretty interesting movie, with plenty of action and msytery, but it doesn’t fall into that “wow, the writers really studied their stuff” category. I was kinda disapointed. The movie is pretty good, but it’s hard not to notice the obvious plot holes. Those plot holes can be explained by speculating about some characters being stuck in limbo or something similar, but that doesn’t make the movie impressively scientifically accurate like the two above.