I want to believe that this will not suck.
…but I have a question. If you have time travel (OK), and you’re using it to dump bodies (…OK), why are you sending them back to a cornfield for some other guy to shoot them? Open up the portal in 10,000 BC, 20,000 feet above the Marianas Trench – and heck, that’s being artistic: anywhere out in the ocean will do, really.
I’m not saying that the movie won’t work, but if they don’t nail down the ground rules about why you can’t do that – and stick to them – then the movie is going to suck. Even if it does have Bruce Willis in it.
…Because then there would be no movie?
Seriously, though, if you send people back without an explicit way to have them killed, you run the risk (ever-so-tiny) that they will survive and somehow disrupt the entire time continuum. See, e.g., Homer sneezing on a dinosaur.
My question is: why not kill them in the future and just send the bodies back?
Doug: …Because then there would be no movie? 🙂
Or, at least, it would be a different movie. I’ll wait until after this one comes out to speculate whether it would have been a better movie.
I hate most Time Travel movies made after Back To The Future (all three) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (and basicly every ST:TNG time travel episode). Most are just trying to hard. I’m still holding out judgement on Alcatraz to see how they treat this subject.
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In real life, I would set out to destory any time machine. They are too dangerous in my honest opinion.
BG5: The Philadelphia Experiment 2 movie was awful, with one happy exception: the background aesthetic and technology of the altered world (Nazis win WWII) was clearly well-thought out, in advance and with a good deal of consistency. It didn’t make up for the craptastic nature of the film, but I hope that whoever was in charge of that part of the movie kept getting work afterward.
I am rather looking forward to the film version of Rome, Sweet Rome.
In other fun time travel merchandise news: the Angels have the Delorean and Biff has the Phone Box.
Yeah, the whole premise of this movie is preposterous. The ONLY reason to involve a time machine in a hit-man operation is that it makes a dandy way to hide the body.
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There is really no reason to send a living person back, and double-especially no reason to send a living person back to be executed by his earlier-in-the-timeline self.
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For me, Bruce Willis + time travel movie invites comparisons to the excellent (well, IMO, anyway) “12 Monkeys”. Probably not an issue for most people, though.
Hold on, Just Dave: there are people out there who do NOT think that 12 Monkeys was excellent? Fascinating.
Oooh, maybe there’s an incremental energy cost per year traveled, so essentially you’re constrained by physics in how far back you can send people? In other words, you’ve got a sliding window to send people back, so you just need to put a series of assassins back during said window and let them handle the cleanup.
My real problem with this is that, since you’re effectively sending a whole bunch of new atoms back into the past, you are effectively changing your own timeline. Thus, each and every time someone in the future sends someone back, they essentially annihilate their own causality state, to unpredictable effect.
Energy, pure and simple. The energy output to send someone back through time would have to be enormous. Cheapest way to dispose of people would be to send them back the minimum amount of time and not try to also move them through space (which would be an additional huge energy cost). Even with the cost of paying the assassins, it still works out to be much cheaper than a one-way trip to 10,000 BC.
MikeCG:
The problem with time travel is that you ARE moving people in time AND space. Since the Earth ever orbits the Sun and the Sun the galactic center and the universe ever expands, there is NO point in time, past OR future, in which the same spot on Earth will be in the exact same place. Time travel is space travel.
Actually, this makes Moe’s original thesis even more intriguing: just calculate how far back you have to toss someone in order to have them end up in deep space and BOOM! no more messy problems.
Moe, I have no insider knowledge, but the first thing that pops in mind is there could be a time-turner style limit to how far back you can go (maybe due to power limitation). Now there can’t be a location limit. Any time machine must be able to compensate for the different positions of the Earth in the two time periods, not just due changes in orbit, but also the expansion of the Universe. So a working time machine must also have a functional teleporter. That said, if there is a 30 year limit then dropping them in the Ocean would not be safe, as there is no guarantee the body would not be spotted by a passing ship or plane.
Heck at this point though why not teleport them to the center of the Earth?
Doug: as long as you don’t dumping the soon-to-be-dead guy in not-so-deep space, you can get by dropping them in the same absolute location in space only a few seconds (or minutes, at most) ago. If they ever fall back to the bottom of the gravity well, I’d think they would burn up on reentry (though, maybe not!).
Canthros:
The problem you run into there is the human-meteors-getting-reported-on-the-6-o’clock-news factor.
@Moe Lane: I am one of them. I was disappointed with 12 Monkeys and thought it unfocused. I don’t know, I was expecting something different with that film.
No, ‘unfocused’ makes sense. That was part of its appeal for me: the surrealism seemed necessary, somehow.
Here’s a question: is momentum conserved during the act of time travel? That is, theorizing that we did place our hit targets several seconds behind the Earth, would they continue on their absolute trajectories? Technically, they’re rotating along with the Earth, as well as hurtling ’round the Sun, so could we end up in a scenario where an ever-increasing string of corpses would form some sort of macabre comet-tail-like appendage in Earth’s wake?
So there could be a zombie horde at the trailing LaGrange point?