I'm a bit later than expected, but here it is: the discussion thread!
I'll Follow You Down
Here we have a sci-fi drama with an interesting cast selection.
Discussion
I felt this one leaned more heavily on the drama side, so I'm interested to hear about what everyone thought about that aspect of the movie.
Other than that we have the time travel aspect of the movie. There's a large selection of time-travel oriented fiction. Did it add anything new to the mix?
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Good time travel movies can be accomplished by limiting the accessibility to time travel. This is why Back to the Future works - he goes back once, it's a mistake, he fucks shit up royally, he has to correct it all, he's got one completely improbable method home and he gets there and he didn't just unfuck everything he made it radically better. The next two movies emphasize your point: once Mr. Fusion is online blipping around the continuum ain't no thang. It's the same limitation that allows Edge of Tomorrow ("Day after tomorrow" is that 2004 thing about how global warming is going to kill us all instantly and dramatically) to work - Tom Cruise is gonna fuckin' die and only by getting the timing right over and over again can he start over. Edge of Tomorrow is basically Groundhog Day with an alien invasion welded on; Groundhog Day is basically Ken Grimwood's Replay with the timescale set to "one day" rather than "one lifetime". Star Trek, under Roddenberry, had the maxim that every change made to the universe during the course of the episode had to be reset to zero by the end of the episode. No budding relationships, no personal beefs, no treaties, the plot was basically catalyst that caused a reaction but neither created nor destroyed anything. The new show has gotten away from this which makes it more interesting.
Consensus seems to be we'd have been better off watching that Solo Bhopal disaster show. To that I'd counter, well why aren't we exploring the mundane emotional impact of time travel instead of the big ideas? I think this film is the answer. Also this was the 2nd highest recommendation of free youtube sci-fi movies. That seems about the right measure and I apologise profusely, for suggesting it while deflecting that zebra2 originally linked that list - Winking Face With Tongue emoji?
Lemme start by thanking you once again for organizing this stuff and putting in the work. I'm glad I watched the movie and I'm happy for the discussion even though I want my 90 minutes back. That said, I don't know if there's a worse genre of science fiction cinema than "talkin' about time travel" movies. You get all the sophistry of a late-night dorm conversation with none of the spectacle of a Back to the Future. Time travel is, of course, a thought experiment and the good explorations of it demonstrate the theories. This is what makes them fun, even if we don't quite buy Michael J. Fox's hand disappearing as he plays guitar. The bad explorations of it are merely lectures. Primer comes immediately to mind, but at least Primer had a vision. It had a goal. I'll Follow You Down is one of those Canadian Content movies that was made largely with public subsidies on the points system that then failed to achieve distribution because it's bad. There's this belief amongst sci fi fans that there's this vast suppressed ocean of great fuckin' sci fi that nobody gets to see because The Man is keeping it down or something but the reality of the situation is most of it is shit. The shittier they are the more likely they are to throw things in non-linear so it's harder to see the shit. Really, this is a movie about a selfish scientist who invents time travel but keeps it from his wife, goes back in time to ask Einstein some questions but gets shot, so his son and father-in-law become obsessed while his wife commits suicide, so the son goes back in time (without telling his girlfriend) so he can make his dad feel bad by committing suicide in front of him. I mean, (1) fuck you for wasting my time (2) fuck you again for forcing this plot down everyone's throats (3) fuck you thrice for blowing 90 minutes on it because Rod Serling solved this problem no less than 24 times in 50 minutes or less. And sure. CAUSALITY. But the random appearance of a gun to shoot the protagonist at the end is such a tired short film trope that some film festivals ban it in writing (DC Shorts Fest among them). This was lazy, sloppy writing, lazy, sloppy directing and lazy, sloppy acting and everyone involved should feel bad. Here's a better time travel movie in which Superman simply thinks about going to 1918 because he falls in love with a picture of Jane Seymour: (Of course, that's Richard Matheson so yeah, it's gonna be better) I wanna do another time travel movie to get the taste out of my mouth. I haven't seen Looper but I hear good things. I'd also recommend Edge of Tomorrow but I'll bet it doesn't stand up to repeat viewings. Also, two of the absolute best movies ever made - Back to the Future and Groundhog Day - are technically time travel movies. Fuck this movie. Thanks for recommending it and thanks for doing this, but fuck this movie.
I ought to recognize this as the go-to opening when you want to slag on the material. I enjoyed both Edge of Tomorrow and Looper. I'll keep those in the pocket for future material lists.Lemme start by thanking you once again for organizing this stuff and putting in the work.
I’ve never seen “Looper,” I’d be down with that.
Are you talking shit about Primer? It's all the rage on the internet for like a decade and it literally put me to sleep and I never looked back. I second Looper because I should watch it again. Predestination is bizarre and confusing and the short story didn't need to be anything else but it's interesting in its ambition. So there's that one too.
I can't say I was a fan of this one really. It wasn't compelling as a drama, and it wasn't compelling as a sci-fi piece either. I will say that the final resolution wasn't what I was expecting to happen, but other than that it had pretty typical tropes and was fairly predictable. The pacing of the film was weird all the way through as well. It felt like non plot-moving development took most of the screen time.