The indie duo of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s latest film, Synchronic, was released on digital and VOD recently. If big concept, intelligent and well-crafted genre work splashed with savvy time travel mechanics is your jam, you are going to want to add this one to your rotation (Spoilers ahead)
I’m ordinarily of the “less is more” school of exposition for genre films, time travel is an exception – some exploration of the “how it all works” and logistics is key. Especially if the filmmakers have come up with a new way for characters to experience time. However, too much information and things either get overly convoluted or simply collapse. Benson and Moorhead give us just enough, offering a baseline explanation without getting too deep into the weeds. We get a basic understanding of the how and why without losing sight of the primary objective – the story being told.
In Synchronic, a designer drug is driving victims to bizarre deaths and has an insane side effect, time travel. There is an analogy used in the film that spoke directly to my interests: records. Time isn’t linear and instead works like a vinyl record: you play one track, but the other grooves are already there. ‘Synchronic is the needle’ a character in the film says, letting people travel to the past while physically remaining in the present.
It is a fresh take, I give them that.
However…
We are on a rock that at its fastest is spinning 450m/s (1000mph), circling the sun at 29505m/s (66000MPH), traveling through our part of the galaxy at 19223m/s (43000MPH), orbiting the galaxy at 215920m/s (483000MPH), moving through the universe at 581152m/s (1.3 million MPH). In the time I have typed this we have moved roughly 147,546,000m (91,680 miles) from my original position in the universe. And we are not exactly sure where that point is because we don’t know exactly which way we are traveling in the universe. Or within the galaxy for that matter.
And if we want to go back in time to a specific point and if our calculations are off by even a miniscule amount we could be in the middle of space, or in the moon, or in the earth or in front of an asteroid moving at 66000 MPH about to obliterate us.
Am I wrong in thinking that if you were to travel even a minute into the future or the past, you’d end up in space? The Earth isn’t a static object, it’s moving through space and the universe is constantly expanding. I’ve always assumed the reason we’ll never time travel is that, if we were able to discover how to move backwards through time, it would be pointless without having enough knowledge about the universe to also “teleport” to the exact position you are in now at a specific time. Hell, wouldn’t teleportation without INSTANTANEOUS transfer leave you in space as well?
And…
I have felt that traveling through time causes one to jump to adjacent parallel universes, thus negating virtually all paradoxes. For example, if you travel to the past, you have entered a universe where your presence alters any and all causality going forward, even the displaced air pressure from your arrival could have an effect. Thus, paradoxes such as the Grandfather Paradox don’t apply because you are a DIFFERENT person than the version of yourself. Therefore, killing your ancestor would not cause yourself to cease to exist, because you existed in the previous universe you had traveled from
Conversely, traveling forward in time has a similar effect, where you enter a universe where you no longer have a direct causal effect on events that you might have had you been present. You could argue that anyone who ‘drops off the face of the earth’ is traveling forward in time by this logic, but taken to its logical extreme. Even so, use of time travel in this instance would effectively remove yourself from the universe, albeit temporarily, to reemerge in a new universe where you for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist
Returning to your time of origin presents a similar problem. If traveling forward from the past, you are in effect running along the timeline you created by arriving in the past in the first place, and even having done nothing upon arrival or departure. You have made infinitesimal changes, and thus will arrive in yet another universe where after changing the past, you temporarily cease to exist only to arrive in a new universe where those changes play out without your direct interference. Same returning to the present from the future. The very act of traveling through time causes the traveler to arrive in a new universe, thus making it impossible to actually return to your original universe, therefore explaining why there are no time travelers. Anyone who leaves a timeline can never return to it, and no one can ever arrive in an established timeline because of the infinite multiverse and the permutations therein.
Synchronic is an entertaining journey and is available on digital platforms now.
–Dagobot
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