Plot synopsis
The Pentagon’s ‘Human Hibernation Project’ cryogenically freezes two pods for a year. One contains Joe, an army librarian with an average IQ, and the other is Rita, who is a prostitute.
The top-secret military experiment gets abandoned when the officer in charge is arrested due to an unrelated incident, and the pods are forgotten.
The pods are accidentally opened in 2505, and Joe and Rita find themselves in a strange future world. The dumb under-classes have out-bred the intellectuals, who became too career-focussed.
Clueless idiots now run the world, and Joe and Rita are the two smartest people alive. They must adapt and re-educate the masses, as the economy has collapsed, and people are starving due to crop failure.
Joe soon becomes President of the United States, while looking for a time machine to take himself home. He eventually gives up and marries Rita; they have three children and live happily ever after.
My comments
See also other films with cryogenic freezing, such as Forever Young (1992), Sleeper (1973), Demolition Man (1993), Vanilla Sky (2001) and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997).
Summary of time travel
Cryogenic freezing does not change the past, but the time traveller’s arrival in the future can change it.
Also, from the moment he leaves the timeline, his absence will cause a new timeline to be created for the world he has left. But without backwards time travel, it is not possible to say whether it would have diverged or converged back.
So, he arrives on a future timeline, which may or may not be the same one that he left; hence the dashed line between the origin and his point of arrival in the following diagram.
Category of time travel
Science fiction: cryogenic freezing
Model of time
Undefined past, open future with a future timeline.
