Plot synopsis
When Stanton takes over his father’s scientific research company, he wishes to see proof that progress is being made before he pours any more funds into their time-travel project.
The three scientists wish to prove they can travel further in time than the 24 hours they have managed until now. So, they turn up the laser cycling and increase the protons to full blast, which inadvertently creates a time warp. This takes the whole lab 5,000 years into the future, where aliens are trying to take over the Earth.
When attempting to return to the present, they meet a ball of energy on a collision course with them. They send it a warning message and when they get no reply, Stanton destroys it. In trying to avoid it, they overshoot their arrival time on Earth. This causes them to land during the time of the dinosaurs.
Stanton leaves the scientists behind and comes back to the present alone. But to his horror, he realises he was that ball of energy coming back through time the other way. He hears the warning message and is helpless as his earlier self fires the blast that destroys his ship.
One of the scientists dies in an accident and the time machine mysteriously reappears for the other two. They manage to get back to their own time, but their calculations were not exact enough.
So, they arrive the day before they originally left and both see past versions of themselves moving really slowly. They realise that they have disrupted the flow of time and now exist in a parallel world outside of time.
Mark says to Karen, “We are existing at such an accelerated time rate that we would appear as nothing but shadows to them!”
He predicts that, “two solid objects cannot occupy the space of one, I do not know what would happen … but we would cease to exist!”
They re-enter the time lab to go “to another Earth, another time.” The film ends with them drifting through space.
My comments
The movie begins with the following voiceover:
“During the span of our evolution, time has been measured by the journey of our planet through the darkness of our space. Scientists use our solar system and the cold vast regions of the universe as a giant timekeeper. Time has a quality as hazy and distant as the perimeter of own galaxy. The haze occasionally clears for those minds, which inquire into the very nature of the fabric of time itself and a glimpse of the true meaning of time is revealed. Time: from creation to now tugs towards all yesterdays almost as strongly as the unborn tomorrows that stretch toward all eternity. Someday, man will strike a balance between these two great universal forces: the past and the future. And then man will make a fantastic journey to the centre of time.”
It is interesting to note that physics has no problems with two different objects from different times coming together in the same region of spacetime.
Summary of time travel
The crew travel along the timeline to both the past and the future and are able to change them both. However, when trying to return home, Mark and Karen find they have inadvertently created a parallel world where time moves more quickly.
Category of time travel
Science fiction: creating wormholes.
Model of time
Open past, open future with a parallel timeline.
