The Horrors of Change-Your-Fate Films

I’m a big fan of time travel. Not like I have a delorian or Tardis or anything and I regularly make trips into the past (that would be awesome), but I like a good movie or TV show that deals with time travel. And while many time travel movies involve people going back and visiting some ancient culture, there seems to be a subgroup of time travel films where a person goes back and affects events in their own personal timeline. I refer to these films as “Change Your Fate”. And while many of them are portrayed as innocent morality tales, there is something truly terrifying about them.

First of all, most time travel movies have established that changing the past is usually a bad thing. While you may be changing events for the better, there is no way of really knowing what sort of future will be produced by a change in the past. Since movies about changing one’s fate are precisely about changing the past, essentially these films are doing what every time travel story tells you NOT TO DO.

You may be asking “What’s the problem with changing something in my past? Aren’t I only affecting myself?” Well if you’re asking that then you have obviously never heard of The Butterfly Effect. No, not the movie starring Ashton Kutcher. I’m referring more to A Sound of Thunder. In that book (there’s also a movie, but the movie is bad so I shall refer to the book) hunters go back in time to kill a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Careful precautions are taken so that they are not disturbing the timeline. Killing a dinosaur mere seconds before it was fated to die and collecting all evidence of their trip back in time. Except one hunter steps off the path and squashes a butterfly. Killing that one butterfly changes all of history.

And that’s the disturbing part of Change-Your-Fate films. The things the character is changing in his or her life have ripple effects that spread out to all the rest of the world. Each person interacts with several individuals each day and while we may not immediately see it, our actions affect the world around. If you change the actions of any one individual you change how he affects the world around him. And those changes affect others whose actions are also changed and soon the entire timeline is completely different.

I’ll just give an example. The movie 13 Going On 30 shows a young Jennifer Garner fast-forwarding from a teenager to her adult self and seeing how far she has come in life. Now by the end of the movie she realizes that this new life resulted in her changing who she was and when she is zapped back to her younger self decides to live her life differently. So essentially she changes everything in her life that happened in between 13 and 30. Seventeen years of her life completely altered. She probably affected a lot of people in those seventeen years whose lives will now all be completely different. For the better or for the worse, we don’t know. We only see how her life is affected. None of her friends or coworkers seem to matter and may have all ended up with vastly different lives without her intervening in them.

Groundhog Day is another film like that. Instead of the character traveling back in time with future knowledge, Bill Murray’s character Phil is living the same day over and over again. Eventually this time loop is broken but not until Phil has developed the ability to affect the lives of nearly every single person in the town. Now while it seems like Bill Murray manages to affect everyone’s life for the better we have no idea if that is how things turn out. Sometimes suffering is a necessary part of human life. A person goes through a bad experience and comes out stronger. But if Bill Murray intervened and prevented such event from happening, while it may be beneficial in the short run it could change the characters fate in the long run.

Any knowledge of the future is bad. At least so says the expositional characters in any number of time travel films. Therefore every movie in which a character is given future knowledge must have negative consequences. The story may work out for the characters but there are still ripple effects. So many stories have shown that if someone tries to purposefully change the past usually an even worse event will occur. For example, kill Hitler and an even more brutal dictator may come into power. So if purposeful time changes have negative effects, than logically any time changes simply through prior knowledge must also have a negative effect.

"The only way to time travel."

There is a theory that everything is connected. In the world of fiction, this is even truer since everything is coming from a single source. It is because of this singular vision that we never see how changing events affects the world outside the purview of the story. In a way that makes the tragedies to befall those individuals even more tragic since their stories are never told. The lovers that never meet, the children that were never born, the lives that were never saved, all because one person wanted to change his own selfish existence.