It's bloody but fun

(This article was written in August 2019)

In the first half of the year, I watched a movie with a tricky angle. I still can't classify whether it is a romance movie or a sci-fi movie or something. If it had to be classified into one category, it would probably be a bad movie.

"Time Strangers"

I've said more than once that it doesn't matter if a movie is bad, as long as it has something to talk about, or elements that make people think and ponder, other parts are bad and it won't affect me too much. its evaluation. I'm afraid of that kind of useless movie, from the creativity to the technique, even the slot hits other bad movies, then the director is a pure failure.

What I find interesting about this movie is that he puts people into a very sci-fi but very real predicament, and this predicament is hard to even describe in one sentence, he needs a complex premise.

Before we start, ask a question: without considering the feasibility, when you make your girlfriend angry, do you want to find a way to make up for it and understand, or choose the one you didn’t choose before going back to your anger. Options to keep her from getting angry?

If you want to watch a bad movie of this nature calmly, you need to give up your previous experience and knowledge system. You can believe whatever the director says. You must fully accept his major premise, no matter how nonsense it sounds. Just like last year's "A Quiet Place" and "Bird Box", I said that the earth was occupied by monsters, and you don't care how stupid monsters occupied it.

The same goes for this movie. The amount of information in the following narrative is very large, and there are also many slots, which may have to be digested slowly.

The male protagonist is a genius boy who invented a time machine in the basement by himself, which can travel to any moment in his life to change history.

But he doesn't have any ambitions, and he doesn't want to be big. The only reason he invented the machine was because he couldn't talk to his girlfriend. He made his girlfriend angry so many times that he reached the breaking point, so he invented a time machine in a fit of anger, and then listed on the work board all the happy and angry girlfriends in the past year, when, where, and why. He doesn't know which of his past events is the most deadly, so he can only travel back bit by bit, correct everything, resolve a conflict before it begins, and then travel back to see Is your girlfriend still angry?

In this plot, you need to accept the premise that he has the ability to invent a time machine. Now that he's made it, don't dwell on why a high school student can make a time machine by himself. The big deal is that he picks up a time machine left by aliens in the basement. Otherwise, you can't see everything behind.

Interesting is the story after he built the machine.

This story seems simple, but if you think about it carefully, you will find that the difference between it and all similar themes you have seen before lies not only in the pattern, but also in the nature of the problems encountered by the protagonists.

In that year's "Time and Space Clues", Denzel Washington also used the time machine secretly invented by the US government to travel back to a terrorist attack and prevent the terrorists from detonating a ferry. If you ignore the scale of saving the world and saving your girlfriend's relationship, there doesn't seem to be any essential difference between them, but the fun part is, it's not.

Solving a case is a very organized and logical thing. The explosion happened. According to the existing clues, we traced the source, followed the clues, checked carefully, and finally found suspicious points, and then traveled back to stop the murderer before the explosion. This is a very rational and rigorous process. But the emotions between people are almost completely unpredictable, and it is much harder to perfectly grasp a person's emotional changes than to decipher a terrorist attack.

This is because the human mind is completely closed. Before mind reading was invented, no one really knew what other people were thinking. So even the simplest emotions, those that exist only between two individuals, are extremely mysterious and difficult to grasp. You don't know whether she knows you know her thoughts, and then you often don't say it. This is the so-called chain of suspicion. Such a matter that is far more perceptual than rational, if it is solved in this purely rational way, it is like trying to solve an open-ended philosophical question through trial and error. Your answers may be infinite, but you can only try them one by one. There is a wonderful sense of disobedience.

This is not just a mental dilemma, but a strange moral conundrum or philosophical thought.

Now you can go back and think about that question: when you make your girlfriend angry, do you want to find a way to make up for it and understand, or do you go straight back to the anger and choose the option that you didn’t choose to avoid her getting angry?

At least in my opinion, there is no standard answer to this question, or no solution. I believe that different people will understand it differently.

In theory, addressing a problem that has arisen is like arresting the killer after an explosion. Delay him by a thousand knives, and the dead will not be resurrected. From this point of view, this is an indicator that does not cure the root cause. If you can stop him before he commits the crime, that is the fundamental solution to the problem. This way of thinking cannot be wrong.

But when the same solution idea happens to the emotional problems between young couples, you will find that things seem to be reversed.

After you quarreled with your girlfriend, you didn't think about solving the problem that had happened, but simply rewinding the God-scale and avoiding the problem. It sounds very ideal, but in essence, the quarrel between you is because of differences in personality and way of thinking, and the quarrel itself is just a concrete manifestation of this difference reaching a certain level. This disparity has not been coexisted and compromised, and is nothing more than delaying rather than resolving this manifestation again and again.

This idea is evident in the film. As a person who can independently invent a time machine, the male protagonist undoubtedly assigns emotional intelligence to IQ. Once he gave a movie to his girlfriend and a few friends, Amway, but everyone complained that it was a bad movie, and then he ran into the streets in anger and made everyone break up.

It is hard for you to believe that a person with such a character would go back and refrain from scolding, avoiding this dispute, and he will never make the same mistake in the future. So this method is not done once and for all, but you have to use it repeatedly throughout your life.

It's true in the movie. The male protagonist finally made his girlfriend reconcile with him after experiencing countless failed time-travel corrections, but he repeated the same mistakes and continued to quarrel that night. And because the previous quarrel didn't happen after his last correction was successful, so he didn't have the opportunity to make a time machine, so after his last time traveled back, the time machine itself didn't exist. Therefore, he has to rebuild a time machine to correct a new round of mistakes.

This is a bottomless abyss, and it is also the inevitable price of using reason to solve perceptual problems.

So in the second half of the movie, the male protagonist regards the time machine as a quick-acting contraceptive, and rewinds and replays it after every quarrel. This paragraph is quite a bit of the joke style of "Happy Death Day", but he has inadvertently become the master of his girlfriend's life. This kind of master is very strange when you think about it, you have no traces and clues, but inadvertently fate has been arranged on a specific trajectory.

Since then, the prince and princess have lived a life without shame.... What should come always comes, and after a few years, everything went smoothly, and the two people who "never" had conflicts lived a life in the upper class. Finally, one day, my girlfriend said, "It's not interesting at all, why didn't we even quarrel?"

At that moment, I could almost feel the urge to vomit blood in the male protagonist as a science geek. Lao Tzu has gone through countless times behind his back and solved countless conflicts, and then you tell me why we don't have a conflict, do I have to go back and quarrel with you?

So what should come is to come. The film itself poses an impossible problem on an impossible premise that sounds completely unrealistic, but is surprisingly close to life. You can't say that the male protagonist doesn't love his girlfriend. I don't think people who can create a time machine for one person, just analyze the reasons for all the quarrels in the past year are rare animals. But this weird sense of control and problem-solving, even as a person with no moral burden, doesn't feel right to me.

After thinking about it, I found that if I had broken up, I might have broken up long ago, or I would not have been on good terms with her from the beginning. This is the root of all problems. Even with high-tech blessings, it cannot change the incompatibility of two people.

Although the movie finally gave a seemingly ideal ending, it still failed to change it as the most ruthless and successful movie of the whole year this year.

Of course, such a bloody movie is a bit out of line. But that's why it's a bad movie but different from other bad movies. If I insisted that it made me understand something, then it is neither the so-called "quarrel is the husband and wife", nor is it "love cannot be explained by science and formulas", but a person with low emotional intelligence Forced to be able to build a time machine one by one, it is time to be a bachelor or a bachelor. Jumping out of the plot, it is more affordable for me to buy lottery tickets with a time machine, so why waste energy entangled with you humble humans?

(Finish)