Wednesday, September 23, 2020

The Logical Impossibility Of Endgame's Ideas About Time Travel

It is logically, hypothetically possible to travel from one point in time to the next, even if there is no known technological way to do such a thing at the current time.  It is also logically possible to portray time travel in entertainment without including any contradictory or philosophically false notions about time.  Nevertheless, movies like The Terminator and Avengers: Endgame, no matter how artistically competent they might be, feature problematic types of time travel.  The latter film is even more thoroughly wrong in its descriptions of time travel than many others because a mouthpiece character for the writers directly makes false statements about how time travel would work.

Bruce Banner, the mouthpiece in question, says that changing the past does not change the future because revisiting the past makes it the new "present," which allegedly negates the linear progression of time.  This approach to time travel is at least somewhat unique in cinematic storytelling, and many time travel movies that explicitly confirm a more conventional flow of time end up contradicting themselves in some important way.  However, it has a major problem: it is not just slightly wrong, but entirely asinine.

The flaw is that while any sort of theoretical time travel by necessity means that the time traveler experiences the past (or future) moment they traveled to as if it is the present, it still is just an individual moment on a timeline that must give way to the moments that follow.  Since it is past events that set up future events, it is logically impossible for the past not to shape the future!  Of course, the events of Endgame actually show that this fact cannot be avoided in either life or storytelling.

There are actually multiple examples of the characters who believe this notion about time contradicting themselves.  One of the most blatant is the very premise of the film: the entire reason why the Avengers use time travel to collect the Infinity Stones in order to undo Thanos's snap is to change the future by changing the past.  Without this goal, the story of the movie could not have been constructed.  It is so fundamental to the film that it is odd that a character presented as intelligent would suggest this concept.

In addition to this prominent contradiction, the entire reason Captain America returned the Infinity Stones to their former positions near the end of the film was to prevent diverging timelines, which would only be necessary if the past does shape the futureEndgame's plot contradicts itself here and elsewhere because it is logically impossible for time to be anything other than a linear duration in which psychological and physical events determine what comes next.

Nothing about the basic story of Endgame would have needed to be changed if this self-defeating claim about time travel was simply left out of the dialogue, but filmmakers often have a difficult time explaining time travel while integrating it into their stories without some sort of logical contradiction emerging.  Perhaps the popularity of nonlinear or otherwise contradictory ideas about time due to philosophically invalid ideas within entertainment.  Even sheer ignorance about otherwise basic logical facts is closer to rationality than believing in contradictory ideas!

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