Time travel is a bunch of hooey

I watch a lot of movies in the theater, averaging two or three a week. And I’m that guy who whispers usually accurate plot predictions to the person next to me, oftentimes ruining an upcoming surprise for an eavesdropper with less foresight. So, I see—and criticize—tons of movie trailers, but none have annoyed me enough to warrant their own rave until The Time Traveler’s Wife. Starring Rachel McAdams and the first big-screen Hulk, Eric Bana, the film adaptation of a popular novel promises a juicy love story taking place across time.

See, Eric, the “time-traveler,” has an issue with his inability to stay put within the time-space continuum. Granted, I’ve never read the book and obviously haven’t seen the movie, and all of this has been gleaned from the showy trailers. Regardless, this premise provides for oodles of plot complications that bring screenwriters into fields they had no intentions of concerning themselves with. Compiled below is a list of problems I see with the trailer that should ruin the film for any astute moviegoer.

In the trailer, a sentimental flashback scene features a full-grown Eric Bana talking to a child version of Rachel McAdams. “You and I are friends,” he tells her, “In the future.” She denies the possibility of time travel—quite accurately, I might add—and he persists to fade into oblivion, proving both that time travel is possible within Hollywood’s warped reality and that the film boasts a moderate special effects budget. Cute, you’re saying. But the problem here is that Eric Bana will meet Rachel McAdams at a point in the future where she recognizes him but he doesn’t know her. Their relationship has to begin somewhere, and if it’s not at the first point chronologically when Rachel first sees Eric Bana, as I assume this scene covers, the movie has all sorts of problems.

A pregnant Rachel McAdams lounges in a bathtub having a conversation with Eric Bana. “We name her Alba,” he informs her, “She’s so beautiful.” This is, presumably, the first Rachel McAdams has heard of the name Alba, and so one begins to wonder: if Eric Bana is reporting from the future of some yet-to-be-seen development, does he actually cause it? And who actually came up with the name Alba? It definitely wasn’t Rachel McAdams, and Eric Bana is simply telling her about what happens. Now that it’s established as future reality, however, Eric Bana has effectively made it true. Rachel has no choice but to name the child Alba, subjecting her to a childhood full of ridicule and ill-natured playground banter.

“Major events pull me in, like gravity,” explains Eric Bana. The Wikipedia entry for the novel calls Bana’s involuntary time-traveling condition a “genetic disorder,” meaning he’s had it his entire life. This raises the following issues:

• Question one: how did that work out when he was an infant, dependent entirely upon his parents? What, he’d just disappear one day and pop up a couple weeks later?
• Question two: how can he understand which events really are the major ones if they’re the only ones he’s ever experienced? If he’s hopping from time to time and only witnessing weddings, funerals, first dates, et cetera, then he is titling these “major” events relative to what, exactly?
• Question three: if he’s living a fraction of the lives normal humans live, why does his hair become grayer over the course of the preview? And why does it seem his hair becomes grayer relative to real-life chronology, since he’s going back and forth through time? At some points he’d be much older than Rachel McAdams when they see each other, and other times much younger.
• Question four: since he’s only living through these “major events,” is he going to die much later than McAdams? Or, maybe, has he already died during a venture into the past? What, exactly, is the range of his time travel? Can he travel before his own birth and after his own death? Can he travel to, as it’s called in a popular YouTube video, “dinosaur times?”

These are my gripes with the trailer for The Time Traveler’s Wife. If you have any of your own, feel free to add them to the comments. I demand logical consistency from my movies, especially those concerning time travel—maybe that’s why I enjoy Minority Report and Donnie Darko so much.