IMDB Plot Synopsis: A romantic drama about a Chicago librarian with a gene that causes him to involuntarily time travel, and the complications it creates for his marriage.
- I was under the impression that one of the most basic, basic principles of time travel in fiction was that you can and will alter the future by virtue of travelling back in time in the first place. In order to help Henry achieve Ethical Time Travel™, apparently nothing he does in the past will have any affect whatsoever on anything in the future; it doesn’t affect the current time line, it doesn’t create new alternate futures, nothing. While I will concede that my knowledge of both the nuances of sci-fi time travel as well as the realities of the actual science for potential real life time-travel are somewhat limited, this still does not compute. Logic, it is lacking.
- I suppose this is my own fault since the movie is called The Time Traveler’s Wife, but god do I hate stories that revolve around time travel. It’s a small miracle that my favourite Harry Potter movie is Prisoner of Azkaban considering that story’s time travel component.
- The only thing I like about time travel is the awesome potential for flashback wigs, of which Eric Bana gets to wear a fantastic one when portraying the younger, rougher version of himself.
- I love how when Henry presents Clare with the winning lottery ticket, she “only” wins five million dollars. I guess he didn’t want to be greedy by holding out for a larger jackpot. He’s ethical! Or something.
- Gross images I will never be able to unimagine: a time travelling foetus that can transport itself out of a woman’s uterus, followed by the reaction of the poor person who discovers it in some random location. And now I bet you’ll never be able to unimagine that; my job here is done.
- Speaking of the above, there were a lot of little elements about this that were pretty skeevy for me. I’m moderately nauseated by a middle-aged man who is able to see his future wife at six years old and actively courts her friendship. I’m also nauseated by her falling in love as a teenager with (again I must stress) a middle-aged man she sees once in a blue moon. Do I have to explicitly say this is unhealthy? What kind of parents does this girl have? I know her dad’s a Republican (zing) but I would hope that at some point her parents would have sat her down and said “Don’t talk to strangers, especially if they appear naked in the back yard and tell you that they are your friend from the future.” What kind of thought process goes through this guy’s head where he thinks it’s okay to befriend a young child in secrecy?
Mostly, though, I’m nauseated by Clare’s proclamation that she’s been waiting for him all her life. The title itself should have been clue enough that Clare’s function in the story is to solely be defined by her relationship with Henry, but this kind of took the cake, especially when he told her on two separate occasions that he didn’t want her to sit around waiting for him. Blargh. The most we see of anything else in Clare’s life is her interest in art; I was happy they threw in one micro-scene of her leaving a gallery where she’s hanging a show, because otherwise I would have been forced to assume that as the daughter of a millionaire Republican father, she was probably dabbling in art as part of her poor-little-rich-girl college rebellion. Blerg. - I did like the scene where she was making handmade paper, especially when she put a bunch of pulp in a processor of some sort and then promptly put her paper pulpy hands all over her face in anguish. Gross.
- Their house was gorgeous, especially the kitchen. Unnecessarily big for two people plus an eventual child, but still.
- I enjoyed that Gomez’s daughter at the end was wearing a shirt similar to the “Rock’n'Roll Circus” shirt he was wearing when Henry first met him. Yay, details!
- All of this aside, you can’t go wrong with Eric Bana showing up naked everywhere, all the time, at random. I suppose that’s the main reason to see this movie.
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They were probably operating on the idea that time is not linear and occurs all at once. Mostly I think they were just being lazy plot wise.Also, I don’t understand why if he’s actualyl travelling through time his appearance would change at all when he goes back in time or whatev. If he’s from the future,he’d be the age he began travelling at, aging only for the amount of time he’s in any one place and not fluxing back and forth. Stupid. I’m really suprised this isn’t a Nicholas Sparks novel.
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No, the reason his appearance changes is due to when he leaves his regular time line, so if he’s twenty-nine when he transports forward or backward, he’s still twenty-nine when he gets there. He’s not leaving at age twenty-nine and then showing up in his mid-forties or anything.
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The sequel will be good – The Time Traveller’s Wife vs Marley. In that film Henry goes back to before Marley got sick and brings him back to the family only to find John Mayer, errr I mean Vince Vaughen, errr, Orlando Bloom, errrr any piece of meat sitting in Owen’s place, so Henry and Marley disappear and end up in the bedroom of the Paranormal Demon, long left because it could not stand drivel like those films.
The Time Traveller’s Wife vs Marley – get lost in the woods near Burketsville instead – it’s safer :)
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