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      The Ars guide to time travel in the movies

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 24 November - 12:30 · 1 minute

    The selected films span several decades to show how Hollywood's treatment of time travel in Hollywood has evolved.

    Enlarge / The selected films span several decades to show how Hollywood's treatment of time travel in Hollywood has evolved. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

    Since antiquity, humans have envisioned various means of time travel into the future or the past. The concept has since become a staple of modern science fiction. In particular, the number of films that make use of time travel has increased significantly over the decades, while the real-world science has evolved right alongside them, moving from simple Newtonian mechanics and general relativity to quantum mechanics and the notion of a multiverse or more exotic alternatives like string theory.

    But not all time-travel movies are created equal. Some make for fantastic entertainment but the time travel makes no scientific or logical sense, while others might err in the opposite direction, sacrificing good storytelling in the interests of technical accuracy. What we really need is a handy guide to help us navigate this increasingly crowded field to ensure we get the best of both worlds, so to speak. The Ars Guide to Time Travel in the Movies is here to help us all make better, more informed decisions when it comes to choosing our time travel movie fare.

    This is not meant to be an exhaustive list; rather, we selected films that represented many diverse approaches to time travel across multiple subgenres and decades. We then evaluated each one—grading on a curve—with regard to its overall entertainment value and scientific logic, with the final combined score determining a film's spot on the overall ranking. For the “science” part of our scoring system, we specifically took three factors into account. First and foremost, does the time travel make logical sense? Second, is the physical mechanism of time travel somewhat realistic? And third, does the film use time travel in narratively interesting ways? So a movie like Looper , which makes absolutely no sense if you think about it too hard, gets points for weaving time paradoxes thoroughly into the fabric of the story.

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      First teaser for FX/Hulu’s Kindred miniseries plays up the horror elements

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Tuesday, 8 November, 2022 - 21:17 · 1 minute

    An adaptation of Octavia Butler's classic 1979 novel is coming to FX with Kindred .

    First published in 1979, sci-fi author Octavia Butler 's bestselling novel Kindred defies conventional genres, incorporating classic time-travel tropes, Antebellum South slave narratives, and historical fiction. Butler herself described it as "a kind of grim fantasy." More than 40 years later, Kindred is now an eight-episode TV miniseries, coming to Hulu next month, and we now have our first look via a 90-second teaser.

    (Spoilers for the 1979 novel below.)

    Butler's novel is told from the first-person perspective of a young Black writer named Dana, who moves to Los Angeles with her husband Kevin in 1976. On her 26th birthday, Dana suddenly becomes dizzy, and the walls of their LA home fade away. She finds herself at the edge of a wood near a river and promptly rescues a young, red-haired boy named Rufus Weylin. Another dizzy spell quickly brings her back to her present, but the attacks keep coming, and soon Dana is being transported back and forth on a regular basis, for varying lengths of time. (Time passes more swiftly in the past, further complicating matters.) She quickly learns there are certain compromises she must make, and cruelties she must endure, in order to navigate the Antebellum South. Eventually Kevin finds himself transported back to the same time period, too, and must learn to navigate the Antebellum South as a white man.

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