Reincarnation
What do you do if your strategy is copying old successes, and the copies don’t do as well as you like?
This strategy of ‘rebooting’ is mainstream now. We accept it, so long as the new franchise shows promise. That means that some storylines can be refreshed and the tone of the thing can be re-established with modern camera and CG effects.
I appreciate Scott and Nolan’s approach. Nolan’s Batman ignored all other films. Scott’s reworking of Aliens and Bladerunner preserve the originals. Cameron? Well, lets see what he does with the next Avatars.
X-Men tried something novel: resetting to a parallel timeline so that some franchise elements could be preserved, but the drag of previous experiments sloughed off. The problem is that they did this by a clearly hoked up time bending mechanism.
Here we have more conventional time travel: a machine. Writers made it seem more real in the story by giving it limits that affect the story other than simple transport. They created intrigue by fully explaining the effect of the travel (who is transported, from and to what times), but leaving most of the agecy out of it. Who is responsible? If the same producers continue, we surely will get answers and that will be a shame because leaving this open retains some mystery. Otherwise, we just have chases and fights.
There are two dynamics in this omission that interest me.
One is the fiction we love that a machine intelligence will become vast and functionally evil.
Posted in 2022, original deleted by religious zealots
Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.