The Book
With an open slot one week before we began the next movie analysis, it was worth a moment to look at what was coming to the big screen. We looked at the list of time travel works anticipated in 2014. Many of these have since been analyzed.
Not much has been said about Welcome to Yesterday, but the trailer is out. It revolves around some teenagers who find the plans for a time machine and build one. At first they make things better, but then (with something of a butterfly effect element) they become aware of disasters that happened in the altered histories. None of the names leap out. It hits theatres February 28th.
A week later, March 7th, Mr. Peabody & Sherman make their big screen debut in the self-titled film. The remarkable dog is made the more remarkable, including Olympic medalist and business titan, and he and his adopted boy Sherman take a tour of the past, only to find they've made a mistake and have to fix it. So we have a bit of Back to the Future in an animated movie with a PG rating. The voice talent includes Stanley Tucci, Mel Brooks, and Stephen Colbert, all in supporting roles.
The next one on the schedule comes on May 23rd, and it's a potential blockbuster: Marvel releases X-men: Days of Future Past, in which Wolverine is sent to change the past in order to save the future. It sounds like a temporal disaster in the making, but it's sure to be an entertaining one. Many familiar names are in the cast, drawn from both the older and the more recent younger sets of characters, including Hugh Jackman (Wolverine), Ian McKellen (older Magneto), Patrick Stewart (Professor X), and Halle Berry (Storm).
On June 6th, Tom Cruise does a time travel film (his first if we don't count Minority Report) entitled Edge of Tomorrow. It looks like it's a Groundhog Day/12:01 kind of thing, with a single day repeating, this one placed at the end of a war against an alien invasion. Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton are also credited.
It is not yet entirely clear whether Interstellar is a time travel story, or simply a space travel story using a wormhole to overcome temporal distances. We may have to await its November 7th release to find out. It has quite a few names, headed by Matthew McConaughey and Ann Hathaway, with the respected names of Michael Caine, Ellen Burstyn, and John Lithgow in the mix.
One more film is promised for the year, but the release date has not yet been announced. Ethan Hawke leads a cast in Predestination, another temporal police story reminiscent of Timecop (analysis currently in the works) of which little is yet known.
For our part, next week we'll begin looking at the classic film Time After Time, in which Jack the Ripper steals a time machine from H. G. Wells to escape into 1979, and Wells pursues him to bring him to justice. It's a film you'll want to see, and preferably before you've read the analysis which starts next week.
