Kate & Leopold: Elevators in Time

This isn't that big of a movie. But as far as romantic comedies go, it's entertaining enough. Basically, a time-travelling Wolverine falls in love with Meg Ryan. If you're afraid of me spoiling things, maybe you should stop reading, because I'm going to spoil the heck out of this one.

Whenever you throw time-travelling into a plot, there's always going to be severe complications. The problem is that it's incredibly complicated and has hundreds of rules associated with it. Also, no one can agree on what all the rules are. Then you throw into the mix that many writers decide to throw something different in there for flair. This isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination. At its best, you'll have an interesting story that you can debate about with your friends. At its worst, you'll have a ridiculous story you'll still have lots of fun debating with your friends. Really, for the discerning overthinker, it's a win-win situation.

So, basically is begins with a guy named Stuart, who appears to be an amateur scientist who figured out exactly how wormholes work, where they go, and how to predict them.

Stuart does what any scientist would do and leaps through a wormhole he predicted without telling anyone. He then proceeds to take pictures and look incredibly conspicuous. He then attracts the attention of Leopold, who chases him back through the return wormhole.

What follows is one of the most confusing bits of time travel logic. You see, Leopold invented the elevator, so when he goes to the future, all the elevators stop working. Now, they don't disappear, or suddenly never existed. They're there, they just stop working. Obviously he's the god of elevators.

While baffling from a time-travel standpoint, it's also baffling from a writing standpoint. Why? Supposedly it's motive for Leopold to return, but they could have made up a hundred simpler plotpoints that would make a lot more sense. Maybe once he left some douchebag inherited his family fortune and stole credit for his inventions? Maybe the history books say Leopold presumably drowned in a river after getting seriously drunk, and his family was shamed into obscurity? Or if we want to get all science-fictiony, we can say the universe will eat itself if Leopold doesn't return to his rightful place in history.

But, this isn't about pointing out an oddity of time-travel. We're going to assume that in the laws of this universe, that's the way it works. If you invent something then travel through time, your inventions stop working, I'm down with that now. Just hope Nikola Tesla never falls into one of those wormholes.

So, being as the modern elevator is significantly more advanced than the first elevator, we can assume that this law not only applies to the original creation, but to all the advances and refinements that use the basic concept. So every elevator thing in the world suddenly broke. So how many people in the world were in critical condition on a gurnee in a hospital elevator being raced to treatment? Well they're dead.

Police officers riding up elevators to quell violent disturbances in tall buildings? Guess those people are going to be waiting for the law.

Miners hundreds of feet underground trying to get to the surface? Yeah, they'll be there awhile.

Did the time travel elevator clause affect pneumatic or hydralic lifts? That pretty much grinds most industrial processes to a hault.

So at the end of the movie when Leopold returns home and everything spontaneously starts working again, how do people explain it? 'The Great Elevator Outage?' We would have been so crippled by it we would assign think tanks of people to figure out why it happened and prevent it from happening again. I'm going to assume that 'Time-travelling Inventor' probably won't be the first thing they guess. So we're going to have some very bright minds tied up with a problem that hopefully will never happen again.

So, in the end, Leopold jumps back into the wormhole and everybody is happy again. But the Stuart the scientist notices that in the pictures he took with his modern camera in a crowded room in the past, there's Kate. She was in the past. Or rather, she WILL be in the past... in the future.

Despite appearances, this actually makes a lot of sense. If you think of the entirety of time as an always existing fabric, everything that has and will happen has already happened. This is a good way to say time travel is possible, it's basically leaping from one point to another. And you don't have to worry about screwing things up because you were already there. Your present is a direct causation of the past you already affected.

Using this knowledge, Kate, Stuart, and her brother Charlie race to the bridge where the wormhole is. She then leaps off, but instead of dying from the fall, she arrives safely in the past where she lives happily ever after.

Except...

She did die. In the present, by every definition imaginable, she is now dead. She went to the past where she lived out her life and is long dead by this point in time. The authorities are going to have a lot of questions for Stuart and Charlie. Obviously they can't tell the truth, who would believe them? Or if they did tell the truth, the law would probably decide they're delusional murderers.

But let's say they kept quiet, and the police didn't put them down as prime suspects, what then? Charlie's going to have to deal with his grieving family. Again, he can't exactly tell the truth, "Don't worry mom, Kate just went to the past." They'll put up missing person posters and billboards, they'll search, but they'll never find anything. And this could go on for years.

It was a happy ending for Kate... but really not so much for her entire family.

Kinda selfish.

Zel-kun out.