Let’s do the time loop again
Plot device richly represented in cinema history
How long have time loops been part of our culture? Three millenniums ago, the Greeks had tales of Prometheus, whose liver ( thought to be the seat of emotion) was eaten every day by an eagle, only to regrow and be eaten again. Or think of Sisyphus, rolling the same boulder up the same hill, over and over. On the other side of the world, the Mayan calendar imagined time as a series of repeating cycles, some of them thousands of years long.
Most modern tales of timeloopery can be traced back to 12:01 p.m., a short story by Richard A. Lupoff, published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in December, 1973. In it, a New York executive relives the noon hour over and over, eventually learning that a physicist has predicted just such a “disfiguration of time,” and that he is now caught in it. It was made into an Oscar- nominated short film in 1990, and a rather less impressive 1993 TV movie, called simply 12:01.
That was the same year that Groundhog Day was released. The miffed makers of 12:01 considered a lawsuit but eventually gave up. An Italian remake, titled Stork Day, was released in 2004.
Of course, nothing about repeating strands of time is simple. Decades before 12:01 p. m., a magazine called Unknown carried a story by Malcolm Jameson, Doubled and Redoubled, in which a man’s “perfect day” keeps repeating, becoming less rapturous each time.
And 60 years before Groundhog Day there was Turn Back the Clock, a 1933 film starring Lee Tracy as Joe Gimlet, who finds himself transported back in time 20 years, able to live out his life with knowledge of the future.
It’s notable for some weird, anachronistic humour; remember when Marty McFly tries to order a Tab or a Pepsi Free in the 1950s and no one knows what he’s talking about? Well, when Joe shows up in 1913 he’s suddenly in a time before alcohol was illegal. (Pre-hibition?) When a man orders liquor at a soda counter, Joe nods and says: “Speakeasy.” Confused, the man replies: “Why should I?”
2018 not only marks the 25th anniversary of Groundhog Day ( and the 85 th of Turn Back the Clock) but the 20th of Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run, in which Franka Potente makes three frantic scrambles through Berlin to save her boyfriend from a crime boss.
Since then, time-loop tales have had their own doubling and redoubling. 2000 gave us the Swedish comedy Naken, about a man caught in a time loop on his wedding day; it was remade last year as the Netflix film Naked, with Marlon Wayans as the groom.
Another Netflix original, ARQ, features Robbie Amell and Rachael Taylor as Renton and Hannah, a couple reliving the same scary morning, as armed men break into their home. This one is unique in that, at first, Renton is the only one who remembers the loop, but eventually Hannah realizes it too. Will their assailants be next? ( Its first- time feature director, Tony Elliott, also made an excellent quantum- themed science-fiction short, Entangled, in 2014.)
The last decade has been something of a golden age for the sub-genre. In 2007, Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo made Los Cronocrimenes ( Timecrimes), a mystery wrapped in a time loop. ( A planned English remake seems to have vanished in its own paradoxical puff of smoke.) 2010 brought Carl Bessai’s excellent Canadian film The Repeaters, with the time loop as a metaphor for addiction — no matter what they do, the inhabitants of a rehab facility seem doomed to repeat their behaviours.
Next came a trio of bigbudget tales of time travel: Source Code, with Jake Gyllenhaal trying to stop a terror attack in Chicago; Looper, with Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis as a man who is given the job of assassinating his future self; and Edge of Tomorrow, arguably Tom Cruise’s best movie since Collateral. Last year gave us Happy Death Day, in which Jessica Rothe must solve her own murder; and Before I Fall, a similar concept but less bloody.
Given Hollywood’s propensity for reusing a good idea, it’s a fair bet that the next 10 years will contain even more variations on the time- loop phenomenon. In fact, maybe the greatest timeloop movie is just ahead of us. Or maybe it’s always been there. It’s hard to know.