MovieChat Forums > Paycheck (2003) Discussion > Am I missing something?

Am I missing something?

posted 8 years ago by virgiltx
2 replies | jump to latest

In order for him to make his sequence of escapes, he needs those devices. If there were just one escape situation, that might make sense. But there's a series of them.

-For him to see the need for the subsequent devices, he needs to have progressed through the sequence of escape situations, which means those subsequent challenges depended on his surviving the prior escape situations.

-So he would need to have escaped to the later situations, with the use of the helper articles from the envelope.

-So he would have foreseen his foreseeing the future and arranging to have those devices, and would have foreseen using them, up to a point.

-So some events of the story cannot happen until they've already happened.

____________________
The story is king.

[–] Buskieboy 8 years ago

Uh, he has access to a time machine viewer, so he probably saw what he needed to know.
But all time travel kind of movies have so many paradoxes that you really need to suspend
your disbelief and just enjoy them as "what if" kind of entertainments.

🕓🕟🕔🕡🕕🕘🕙🕚

[–] [deleted] 5 years ago

"But all time travel kind of movies have so many paradoxes that you really need to suspend "

That's a bit of a blanket-statement that leaves no possibility for time travel-movies to not have 'so many paradoxes'.

There ARE time travel-type movies that do not have anything contradictory, and in any case, not MANY paradoxes.

"The Terminator (1984)" has only -one- thing, that in my opinion, would break the time travel-story. Bringing John's name from the future would make Sarah, our individualistic and stubborn 'mother of the future' either a complete slave to someone else's idea of what to name HER SON..

..or it would make her stubbornly change it to something else, if only JUST to see what would happen (I know I would).

Besides that, the movie's time travel doesn't really create any paradoxes whatsoever (besides the 'pre-destination paradox', the only kind that makes time travel movies plausible for the viewer, until something else is proven to do the same).

Another movie is "12 Monkeys", which also doesn't allow changing of the future by tinkering with the past - everything is pre-set to happen exactly as it always did, both past and the future (which is basically the present).

What are the 'so many paradoxes' of those two movies? I am waiting for a comprehensive list, or admission that you were wrong and doing an unfair blanket statement about movies you haven't probably even seen.