Time Travel Genre Project

Our group has chosen time travel for our project. We chose to analyze this sub-genre of film because it is a unique genre often paired up with other genres such as psychological, thriller, mystery, and action. When we started the research, we closely examined the history of time travel and how it had gotten popular enough to become a sub-genre. It had started off with a short silent film from 1920 called The Ghost of Slumber Mountain. This story depicts a man who climbs a mountain to look through a looking glass to see past lives and experiences such as dinosaurs. After evaluating the history of time travel, we chose three scenes that were well spaced out when being released in theaters or streaming services. We chose Groundhog Day from the 1990's for our first scene.

This scene depicts our protagonist, Phil Connors, realizing his time loop. This causes him to worry and anticipate of what is going to happen next as he asks random questions to one of his coworkers. This is a good example of time travel because it depicts how people would feel if they themselves were in a situation like this. Our second scene we chose was Interstellar from 2010.

This scene depicts a character named Dr. Romilly and his hardships when waiting for his crew for 23 years when they went ventured through a wormhole to find the planet Miller. When going through the wormhole, it took them 13 years to find the planet but in actual reality, it took longer. This is a good example of time travel because time had skipped even though the girl who is emotional because of shock was not prepared for it. Our last scene we chose was a show called Re: Zero from 2016 still continuing today.

This scene depicts our protagonist Subaru, who is a normal high school boy. Dying over and over again. Now what this means is that those were all the timelines from when he died because of supernatural beings, suicide, or external factors. Every time he dies, he goes back to a certain point in time to fix his mistakes. Sometimes he dies over and over again. This genre is paired up with psychological thriller and sci-fi as there are many ways he can die in the world, and when he dies he always feels the pain of death. That is why he starts slowly losing his mind. The premise of this show is to never give up because he keeps resetting over and over again until every mistake is fixed. This accurately depicts time travel as time is being manipulated every time he dies.