Next is like Minority Report. He can change the future based on his knowledge of it. In one scene, he is being shot at, and you see his sight of it. If he steps to the left, he gets shot, so he steps to the right instead. If he goes forward, he get shot, so he goes differently instead. Really cool scene.

What you describe of Next and Premonition both suggest time travel–the former, that information is traveling from the future to the present (unless it winds up being like Minority Report, a “most probable future” scenario which is easily changed), the latter involving someone moving between points in time in a convoluted fashion that is going to require careful attention to detail. If Lake House is like Frequency (and I think it is from what I’ve been told) then it, too, is about the transfer of information from the future to the past, and will set up its own anomalies. However, at the moment I’m committed to doing Primer, and it’s taking me a lot of time to actually watch the whole film once, so it will be a while before I get anything else done there.

Thanks for tackling Mimzy.

–M. J. Young

I got a copy of The Next Mimzy, and with your permission, I’d like to try to write that time-travel analysis of it. I’ve seen Primer. No, the movie drags. It has nothing to do with you watching it late. I have also seen Lake House, it’s sort of like Frequency, except it is letters instead of Ham radio calls. I think it ends in a huge infinity loop, but I could be mistaken.

Next and Premonition probably belong in the “Other movies” section. Neither of them is time travel in the sense that you conceive it. Next is about a man who can see 2 minutes into the future, and Premonition has Sandra Bullock bouncing around different days of a 2 week period. It does kind of include the Uncaused Cause, since the disaster she is trying to prevent is only caused by her intervention to stop it. I think you should put those 2 in the “Other Movies” section if you do anything with them at all. Just my two cents.

John “A1nut”