Time Travel Stories Reviewed: The Adam Project, Shining Girls, and Sea of Tranquility
As I tend to do, I rounded up a list of must-see/read sci-fi stories for the year and pregnancy has given me a really good excuse to indulge in reading and watching for more hours than I usually would.
I always like to make sure my annual list includes a few time travel stories. With my own books being in this genre, I like to stay plugged in (even though it isn’t what I’m writing at the moment).
Time travel is such an extraordinarily diverse storytelling device. It can be a catalyst for comedic fodder (Back to the Future, Future Man). It can be extremely nuanced and mind-bending (Donnie Darko, Sound of My Voice). Or it can be a tool for adventure (Star Trek, X-Men: Days of Future Past). However it’s used, I typically love its range.
The three time travel stories I’ve most recently indulged in, used time travel in a spectrum of ways. Some did it well. Some fell a little flat.
Shining Girls
Of the three stories I’ll be reviewing, the adaptation of Lauren Beukes’s The Shining Girls on Apple TV+ was my favorite. As a megafan of The Handmaid’s Tale, I was delighted they cast Elizabeth Moss.
Though I admittedly didn’t read the book (had all of the best intentions, but you know that TBR pile is high), I knew a little bit about the story going in. Still I was really enticed by the way time travel was used.
[Spoiler alert!]
The story revolves around a serial killer who found a house that allows him to time travel. So as many of these crime fictions go, he stalks his prey. But he is able to do it over and over and over again to the point where he is visiting victims in early childhood and repeatedly on the same day.
So instead of time travel being an adventurous apparatus, it’s more like a weapon, wielded against women over decades making the killer more ominous and more elusive. In addition to how the killer uses it, the way it impacts the overall timeline is extremely well done and unique.
Kirby (Elizabeth Moss) is the lone survivor of the killer’s attacks, but it’s not just the trauma of her experience that she has to survive. The time tinkering that took place is affecting her present. One moment she’s living with her mom, the next she’s married to a co-worker. Her present is constantly shifting because of the all the time traveling fuckery that has now entangled her with the predator.
Across the board, I thought the show was really well done. It was a super compelling story, with solid acting and a hook you couldn’t look away from.
#SciFiIIRL: I always like to pull out anything from science fiction stories that is reflective of real-life. Often, there is a huge abundance, but because this story more borders on fantasy than science fiction, there wasn’t nearly as much as some others. The number one detail dealt with quantum entanglement. The surviving victim and the killer were two particles across time and space, inextricably connected. What one of them did impacted the other. It made for an effective conflict, and interesting play on the concept.
The Adam Project
I do not require all my entertainment to be highbrow, thought-provoking work. Sometimes, a good ol’ summer movie with action, laughs and a little heart is just fine. And that’s what The Adam Project is.
Possibly the most classic of time travel tales, this movie unfolds with few surprises:
Time travel is invented in the future. It’s bad. Bad people control it. Gotta go to the past to stop it.
I have no interest in being condescending. The movie was perfectly watchable even if it was predictable and rehashed. Ryan Reynolds is the same guy he always is, which, I have to say, never gets old for me. He’s hard not to love and can carry even the most ordinary of stories to the finish line. Netflix has a hard time making great movies, IMO. They do much better with shows. Their shows seem to be much less prescriptive than their film counterparts. Nonetheless, like I said, The Adam Project was totally watchable. My kids liked it and they range from four to fourteen. There just isn’t much to say about it. Evil corporations gonna evil corp, ya know?
The tenderness of the father-son relationship was the connective tissue of an otherwise straightforward adventure featuring one of the Millennial generation's most adored leading men as he battles an evil CEO in the effort to save humanity.
#SciFiIRL: This is hardly a mystery in need of extracting and uncovering. But the most obvious nod to the real-life sci-fi world is the evil corporate CEO and an invention that was bad for humanity. Where else might we find this? Hmmmm, just to name a few:
Social media and internet monopolies/Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos
Pharmaceuticals/It’s peddlers
The Federal Reserve/Government
Seed oils and Glyphosate/Big Food, Agriculture
Agent Orange/The Military Industrial Complex
Subprime Mortgages/Bankers
Propaganda/Edward Bernays, Joseph Goebbels
From coffee pods to nuclear bombs… it’s not hard to find irredeemable inventions that come with catastrophic implications for humanity.
Sea of Tranquility
It’s hard to know where to start with this one. I LOVED Emily St. John Mandel’s debut, Station Eleven. So when I heard she did a time travel book spanning across centuries that had everything from moon colonization to simulation theory it was an “oh, hell yeah!” for me.
The story started out strong, weaving seemingly unconnected characters together with little hints of a mystery to come. It’s a quick read and I was able to get hooked fairly fast. Unfortunately, once the time-teasing riddle started to unravel, so did the story.
Perhaps I am far too deep down the rabbit hole to appreciate some of the elementary takes on the theories presented in this story. From a writer as talented as Emily St. John Mandel, I guess I was expecting more nuance and exploration of the subjects she pulls into play.
Instead, the most interesting subjects came off as trivial throw-ins amidst a pandemic-centered diatribe. Her newcomers' take on some of the more intriguing topics like space colonization, time travel and simulation theory fell flat and were wildly under-examined. On the flipside, the century-spanning threat of pandemics felt like an endless indulgence. The fascinating tidbits of far-reaching sci-fi are dropped in and dismissed quickly as “just the way things are.” But the irony that a moon resident can come to Earth for a book tour, but we’re still talking masks, lockdowns (on the moon!), contactless interactions and vaccines as a pandemic solution seemed totally lost on the author. Pepper in tired dialogue around mansplaining and gender roles set 200 years in the future that look identical to today’s complaints by feminists and I nearly put the book down.
The story continues to fall apart with nothing compelling keeping you going other than a loosely held together time travel mystery that folds back in on itself.
#SciFiIRL: This whole book was science fiction in real life as it related to the pandemic. I felt bad for the author who unfortunately seems to have written this story in the bubble of 2020 New York City. It felt more like her processing personal trauma than doing the work of taking a critical eye to the events we all endured.
Ultimately, my biggest struggle and complaint with this book is one I’m having with just about every recent, traditionally published science fiction book I’ve read (and a grand majority of the TV and movies being released). There is WAY too much homogamy in the space. Only one breed of ideas are allowed in and the stories are becoming redundant and flat. They all feel like some sort of a lecture on mainstream talking points. Science fiction is supposed to be an extrapolation of what we see happening around us and casting that on a future world. It’s supposed to be a critique of our leaders, society and culture, not a drumbeat that keeps us marching in the same direction. It has become a stage for proselytizing instead of an exploration of humanity’s best and worst traits. Tired as I am of anything coronavirus related, I was interested to see a book that pulls in this historic moment rather than avoid it. But instead of a careful examination, this was a propaganda piece for doing things exactly as they were done in 2020, no exceptions, despite all we know now about the fallout. The time and space travel elements may as well have not even been there.
And while I don’t fault the author for her insulated take on pandemics, I do fault the traditional publishing industry for doing what all of the media is doing right now. Which is creating this hive mind effect where they are desperately trying to convince us there is only one right way to think.