There have been many movies about time travel so far. Most of them fall under the genres of science fiction or fantasy. Among these types of movies, a common formula exists in which situations get worse and more tangled due to time travel and the characters have to resolve them. However, the time travel movie that came out in 2014, the year of cutting edge digital cinema, breaks down our stereotype and shows a very traditional movie. That is a movie, About Time.
There is no grand machinery or special technology used for time travel. Tim has a special ability that has been inherited from his family genes, which is the ability to time travel. To travel through time, he merely has to go somewhere dark, close his eyes and think of the time that he wants to return. With that ability, Tim experiences trivial changes in his daily life. He does time travel to meet a girl he crushed on for the first time again or to help someone precious around him. However, there is no messy story that you have always seen.
Through time travel, Tim becomes mature and realizes the beauty of love and life. In order to become happier, Tim travels through time but at some point, he does not time travel anymore because he has discovered the secret formula for happiness. The first is ‘get on [with] ordinary life living day by day like anyone else’ and the second is ‘to live everyday AGAIN almost exactly the same‘.
A conception that we have is that we wouldn’t find anything special in the repeated ordinary daily life. But this conception crumbles when Tim discovers the tiniest happiness from repeating daily life. “The first time with all the tensions and worries that stopped us noticing how sweet the world can be but the second time, noticing”
Tim could not be in the moment due to all the tensions and worries but through time travel he returns to ‘that moment’ again and he realizes how beautiful that moment is. It is the miracle of miracles that time travel presents. It is a fantasy that human dreams with his greed to become a billionaire or to change history through time travel. The movie has used time travel to see the happiness that exists in daily life.
It shows that even the tiniest happiness is actually a real fantasy that we should dream about. Since his father passed away, Tim returns to the time that the father was alive whenever he misses him and enjoys even just the mundane daily life together with him. With the last chance that he could use for time travel, he goes back to his childhood and takes a walk together with his father. What would you do if the Earth is destroyed tomorrow?
So many thoughts come to mind when confronted with this banal question. However, a choice that we would make in the end would be to spend even just a tiny bit of daily life together with the ones we love. Every moment is a miraculous moment. However, we cannot realize it. We dream for a better future or live bound to the past that was like dream.
The moment you open your true eyes to the world, the miracle is right in front of you. By the end of the movie, Tim no longer time travels. The message that the movie gives us is simple.
“We are all traveling through time together every day of our lives. All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable ride.”
For us, we always time travel in our daily life. The moment we enjoy this travel, we can find real happiness. This is a message of the movie. When we realize the miracle of daily life, we will live life as if there was no second chance.
‘Time travel’ has become the imagination that originates from human’s bad habit to want ‘a second chance’ or delay ‘now,’ all the time. The chance will not come again to people who dream for a second chance. In fact, the concept of time is a concept that only humans mistakenly think exists, but actually does not exist when thinking from the point of view of the everlasting and never-disappearing Universe.
What actually exists is the ‘reality’ of this moment. If you dream about some kind of miracle like time travel, I hope you could discover the miracle that is right in front of you at this moment. And, I wish you could find the method to exist forever, the age of the Universe, which is the real time travel. If so, you will be able to enjoy the time travel forever. You will be able to find the eternal true life. Wouldn’t that be the miracle of the miracles?