movie science

In the world of cinematic science fiction one of the most appealing themes involves a universe brimming over with intelligent life. In this imagined future (or past) humans interact with alien friend and foe because they've at last hammered down the ability to travel to distant stars and galaxies, and, yes, "to boldly go where no man has gone before. Having grown up on the original Star Trek series, observed the effect of the Star Wars movies on the zeitgeist of movie-going generations and enjoyed sci-fi soap operas like Battlestar Galactica, I have to admit I wish we could make it happen; no matter the odds.

Spiderman, Batman, the Fantastic Four, Ironman—seems like every time we go to the movies, there's some guy in a unitard saving the world with acts of unnatural physics. We realize that these are works of fantasy, so we don't get too upset when the science portrayed in them comes from some alternative universe.

Forget about jumping back to the age of the dinosaurs. In Primer, a time- travel movie opening this month, the characters barely backtrack a full workday. When Shane Carruth, the writer, director and co-star, set out to make a film about two friends who construct a time machine in a garage, he wanted to offer an unconventional take on the genre. “In other stories, people seem to 'jump' from one point in time to another,” Carruth says, which didn’t make sense to him.