Caption / Spider-Man Parallel Universe
How are the superheroes of 2022 doing?
Although "Spider-Man: Heroes Of No Return" was not released in China in the end, the global box office of $1.885 billion still shows everyone the huge appeal of three generations of Spider-Man in the same frame. However, the Douban score of this work has fallen from 8.0 to 6.8 today, but it also shows the audience's dissatisfaction with the plot of the movie. This is not a problem with The Spider alone, but a manifestation of the entire Marvel multiverse falling into burnout after experiencing its climax.
In contrast, "The New Batman", which was released last month, has significantly performed better in word of mouth. Warner's strategy of suspending the DC Multiverse and focusing on independent stories after the "Justice League" defeat seems to have paid off. There's more than one superhero movie on the way to 2022, building its own multiverse at its own pace. The concept of the multiverse is no longer new, and time travel or parallel universes have long become the source of materials for various types of film and television animation and games, and a variety of subdivided genre films have been derived. "Crossing" has gradually changed from a relatively obscure concept to the most common element symbol in popular culture, and Tumblr has also made a sorting out of various cross-over films (note that there are slight spoilers for the film in the picture), which can peek into the tip of the iceberg of the cross-genre.
Who first plucked the strings of time, and how did the multiverse music play? The answer is to be found in history.
Machine Cult: The initiators of traversal tend to trace scientific time travel fiction back to 1895 by the British writer Herbert Wells in Time Machine. In the novel, the author fantasizes about using a time machine to travel to the future, seeing that the future of human beings is divided into two extremely opposing races, a metaphor for the social contradictions of the 19th century. This novel has a far-reaching impact, not only has it been adapted into a movie many times, but also influenced many later works. The time machine in the novel is also often used as a tribute to various film and television works, such as "The Big Bang Theory", which has countless terriers, and naturally does not let go of such classics.
Before "Time Machine", time travel was mainly achieved by sleeping, and it was possible to travel through several years to see how many years the person could sleep. After Time Machine, the crossing can finally be controlled by the operators themselves, and this is the power of science. But then again, the theory of relativity will not be published for another 10 years, and the crossing in "Time Machine" has no scientific theoretical basis, and the author only uses this machine to describe a future he fantasizes about. The work reflects the mechanical cult that prevailed in that era: machines can fulfill all human wishes, and how machines operate inside is not something that users need to care about. This has become an important genre of time travel: give you a machine and you can travel up and down for five thousand years. Ming traveled through time, but in fact, he only organized a sightseeing tour of another world, and this kind of sightseeing is obviously very popular with everyone. For example, "Timeship", produced by the Son of the Japanese Dragon in 1975, is an adventure anime called time travel. The production team designed the time spaceship into the shape of the insects loved by children such as unicorn immortals (the internal structure refers to the "time machine"), and traveled through ancient China, ancient Rome until the age of dinosaurs in the form of a unit drama, which greatly satisfied the audience's curiosity. This film was not introduced into China by LiaoYi dubbing until 1994, in which the villain's magic character song of "Huhaha, Huhaha, We are geniuses, brain melons are good..." has become the memory of a generation of friends.
The American drama "Time Tunnel", filmed in 1966, became the memory of another group of viewers because it was once broadcast at the CCTV Zhengda Theater. The black-and-white time tunnel has also become a classic image symbol, which has been homaged by many later works.
Universal Pictures' 1985 "Back to the Future" completed the worship of machines and integrated the time machine into a car. For American teenagers in the 80s, getting a driver's license and owning your own car was a sign of adulthood, and if this car could travel through time, it would be so cool!
With the rise of game culture in the 80s, time machines have naturally influenced games, and machines used to travel through time are also how cool they come from. For example, in the classic masterpiece "The Wheel of Time", there is a "timewing" spacecraft used to travel through time and space.
The "Red Alert" series deeply binds the plot to the time machine, making Einstein also into the game, and even burying easter eggs that let players catch dinosaurs from the age of dinosaurs to help fight.
Although the time machine is getting cooler and cooler in movie games, the foundation of machine worship has long been shaken. Especially in the new century, when more and more discussions have changed from how machines can increase productivity to the alienation of machines to humans, many science fiction stories have abandoned machine worship and begun to criticize scientific theory. The one that went the furthest was "Rick and Morty," which aired in 2013.
After more than a century of machine worship, time travels back to its starting point: the quest for the meaning of man's own existence. The extremes of sosophy make humans forget about self-reflection, and what Rick and Morty and similar works do is only to remind humans that science is only a means, not an end. After all, human beings' own problems must be solved by human beings themselves.
In 1905, Einstein published a special theory of relativity, opening the door to scientific explanations of time travel. It is said that at that time, "only 3 people in the world could understand the theory of relativity", but this did not prevent science fiction creators from using the chicken of relativity to give birth to the eggs of their own stories. With the french writer Héhne Bach zavelle's 1943 "Careless Traveler" first proposing the grandfather paradox, it was suddenly discovered that the theme of time travel could also be played as a game of logical reasoning.
Faced with this paradox, some people are struggling to find answers and even write letters to ask Einstein, while others use exquisite writing skills to start building their own logical labyrinths. For example, Heinlein's "You Souls", Ray Bradbury's "A Thunder" and so on are classics, and even Churchill wrote "If Lee hadn't won the Battle of Gettysburg", who said politicians can't open their minds? If you're unfamiliar with these ancient novels, there are more approachable Japanese works that show us the paradox of time, such as the time machine hidden in Nobita Nobita's drawer. Fujiko · F. Fujio did not waste the prop of the time machine when creating Doraemon, but used it to create a number of small stories related to time travel. For example, in "Danger! Lion-Faced Man! In this story, the author cleverly triggers a time paradox in just 13 pages. The story begins with Nobita and Doraemon dreaming of seeing next month's Lion-Faced Comics series in advance, only to be asked by the comic book author to use the time machine to buy back the published manga magazine in the future. Finally, Doraemon awkwardly asked, "Who should the real author of the manga be?" "The story is over.
Now people go to the future to buy back the comic book to copy it and publish it again, so who came up with the plot of this comic? This is a typical case of the grandfather paradox "out of nothing". The great thing about Doraemon is not how well the story is told, but that it tells the story in a way that elementary school children can understand and points out the paradox. A similar story appears more than once in Doraemon, where Nobita runs to both his parents who have influenced him in the past and to the future to confirm that his bride is Shizuka. The author has also repeatedly let Nobita or Doraemon on different timelines get together and even fight.
After all, "Doraemon" is only a unit drama, and you can leave the logic loopholes and let the small partners compete for a red face. But in movies that want to tell a good story, the logical loopholes are not so easy to fill. For example, when Cameron's "Terminator" series was first launched, its setting of traveling through the past to save the future was amazing, but as sequels continued to be launched, there were more and more logical loopholes, and finally fell into the infinite nesting doll mode, and the reputation also plummeted. The "Back to the Future" series also came to an end after experiencing a trilogy, the model car sold a lot, even the game has come out of 6, but the movie has no new plans so far. This is also the reason why films with the theme of time paradox can rarely form a series of big IP. The logic game of the time loop expands exponentially once it starts, until it ends up falling out of the control of all screenwriters. Borrowing a picture from Netflix's 2020 crossover drama "Diablo" illustrates this point.
Once the strings of time are plucked, no one can stop it. The logical paradox of the brain-burning not only puts forward extremely high requirements for the creators, but also has a high threshold for the audience's understanding. Watching a serious time-travel movie is like putting the brain in an extreme marathon, and not everyone can stick to it to the end. This is also the reason why every time Nolan's new film is released, someone will make hours of video science movies with various physical knowledge. And even Nolan will eventually rein in the meaning of traveling through time and space back to human beings themselves, as he borrowed From Anne Hathaway in Interstellar: "Love is a force that allows us to perceive its existence beyond the dimensions of time and space." ”
Multiverse: Superheroes gather here to logically and seriously cross the threshold of movies, and producers who covet the audience's wallet must use their brains to develop more people-friendly crossing works. The multiverse that evolved from the superhero world became a great idea.
American superheroes represented by Superman, Spider-Man, etc. have been on the road of advancing with the times since their inception. But whenever there is any major event in society, superhero comics will immediately create a story with the corresponding theme. During the Great Depression, superheroes were busy doing community heroes to help the poor; when World War II began, superheroes went to the front line to tear up ghosts; the atomic bomb exploded, and the superhero family gave birth to a group of heroes who used atomic power, and the latest scientific discoveries often became the source of superhero power. However, after World War II, superhero comics suffered a big setback. The bloody and violent elements of the comics were criticized by parents' schools, and sales fell for a while. In the face of this challenge, Marvel's approach is to create high school characters such as Spider-Man (who debuted in 1962) to make the work closer to young people, while DC's approach is to sell feelings and pull popular classic characters back into the story. DC did not simply and rudely restart the old characters, but borrowed the concept of the multiverse parallel world just proposed by the physics community, and let the new and old generations of flashmen in different time and space meet in the same world line in the 123rd issue of "The Flash", opening up the multiverse of DC Comics.
Comics were originally introduced into the multiverse only to fill in the various logical loopholes and copyright disputes caused by the super-long series, introducing classic characters to attract lost old readers without affecting new readers. As a result, this setting was very popular as soon as it was launched, and DC also found a new way to make money, and the "bundled sale" effect was excellent in the way of popular heroes and unpopular heroes. At that time, Marvel also followed closely behind to create superhero universes such as the Avengers, and also accumulated many fans.
Since then, both DC and Marvel have formed a tradition of restarting their worldviews every once in a while in order to keep their superheroes young and in line with the aesthetics of the new era. For example, the origin story of Iron Man changed from the previous Vietnam War to the Afghan War. Spider-Man graduated from high school as early as 1965. But in the latest Spider-Man movie, Spider-Man is still in high school. The multiverse is like a crisper box, preserving the superhero image from decades ago to the present, constraining the time paradox to a controllable range, and dividing the copyright sphere of influence of different manufacturers. The audience also accepted the different qualitative settings of the hero's name, and even enjoyed it. The multiverse is "skinning" superheroes. Each superhero becomes a symbol that can be played by different actors, directed by different directors, and involved in different stories in works with different themes. Each hero has multiple versions so that every viewer can find their favorite version. Even if there are occasionally a few versions that don't go well, the producers can start all over again by changing actors, directors, or rebooting the universe. This multiverse certainly offers capital the possibility of a winner-take-all. Of course, this is also the reason why directors such as Martin Scorsese criticized the Marvel Universe movie as a "theme park movie". It seems to have a variety of choices, but in fact, it locks the audience within the framework of capital circle. The strength of one universe actually comes at the cost of absorbing the energy of other universes. How to make the multiverse truly coexist is not only a problem within the superhero universe, but also the entire film business model needs to continue to explore.
In 1900, william Thomson, the original Baron Kelvin, summed up the great achievements of 19th-century physics and raised two dark clouds floating over 20th-century physics without hesitation. These two dark clouds stirred up the physics community in the following century, but they gave countless novels and movies inexhaustible artistic inspiration, and time travel is one of the fascinating branches. Time is invisible and untouchable, but it is everywhere all the time, and people want to understand it, control it, but they fall under its endless entanglement. Some people delicately play the strings of time to play a logical melody, some people use film and television industry machines to create amazing visual effects spectacles, and some people send time capsules to the past or the future to wait for possible replies... Whenever we try to unveil the truth of time, we always find that the truth is not there. As Carlo Lovelli put it in his Order of Time: "Studying time is like holding a snowflake in your hand, and just when you want to study it, it will gradually melt at your fingertips and disappear." "This may be the reason why the theme of time travel is fascinating.