Time Travel 101, for the confused (*miniscule spoilers*)

Rating: Null/10 (16 June 2003)

IMHO, there are far too many posts here by people who don't understand the way time travel is treated in the movie, which is also the way it is understood by modern science and logical thought. I will attempt to educate the uninformed and misled, because this is really a simple concept.
Time travel (this is all hypothetical, as time travel doesn't currently exist) does NOT create paradoxes. What happens as time moves forward, happens, and cannot be changed. If someone travels back in time, then their actions in the past they travel into had already happened.
Think about it like this: everything that happened in, say, 2002, happened, and cannot be altered. This is not to say that I can't travel back in time to 2002 and do whatever I want; merely that whatever I do as a time traveler in 2002 has already happened then. The past is unchangeable, but that doesn't mean no one from the future had a hand in it. This was repeatedly referred to in the movie: Bruce Willis's character kept saying that he couldn't stop the spread of the virus because it had already happened.
Likewise, you can't go back in time and kill yourself, because you are alive now. If you had died in the past, you would be dead now. And you can't stop 9/11, the Kennedy assassination, etc. because if you did, they wouldn't have occurred. You can try, but you will fail, as attested to by the fact that these events have happened.
So forget the Back to the Future movies; entertaining but completely contrary to the modern--and much more sensible--view of time travel.
And as a final example: in the world of the movie, Bruce Willis was at the front lines of World War I in 1917. That happened, and there was never a 1917 when he WASN'T there. He didn't go there until whenever in the future, but the picture of him there had existed since 1917. No paradox, he was just a part of 1917 for a brief while.
I hope this will clear up all questions regarding paradoxes and such; there were no time travel paradoxes in the movie. But I still don't understand the whole Madeleine Stowe "I feel like I've always known you" thing; it's not because she sees him as a little boy in the airport (that puts her in HIS mind, not vice versa) but I don't know what DOES cause it. Maybe a second viewing will clear it up, we'll see.
What a great movie, btw!
--AC