footnotes
Pasilda Nacera said:
How is that a mistake?
She told her dad not to touch her and of course he didn't.
LISTEN DUDE, she told him to NEVER TOUCH HER AGAIN, so he had touched her and he then agreed to stop doing it by saying "ok."....and then later on, during the same time phase, she was older and told Evan her dad never touched her at all. How can that be, if as a child, she said don't ever do it AGAIN?
That scene by the way was way too idealistic and unrealistic. The dad's a total fucking freak, you think he's going to actually take a command from a toddler and stop doing something he already knows is bad for her but doesn't give a fuck about anyway? to make it worse, they act like him saying "ok" is going to change something. it doesn't matter if he molesterd her once or a million times, he should be jailed at that point, not free to make bullshit promises to pacify a damaged child.
I wonder why Evan, during the time travel flashbacks to stop the dad from hurting the kids, and now being confident and aware enough to know what to do, never called the police on the dad.
as for the time traveling...i don't consider this the time traveling of science that was featured in shows like Contact, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures, Star Trek, or Carl Sagan and Einstein philosophy. The latter's philosophy on time travel doesn't seem to deal with changing the past or even say that doing that is possible, it's more like observing it to learn from it and see what really happened, or to see what is going on in a parrallel universe.
i think this has to do with his psychology of exploring his "shoulda, coulda, woulda's." Similar to Jacob's Ladder.
he's traveling back in his memories seeing what options he should've taken, SPECIFICALLY to counteract the trauma he experienced. he has a major guilt complex. Instead of denying that the trauma happened and trying to forget about it, or trying to accept all that shit and forgive the people that made you endure it--the only 2 options available to those traumatized, you know-- and living with all that guilt and pain, why not just change the events mentally so that they fit the way you would have hoped they could've.
When i watched the way he would time travel, i just think of a PTSD flashback, where it can get so intense that you experience seizure-like episodes, which is what he was going through to everybody looking at him when he was traveling back in his mind.
i wish this film would've talked at greater length about how PTSD affects one's life, and how the guilt over feeling like all the bad that happened is somehow your fault, because it certainly showed enough PTSD suffering from every character's angle. The audience this caters to, the Ashton kutcher crowd, most likely doesn't even know what PTSD is let alone what it stands for.