Hollywood, Time Travel and the Art of the Pre-Boot

The new Terminator Genysis trailer has premiered. And if it’s made one thing clear, it’s that the new film is effectively what I would term a “Pre-Boot”, a cross between a prequel and a reboot that attempts to simultaneously maintain continuity with the previous films in its respective franchise, while branching off to tell a story that directly contradicts that very continuity. If this sounds confusing, it’s because of the circular nature of preboot storytelling. A preboot typically arrives after several installments in a franchise have moved it to a point, where the prospect of going forward (sequels) with the series for whatever reason is no longer attractive. Perhaps the story has run its course. Perhaps the studio has run it into the ground. Whatever the case is, now is the time to move back and then sideways. So, the preboot opens in what very well could be the relative past of its originary text before splintering off to develop an alternate timeline. Because of this, it has to foreground to some extent its connection to a prior text even as it goes off on its own tangential/reimagined story.

Rise of the Apes, for instance, opened shortly before George Taylor (Charlton Heston) took off in his rocket and arrived on the Planet of the Apes (1968), while Prometheus (2012) took place a few centuries before the Alien (1978) burst out a man's chest aboard the Nostromo. Neither picture truly fits in with the narrative “future” depicted in their predecessors, yet each invites the audience to read it as potentially being part of that same pre-established continuity. No wonder then, as to why around the release of X-Men First Class (2011) there was a lot of debate as to whether the movie was really a prequel to or a reboot of X-Men (2000), with the filmmakers themselves offering conflicting answers. The time-travelling prequel/sequel hybrid Days of Future Past (2014), which would erase the events of X1-Wolverine, subsequently established that indeed, First Class is/was part of the “initial” continuity, even though it deviated from it so much, that some have proclaimed the film continuity as a whole to be “irretrievably f**ked.” [http://io9.com/5966264/8-ways-x-men-movie-continuity-is-irretrievably-fucked]

Ostensibly, the launchpad for all this was 2009’s Star Trek, which internally reset the continuity of the half-century old franchise through the use of a time-travel plot, allowing the filmmakers to maintain that everything that happened previously is still canon, even though new stories would not be beholden to it. Not coincidentally, other pre-booted franchises tend to similarly be science-fiction series with time travel plot elements, a fact that mitigates discrepancies and contradictions between the various pictures and permits the filmmakers to keep the conflicting films interconnected, as though they can take place in one story-verse, but in different timelines. One can also trace the preboot approach to Casino Royale (2006), which rebooted the Bond franchise by telling the origin story of its central character, while maintaining an ambiguous temporal relationship with the previous Bond pictures, which is line with the franchise as a whole. (Eg. The character of “M” is still played by Judy Dench, much like in the Pierce Brosnan films, providing actor/character continuity.)

What is the reason Hollywood has shifted towards pre-booting its franchises, rather than re-starting purely from scratch? One possible explanation is that contemporary audiences are far more in tune with interconnected storytelling than in previous decades. Continuity now has far more value than it did back in the 90s and disregarding it entirely would today likely alienate a sizable amount of audiences. [This is especially visible in how modern horror franchises actively embrace, rather than ignore, past events.]

A pre-boot’s dual function thus allows it to both appeal to the fans of the previously established franchise entries, while liberating filmmakers to tell “new” stories without being slavishly beholden to the pre-existing narratives that would chronologically come later. It is a good countermeasure especially when a franchise begins to sink creatively following a disastrous outing or two. One can eclectically expunge various undesirable narrative elements (eg. the bungling the Phoenix plotline in the X3), while retaining what worked before and doing something new with it. In prebooting its franchises, Hollywood admits that it’s made mistakes and communicates that it wants another chance to win your attention. If this trend continues, then we'll likely be seeing more and more time travel narratives in current franchises. (I wonder how long before Marvel Cinematic Universe decides to preboot itself?)

After the atrociousness of the last two Terminator sequels, I’m really looking forward to seeing how Genisys (which, btw, obviously stands in for the name of some company within the movie that wants to revolutionize technology) revives/rewrites/revises the franchise continuity and erases T3 and T4 from existence. If it’s good, which I believe it has potential to be, we might see a slew of new quality Terminator films. [Honestly though, I’d prefer three more seasons of Josh Friedman’s excellent Terminator TV series, which, in my book, easily trumps the original Cameron films in terms of narrative sophistication and character development, but I’ll probably be in the minority on that.]