#plus the meta is by far not even my favorite part of undertale

[eldragon-x]

something very funny about the undertale timeline canonically resetting if you reset the game, meanwhile in stars and time is specifically about siffrin struggling with the idea of moving on after the journey is over but in the qna the creator was like. yeah dont worry about it if you restart the game youre helping a siffrin from another timeline lol

[0poole]

Edge of Tomorrow VS Groundhog Day VS Undertale

So me and my family just recently rewatched Edge of Tomorrow, which naturally led us to rewatching Groundhog Day (Except it was my first viewing, apparently it’s one of my parent’s all-time favorite movies) and while doing that I realized Undertale deals with a similar concept to the two films. And, since I’m so in love with basic concepts taken to their natural extremes in stories, I really feel like talking about it. I don’t really know what there is to get out of me talking about it but hey I feel like doing it anyway.

So yeah, I love stories that revolve around one simple, basic concept. You don’t need any interstellar wars with deep political intrigue or complex interpersonal relations to hold up a story if you just say “hey, here’s a weird thing that’s going on and here’s what happens because of it.” From there, you could basically do anything and keep me interested. 

Obviously all the stories are good ones, but I definitely think there’s a hierarchy in how the idea is dealt with. 

Edge of Tomorrow is probably the worst of the bunch, mainly because it feels like the “Time Travel” aspect of the movie is just a sort of tool inside of a normal alien-action movie with the shitty alien hive mind plot device that I actually can’t stand at all anymore but that’s a rant for another day. I still like the movie, obviously, because I like the concept and the aliens at least look really cool, but after watching Groundhog Day I’m realizing there’s some iffy-er feelings about it. First of all, the thing I realized without even having to watch GHD is that they really try to explain too much. The whole problem behind that is that, even with the explanation, it still makes no sense what so ever. Apart from the hive mind device, I also hate it when alien species are presented with “biological superpowers” like they just naturally evolved to control time somehow. Obviously until we actually meet any aliens all bets are off, but as far as we know that is completely ludicrous. The whole “Time Travel” ability is so supernatural that, even when they say “That’s just how the aliens are and getting dissolved by their blood gives you the same power too but only while you still have their blood” is so contrived that you just think “Okay. Sure.” 

I feel like, if you’re to explain anything like this, you really have to make it realistically work or just forego it all together. If you try to give rules to something, all you’re doing is giving Youtube movie reviewers the ammunition to dismiss your whole movies because of plot holes. For example, the plot hole of the main girl character somehow knowing that getting your blood replaced removes your power even though she would have to die to truly be sure. When you try to explain everything, the viewer expects you to explain that too, and as far as I remember it was just a “It felt like it was gone.” Also, spoilers, at the end of the movie when Cruz woke up in the helicopter after destroying the center of the hive mind, it sort of confused you because you weren’t really sure where the starting point for the “Time Travel” starts. If he just woke up on the ground like he did before, you’d just accept it, but changing the location and time makes you think there’s something else at work, and therefore we should at least have some idea of what it is. That one’s kinda just a side affect of the quirkiness of time travel though, especially because he went back in time to right about when the aliens died as a whole even though he technically did that in the future, and yet his current time is seemingly drastically affected by it because he somehow got a higher rank after destroying them... It’s just a mess, and it feels like a mess because we expect an explanation, even though it would just be arbitrary anyways. Again, since something like this just can’t be explained well, trying to explain it just doesn’t feel satisfying.

But to be fair, the one thing I loved about both of the films is the editing as the main character gets into a routine with his infinite day. The way they shrink everything down in time slowly but surely, and then when emotions strike high they show us most of the generic events again. Really, it’s one of the few times you can confidently say that the editing was the best part of the movie. Usually it’s just the acting, plot, characters, etc, but you rarely get something where the editing is in the forefront.

Also the glowy spaghetti aliens looked cool.

But for Undertale, I really only realized it sort of used the same idea as I watched Bill Murray kill himself a dozen times. Unlike the films, Undertale of course could be more meta about it and say the “Time Travel” is just video game logic applied to the canon story itself. Also, the events are being experienced by multiple characters, including the player. It was basically one of the selling points of the game, because the idea of video game logic as a plot device wasn’t really as well known as it is now (thanks to it itself for popularizing it). It didn’t really have to explain much because it was sort of built upon what we already know, i.e. that we die in the game and reset time to our last save point. All they had to do is just say “Hey, that’s called ‘Determination’” and that’s it. When you have Determination, you come back from the dead and keep going. Considering they didn’t try so hard to explain that in detail, you can somewhat pass off the little things, like why the stars specifically are the points at which you come back, etc. When you don’t try to explain things so hard, “plot holes” just become irrelevant details.

But the bigger selling point for Undertale is the characters, and Sans especially is the one made the most interesting out of the concept. Flowey did have the power, and he just went full psychopath on everyone just to see what happened, which naturally is another key point of the game. Him being completely devoid of emotion and sympathy also made him relatively interesting, but Sans being completely unable to control any of it was basically why I like him as a character. Naturally a lot of these characters are sort of one-off personalities, which is definitely fine because of how fun and well written they are. So, you see Sans and you’re like “Okay yeah, he’s lazy and makes jokes. That’s him.” But then you fight him, and say he’s so lazy because he can’t muster up the courage to do anything because he knows that when the player resets the game he’ll just go back in time like he never did it. That’s basically the next ideal step in exploring the concept. GHD is the most basic version of the idea, where the guy that time’s focused around just does whatever he feels like, EoT is when the guy uses the power to save humanity, and UT (or just Sans’ character) is about how a person without this power would react to someone else using the power. It’s actually seriously interesting, and a perfect way to explain a character’s personality. Also, you can’t disrespect an amazing battle theme. 

But, as you’d expect from the order, Groundhog Day is the king of them all, because it is just pure concept. Literally nothing supernatural happens to Murray (and yes I refer to characters by their actors sometimes sue, me) to cause the “Time Travel,” and literally nothing supernatural happens to him to stop it. All the movie is is just “This is happening and this is how he reacts.” Frankly, for something like this, that’s the ideal. You go to the movie in order to see what happens when a guy has to relive one single day no matter what, and that’s it. No extra bells or whistles. You get exactly what you came for, and you get it in such high quality it’s perfect. No one has to care why it’s happening.

First of all, I love how it’s focused around Groundhog Day and the weather as a whole. Weather is so unpredictable that even the professionals have to assign a percentage to it. It’s one of the least predictable things we know of, and that’s exactly why it’s perfect here, because it shows for absolute sure what’s going on. Murray can predict everything, so he could even predict the most unpredictable thing in these circumstances.

Second, it’s a great mish-mash of two key elements of the concepts from both EoT and UT. From EoT, he used his knowledge of the day to his advantage, like anyone would, but using the knowledge differently at different times (i.e. knowing he’ll meet an old friend, to remembering his name, then to punching him in the face, then to buying out his insurance, etc). From UT, he feels like it is happening out of his control, so you get the middle-late section of the movie where he spirals into a deep depression, and throughout just changing his personality. It all feels so natural. At first, you’d totally say “Yeah, I’d do that if I were in his shoes” and towards the end you’d say “Yeah, that’s probably how I would end up if I were actually in his shoes...” I mean, personally I’d go the skill-learning route first but that’s besides the point. You come in wondering what would happen to the guy, and you get exactly that. It just feels right.

Plus, it was just written extremely well, both in the natural progression of his character and in the humor. I’ll always die on the hill of movies having to make you laugh before they can make you truly cry. It lets your guard down. I swear, the day where Murray realizes his actions have no consequences is one of the best parts of any movie I’ve seen. It was so hilarious and fun, even though internally you’re a bit like “What an asshole.” Then you get to the montage of him nonchalantly killing himself, and you really just feel bad for him. Considering humans, as you’d guess, experience a full range of emotions, showing his full range makes him feel so much more human, making him easy to sympathize with. Then, with the cathartic solution at the very end (which is where I usually cry to be honest, not sure why), it feels so good to see him break out of the giant loop of emotions he went through, especially since he seemingly got the best possible ending out of all of them, where he didn’t brute force his way into his love’s heart, and found the goodness inside of him by ignoring his personal interests and consistently doing things to the benefit of others, even though he knows he’ll just have to do it again tomorrow. I’m not sure where to fit it in cleanly but the turning point of him realizing he can’t do a single thing to save that homeless man’s life was seriously heartbreaking, because he felt even more out of control than he already did. 

But yeah, this post was pretty much just a stealth way of me saying how much I like Undertale and Groundhog Day and also mentioning how much I hate the hive mind alien plot devices.

Seriously. What kind of alien species would evolve to be that dependent on a single being? Surely one wrong move means their extinction, right? How could an entire species exist that long under that principle? I would kill for a movie that makes it seem like their aliens are a hive mind, but then once they kill the “queen” the drones all turn on the heroes and wail on them, and after they’re done they just biologically convert one of them into a new queen. You know, like how it actually happens in nature. Every cliche needs exactly and only one instance where another form of media points at it explicitly and laughs, and I’ve yet to see that for this damn hive mind cliche. At least go the Alien route and make the enemy a single organism, so there’s no funny business. I mean I’d also kill for more movies like Valerian where there are so many normal, human-tier aliens that just exist together in a society like actual sentient (sapient) beings. Baby steps, though. I just want good aliens.