"Paul Levinson's It's Real Life is a page-turning exploration into that multiverse known as rock and roll. But it is much more than a marvelous adventure narrated by a master storyteller...it is also an exquisite meditation on the very nature of alternate history." -- Jack Dann, The Fiction Writer's Guide to Alternate History

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Triple Hit: Parallel Schrödingers

Parallel worlds lurk behind a lot of time travel - since one way of getting around the paradox of that, if you changed the past, how would the earlier you in the future know that the past needed to be changed if it no longer existed, but if the new reality were a parallel reality, in which the event that needed changing now never happened, there would be no problem, since the time traveler came from the old reality - but it's not often been explored in the movies, though it was a mainstay of Fringe and is the theme of Counterpart, just now beginning on Starz.

All of which is to say I was eager to see Triple Hit, because it's a movie (free on Amazon), in which parallel universes are almost the whole story.  The "almost," though, is its main problem, since it also brings in space travel and time travel, and is a bit of a free-for-all hodge-podge of science fiction tropes.

But it has its moments.  Triple Hit (2009, originally Schrödinger's Girl - you ever notice how the original titles are usually much better than what they've been changed to?) tells the story of Rebecca/Anastasia/Sarah, Dave/David/Dmitri, Matt/Matthew/Mateus, etc in three parallel realities (worlds) in which Rebecca/Anastasia/Sarah is/are trying to break on through to at least one of the other realities.  All of the realities are some version of our United Kingdom.  One of them is pretty much like ours, another seems like a high-tech white-coated European Union, and the third, the most fun, is a "People's Republic," replete with a statue of Stalin and obeisance to the Soviet Union(!).

Of course something goes wrong with the attempt and frenetic craziness and mayhem ensue, done up almost in a slapstick 1950s bug-eyed-monster B-movie kind of style.  So ... it's hard to take Triple Hit seriously, but it is fun, especially in the wee hours of the morning, with good multiple campy performances by Abigail Tarttelin as Rebecca/Anastasia/Sarah.  See it if parallel worlds are your cups of tea.

  
more parallel realities ...

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