8 thoughts on “Groundhog Day”

  1. We watched “Happy Death Day” last night. It has a similar premise even ending with a nod to “Groundhog Day”. HDD was ok, but mostly it provides an idea how “Goundhog Day” could’ve gone wrong. Like most modern movies, the first thing GD gets right, and HDD gets wrong, is developing a connection for the audience to the characters, so that you care what happens to them.

    Phil Connor may be a jerk to various people, but he is not a callous asshole to absolutely everyone he meets or knows during the first day you meet them. In Happy Death Day, by the time the first day ends; the main character hasn’t done one thing nice to any person she’s met (or her dad trying to contact her) to make you care that she dies at the end of the day.

    1. Sorry MikeR, your theory makes no sense. Since the day starts at a specific setup he is not hopping between many worlds… unless like a scratched record he goes back a day with each skip, so he’s still in a time loop except with the addition of a world jump.

      Since he’s only experiencing his own line, does it matter if he does anything destructive in another world which he will never go back to again?

  2. “he is not hopping between many worlds…” Nope – according to the Many Worlds Hypothesis, every single quantum choice creates a set of new worlds with all the possibilities. That is, all his lives could branch out from 6 am Groundhog Day.

    1. That creates an entirely different problem.

      He would not be able to remember those things in other universes that had not happened yet (and disagrees with your old explanation.)

      Another factor is how time bleeds through universes but that’s too long an issue.

      1. “He would not be able to remember those things in other universes that had not happened yet” Well, yeah. It isn’t a true story. But this is what I said in the article: the one assumption that needs to be made to explain the story is that he has memories of a different time line (indeed, one that didn’t happen yet, none of them happened yet).

        1. I’m not confused. But people do consider the multiverse to be real… in which case it must be explanatory. So imaginary stories can open itself to actual understanding.

          Sorry if I didn’t get your reference to remembering the future. It’s a fundamental question that nobody has a real explanation for. It’s one of those areas where if you avoid intellectualizing the answer is, “of course.”

          Anybody besides Jonathan Winters and Merlin living backwards?

          1. I still think we’re not communicating. The advantage of the MW Hypothesis is that you don’t need his _body_ to keep going back in time to the starting point, just his memories (from a different branch). And you don’t need to keep overwriting the story of the day, whatever that would mean; there is no overwriting, we’re just tracking a different branch each time.

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