I've been fascinated by the concept of time-freezing ever since I was a kid and it usually isn't just a fantasy about molesting women frozen like mannequins. In fact it's hardly ever not.
I think it was an episode of Wild Wild West that really got me thinking. If you can freeze time what are the physics involved? Am I just moving so much faster than everyone else that it appears time has frozen? So if I open a door, will it come off its hinges? Can I use a computer or do the clock cycles in the CPU slow down too? If I fire a gun can I watch the bullet slowly travel through the air? If time were truly frozen where does it stop and end?
So many interesting points to ponder. Both Twilight Zone and Outer Limits had episodes about time freezing.
If I could do it? Well, it would probably be kind of boring. I wouldn't have to pay for groceries or beer anymore, but I don't think I'd spend much time in women's dressing rooms just to catch a glimpse.
The news stories would be interesting though...grocery and liquor stores report mysterious thefts - stuff just disappearing despite the cameras rolling nobody was seen taking them. It just disappeared.
It would be great to be a vigilante with time-freeze powers though. Imagine the LA Times story if I killed a few hundred Bloods and Crips - all with the same gun and to the police investigating it would seem they were all killed at the same moment. And just for fun you could collect all their crack and pile it up on the front steps of the police station.
Nobody would believe it. Heads would explode trying to fathom how that happened.
And yeah, I might undress a few women, but Ben is not like that. He doesn't want to take advantage of people. When he finds someone he really cares about he is unable to freeze time at one point. Just about every other character in the movie is someone who would be do bad to the frozen, but he just undresses them and draws them. Yes, it's a bit invasive, but nothing near what he could have done with that opportunity
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mobocracy
10 years ago
I thought this movie handled freezing time very well, using it to great effect without it becoming the subject of the narrative.
I think you could very easily turn this into a "slacker caper" film where he steals money or gets up to other hijinks.
The physics do get complicated, like how does electricity (that involves the flow of electrons) still work? Does the "shudder" of time resuming have any impact (like, say, on a pilot landing a plane 1 foot off the ground)?
How would they explain a bank suddenly finding all the teller cash drawers empty without any video evidence that the money was taken? You could almost imagine a mystery about someone investigating a series of unexplained events -- missing money or valuable objects that disappear without explanation despite video surveillance, people reporting winding up in strange locations without any explanation, or events with a "sure" outcome inexplicably changing (caught footballs "dropped", etc).
The possibilities are kind of endless, from science fiction to mystery. Even though it's kind of been done before in a Twilight Zone kind of way it doesn't seem like it's been done to death by Hollywood with the minor exception of certain characters with super speed who can move so fast time appears to stop relative to their speed but doesn't actually stop.
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