A movie about time travel and robots is not easy for me to resist. But what if it is based on a 1956 story by Robert Heinlein that features a
cryosleep industry in 1970? Even worse, a movie that is going to force me to read English subtitles for two hours? I took a chance and watched
The Door Into Summer and was pleased to find that
Tomoe Kanno re-imagined the original Heinlein story, shifting everything further into the future... but not far enough.
For this 2021 film, you are asked to accept that there was a cryosleep industry in 1995. I don't think I'll ever understand why Heinlein imagined cryosleep in 1970. This movie also expects us to accept that there will be a horde of intelligent humanoid robots in 2025, each of them powered by a SuperCool™ battery that never needs recharging. Maybe these film makers have plans for a sequel that will show time travel being used to start a cryosleep industry in the 1980s.
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Pete the cat
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The film is a fun time travel romp, which could have been more fun except for reliance on two painful plot elements.
First pain: the excruciatingly slow first half of the movie which is supposed to get us invested in the relationship between Soichiro and Riko. Much wasted effort there since viewers of the film are likely to become more invested in their pet cat, Pete, than the two star-crossed lovers.
Second pain: this film double dips on one of the worst Sci Fi plot devices, the lone genius inventor. Working alone in his garage, the boy genius Soichiro invents intelligent humanoid robots, but wait... there is more. Also in the same film is
another genius inventor!
Doc Brown Professor Toi works alone for 30 years in his basement and builds a time travel machine.
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Doc Brown Toi
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The remaining annoyance is that after Professor Toi spends 30 years developing time travel technology, that technology is only ever used once: to make this movie.
How does this 2021 film compare to Heinlein's original story? I read "The Door into Summer" as originally published in the October,
November and December 1956 issues of
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Heinlein really piled on the hard-to-swallow choices for his future world of 1970. Not only was there a booming suspended animation industry, but in Heinlein's world of 1970, Washington D.C. had been erased by a nuclear war and an automated traffic control system meant that travel by car was super fast and efficient. One of the ways you can tell that the story was really written in the 1950s is that Heinlein's protagonist, while planning how to have a long life, talks, eats, smokes and drinks like "real man" of the 1940s.
Uranium Age. The other temporal symptom of 1956 is that Heinlein describes a role for hypnosis in his fantasy suspended animation industry. I don't know who was selling stock in
hypnosis during the 1940s and 1950s, but they sure made a fortune off of science fiction story tellers. According to Heinlein, the real trick to creating a suspended animation industry was to simply have the military hire a thousand scientists and put them to the task. Presto, you get a
atomic bomb cryosleep industry.
Yes, Daniel Boone Davis is the genius who invents intelligent robots in his garage. Why, you might ask, does the military need 1000 scientist to invent cryosleep but building a robot only requires Dany boy? Really, you should know better than to ask such questions. Answer: plot... or as we can also say, highly contrived plot. When you write a novel in 13 days, these sorts of plot holes accumulate fast. Oh, and the "everlasting power pack" gets only a casual mention from Heinlein.
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interior art by Kelly Freas
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In 1940,
Asimov's positronic robots had the
positronic brain and by 1970, Heinlein's robots had the
Thorsen memory tube™. There is the Kelly Freas depiction of Dan's first robot, a household cleaning robot (image to the left).
In the 2021 movie, Dan is rendered helpless by an injection of insulin. In Heinlein's fantasy world, we have "the zombie drug", used by both psychiatrists and Evil Accountants™ who take control of robotics companies. The Evil Accountant is Belle, whose cute breasts were Dan's downfall.
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Accounting 101: always carry your hypo with zombie drug
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Because of Heinlein's contrived plot, Belle not only has a hypo with the zombie drug on hand, but she also has the shady connections needed to quickly put the zombie-drugged Dan into cryosleep.
You know why the evil Belle does not simply kill Dan and have done with it: plot. In the end, Dan must get his revenge. Particularly after the Evil Belle tries to kill Pete the cat. But Pete has nine lives, so the Evil Belle can't skin the cat.
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Figure 2. Editorial teaser for Part 2.
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As long and drawn out as the start of the 2021 film is in dealing with the relationship between Soichiro and Riko, that was a good choice for a film compared to the tedious details about topics like nuclear war, business contracts and hypnosis that Heinlein included in Part 1 of his written story.
The big selling point for Part 2 of the story was: Gee wiz, just wait until next month when you see the amazing world of 2000! For readers in 2022, you probably want to know what happens to Pete the cat and why did
Doc's Dan's car disappear. I wonder how many 1956 readers of Part 1 of the story were able to guess that time travel would be the "startling science fiction theme" of the future (see
Figure 2, above).
Amazing 2000. Heinlein imagined that in the year 2000 there would be newspapers with printed 3D images, regular space shuttle traffic to the Moon, the return of the King in France and England would become a province of Canada. When The Door Into Summer was published as a novel in 1957, readers knew they were going to get a Sci Fi look at the Hi Tek™ future just by glancing at the book's cover art (image to the right).
Okay, I don't expect Sci Fi stories to predict the future, but I also expect Sci Fi story tellers to know better than to
try to predict the future. Heinlein had an ego large enough to exceed that common expectation. Maybe for a reading audience in 1956, Heinlein's fantasy future was enough to provoke a sense of wonder, but we really do need a way to update old Sci Fi stories for later generations.
Intermission. I confess that when I moved to Part 2 of Heinlein's story in the November issue, I could not resist reading the Isaac Asimov short story "The Brazen Locked Room", a fantasy time travel story featuring a polite demon named Shapur.
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| editorial blurb following "The Brazen Locked Room" |
As shown in the image to the right, readers of "The Brazen Locked Room" were referred to Anthony Boucher's 1943 story "
Elsewhen".
Elsewhen. In Boucher's time travel story, a time travel device is built in the garage of Mr. Partridge, who uses time travel to commit a murder. One thing leads to another and Mr. Partridge ends up dead, his time machine destroyed.
Both "Elsewhen" and "The Brazen Locked Room" are constructed around "locked-room" mysteries. In both cases, the "solution" to the mystery involves time travel. Neither story takes itself too seriously and both authors were having fun with the concept. Boucher's story doubles down on the lone inventor plot element, depicting the discovery of time travel as a chance event and also depicting a portable time travel machine that can be carried to the scene of the murder.
I love Sci Fi stories about fantastic imaginary technologies that are constrained by practicalities. Boucher's imaginary time machine was seriously constrained in terms of the energy demands for traveling a great distance through time. This was amusing for me to see since I had
just recently been including in
The Historical Archive my own account of how much energy was needed for time travel (see the image to the right).
Time Loop. Before Asimov's "The Brazen Locked Room" could be published, he had to ask permission from Theodore R. Cogswell who had published his story "
Threesie" in 1956. In "Threesie", Joseph Cruthers sells his soul for three wishes. When his third wish is for three more wishes, he is put into a time loop that will again force him to experience the agonizing de-souling process.
I first read a story by Cogswell when I saw his humorous 1952 story "The Specter General" as reprinted in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. That story was my introduction to the "collapsed galactic empire" genre that Jack Vance later made use of for his Durdane Trilogy.
Back to 2000. Heinlein included a "Panic of '87" in his imagined future while there was
Black Monday in the real 1987. Also in that fictional future was a cure for the common cold and anti-gravity technology ("NullGrav"). It is a long, long, long slog through Part 2 of "The Door into Summer", waiting and waiting and waiting for some indication that this is a time travel story. I suppose Heinlein had fun dragging out the mystery of Dan's time-twisted life, but the 2021 movie wisely condensed 40 pages of the novel into a single scene of the film.
Twissell Twitchel. Finally, 50 pages into Part 2, Dan learns that Dr. Twitchel invented time travel, but the technology is a government secret and Twitchel is reluctant to use his machine with any other human test subjects since he can't control the direction of travel. Then, finally, 65 pages into Part 2, Dan uses the time machine. I suppose Part 2 seems particularly tedious because there is no Pete the cat.
Back to 1970. The start of
Part 3 was also not included in the 2021 film. Dan arrives in 1970 and finds he has "landed" inside a nudist colony. Dan does what anyone would do under these circumstances: he sets to work building a robot. And quickly, because he is eager to get back to 2001. Just before entering cryosleep (for the second time), Dan rescues Pete and steals the robot design materials that his business partners had stolen from him.
A major difference between the 2021 film and Heinlein's novel is that Dan returns to 1970 alone. In the film, he travels through time with an amusing robot from the future. Another big plus for the film is that Riko has a much more sophisticated role in the story than Heinlein's "Ricky".
I agree with the comments shown in Figure 1, above; the 2021 film is true to Heinlein's story and the changes made were improvements over the original.
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Star crossed couple.
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Had "The Door into Summer" been made in Hollywood it probably would have been larded up with meaningless shootouts, car chases and explosions.
Even the one explosion that made it into the 2021 film seems like an improvement over Heinlein's original story where Dan throws his design for an early model robot into a canyon in order to deprive the
Evil Accountant of any benefit from it. In the film, the robot from the future delivers Dan's early robot design materials to his new business partner and Dan's house is blown up in order to suggest the possibility that those materials were destroyed.
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the time travel pregnancy paradox
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It is rather horrifying to read online reviews of this film such as
this one. I suspect that most people see "science fiction" and they expect a mindless 2 hours of explosions and light saber battles. Sadly, such Sci Fi fans can't figure out the time loop in "The Door into Summer" and they often wonder why anyone bothered to embed a
love story in a Sci Fi movie. 😔
Romance. I have no objection to the insertion of a love story into a science fiction novel. Asimov also did it in his time travel novel The End of Eternity. In Heinlein's story, we get to witness a pubescent girl-scout making a 30-year-old man promise to marry her. Through the wonders of cryosleep, Ricky arranges to erase ten years of the age difference between herself and Dan. At the end of Heinlein's novel (back in the year 2000), Dan is so busy impregnating Ricky that he forgets all about the "other copy" of himself who is struggling to adjust to the year 2000. But that is for the best, because you would not want to disrupt the space-time continuum with a temporal paradox.
Next: Part 9 of The Historical Archive.
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