Screen Share | Films that teleport us to another world

Carrie-Anne Moss and Keanu Reeves in ‘The Matrix’
| Photo Credit: Ronald Siemoneit

A friend’s brother, who happens to be an assistant cinematographer, shared on his Instagram story how he enjoyed watching the sci-fi thriller Coherence. Of course, I had to reply to him asking if he caught the recent Tamil film Black, an adaptation of Coherence. It got me thinking how, in an alternate world, the English film could have been adapted from the Tamil film. Eventually, my mind began tabulating films I had watched over the years on alternate reality and parallel worlds, and their transportive power over our souls. If movies were designed for escape, why not escape to somewhere utterly new?

Wikipedia calls a parallel universe a “hypothetical universe co-existing with one’s own, typically distinct in some way”. Beneath that umbrella term lie sub-categories such as time travel, alternative histories and simulated reality. This writer — a sucker for anything sci-fi — probably owes it to the big daddy of the simulated reality sub-genre, The Matrix. The Thirteenth Floor and Jim Carrey’s poignant The Truman Show also fall under this category. 

Parallel universes are said to serve two main purposes. One is the possibility of violating the laws of Nature, a primal human fantasy, which the majority of the films of this genre fall under — we are looking at you, Liam Neeson-powered Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia. The other is to serve as a starting point for speculative fiction which ventures into the ‘what if that event had turned out differently…’. The aptly titled Marvel miniseries What If…? is a perfect example. In a way, many of Marvel’s recent films and series, such as Avengers: Endgame, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Spider-Man: No Way Home and Loki have toyed with the concepts of time travel, alternate reality and parallel universe in their Multiverse Saga… until Jonathan Majors’ real-life shenanigans made Marvel wish there was an actual multiverse. 

The world of fictional parallel universes takes the fascinating biological concept of convergent evolution up a notch to create new races and species that are at times par or even better than human civilisation. Genre-defining franchises such as Star Trek, Star Wars and The Planet of the Apes films all have such examples with humanoid species ranging from films like Avatar (Na’vi) to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Oompa-Loompas).

The most famous film involving the alternative universe concept is The Wizard of Oz. A personal favourite is Space Jam where basketball player Michael Jordan is brought out of retirement by Looney Tunes characters so he can help them win a basketball match against invading aliens. If comfort watches make for a separate list then mine would have Pacific Rim where multiple kaiju (monsters) escape through an interdimensional portal to wreak havoc on Earth only to be brought down by gigantic humanoid mechas named Jaegers. 

For fans of something more serious, Jake Gyllenhaal’s Source Code is a good place to start with. On smaller screens, apart from Star Trek and the usual culprits like Twilight Zone and Doctor Who, arguably the most famous series are Netflix’s Stranger Things and the German show Dark. 

For those closer home, apart from the recent hit Black, Selvaraghavan’s Irandam Ulagam and GV Prakash’s Adiyae played with the concept of a parallel universe. The Telugu filmOkka Kshanam, heavily borrowed from Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rear Window, also explores the concept of a parallel life. In Malayalam, Nivin Pauly recently announced that he will headline Multiverse Manmadhan which is billed as “India’s first multiverse superhero movie”. 

While we might return to our daily life the moment the credits roll, until interdimensional travel is a reality, films are the way to go to witness someone’s idea of how an alternate world would look like. Neo might have opted for reality, but I would have probably gone for the blue pill!

From The Hindu cinema team, a fortnightly column recommending films and shows tied to a mood, theme, or pop-cultural event.