Let’s talk about the Time Turner in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
As cool as it is that you get to see how Hermione and Harry are able to go back in time and do all the things they do to save Buck Beak and save Sirius Black, and Harry does his Patronus… Expecto Patronum and all that…And gave the logic that he knew he could do it because he’d seen himself do it before…herein lies some time travel issues.
In fact, I’d say the way the time travel is shown to happen in the Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is actually the least satisfying time travel adventure I’ve maybe ever seen in a film…and here’s why
We don’t see the characters change time…at all.
And I’m sure you’re thinking that we see them save Buck Beak because he got killed etc…but that isn’t what we saw.
We are just shown the same events twice form two different angles. They don’t show us a bad version of history that the characters then have to repair.
Instead, what they do is trick us to think that Buck Beak was killed, only to later reveal that he wasn’t actually killed and the executioner just hit his axe on a big pumpkin thing.
We see that Hermione had been causing distractions like throwing rocks or howling to distract Lupin. But this means that in both the first time we see these events play out and the second time, the same events happen exactly the same. We don’t see a version of time where Buck Beak was killed, or where Hermione didn’t distract the werewolf and it killed Sirius etc.
If you think of something like Back to the Future, we see Doc Brown get shot at the start of the film and we know that he’s been killed. Then, when we see the same event happen at the end of the film, we’re led to believe that he’s been killed again, but we have the reveal that what Marty did in the past has actually changed time and now Doc lives.
We see the same event twice, with the first time being where things go badly, and then we see the version of the event after the characters fix it.
In Harry Potter, we don’t ever see the bad version of the events. We just see the good version of events twice, but from two different perspectives.
There’s the moment where Lupin goes to attack Harry and the gang, but the werewolf gets distracted by the sound of howling, or when Hermione thinks she sees something in the bushes, and we then learn that this was in fact Hermione changing time for the better when we see it from the perspective of the later version of Hermione.
They are sneaky to try to trick the audience into thinking that things have gone wrong, including that Buck Beak is killed by the executioner, but when we see the event from the perspective of the future Harry and Hermione we then learn that Buck Beak had escaped and the executioner just slammed the axe into a giant squash or pumpkin. It’s just a shame that this approach of showing time travel in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban doesn’t show you what originally happened.
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