A "pretty girl" turning back time?

 

Cher's song "If I Could Turn Back Time" is featured in a post-credit scene in the 2018 film Deadpool 2,an American superhero film based upon the Marvel Comics character Deadpool. It is a spin-off in the X-Men film series, a sequel to 2016's Deadpool, and the eleventh instalment overall. As the closing credits roll, Cable, one of the main characters of the film, and a time traveller from the far future, the character Deadpool uses Cable's time machine to go back in time and correct various timelines as Cher's song plays. This includes time travel back to a find a baby Hitler, and potentially correcting the history of the twentieth century and accordingly removing the Holocaust and World War II from human history by killing a baby. 

Q. Killing a baby? 

A. Yes, killing a baby! 

A similar scenario, but emerging from an historical and existential context, occurs in the 1985 Soviet anti-war film directed by Elem Klimov titled Come and See. 

The original Belarusian title of the film derives from Chapter 6 of the Book of Revelation, where in the first, third, fifth, and seventh verse is written "ідзі і глядзі" (English: "Come and see", Greek: Ἐρχου καὶ ἴδε, Erchou kai ide) as an invitation to look upon the destruction caused by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The fourth woodcut of the Apocalypse series by Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1498) 

Chapter 6, verses 7–8 have been cited as being particularly relevant to the film:

And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, "Come and see!" And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. 

In 1943, two Belarusian boys dig in a sand-filled trench looking for abandoned rifles in order to join the Soviet partisan forces. Their village elder warns them not to dig up the weapons as it would arouse the suspicions of the occupying Germans. One of the boys, Flyora, finds an SVT-40 rifle, though both of them are seen by an Fw 189 flying overhead.

The next day two partisans arrive at Flyora's house, to conscript him. Flyora becomes a low-rank militiaman and is ordered to perform menial tasks. When the partisans are ready to move on, the partisan commander, Kosach, says that Flyora is to remain behind at the camp. Bitterly disappointed, Flyora walks into the forest weeping and meets Glasha, a young girl working as a nurse in the camp, and the two bond before the camp is suddenly attacked by German paratroopers and dive bombers.

Flyora is partially deafened from the explosions before the two hide in the forest to avoid the German soldiers. Flyora and Glasha travel to his village, only to find his home deserted and covered in flies. Denying that his family is dead, Flyora believes that they are hiding on a nearby island across a bog. As they run from the village in the direction of the bogland, Glasha glances across her shoulder, seeing a pile of executed villagers' bodies stacked behind a house, but does not alert Flyora.

The two become hysterical after wading through the bog, where Glasha then screams at Flyora that his family is actually dead in the village; resulting in the latter attempting to drown her. They are soon met by Rubezh, a partisan fighter, who takes them to a large group of villagers who have fled the Germans. Flyora sees the village elder, badly burnt by the Germans, who tells him that he witnessed his family's execution and that he should not have dug up the rifles. Flyora, hearing this, then attempts suicide out of guilt, but Glasha and the villagers save and comfort him.

Rubezh takes Flyora and two other men to find food at a nearby warehouse, only to find it being guarded by German troops. During their retreat, the group unknowingly wanders through a minefield resulting in the deaths of the two companions. That evening Rubezh and Flyora sneak up to an occupied village and manage to steal a cow from a collaborating farmer. As they escape across an open field, Rubezh and the cow are shot and killed by a German machine gun. The next morning, Flyora attempts to steal a horse and cart but the owner catches him and instead of doing him harm, he helps hide Flyora's identity when SS troops approach.

Flyora is taken to the village of Perekhody, where they hurriedly discuss a fake identity for him, while the SS unit, accompanied by Soviet collaborators surround and occupy the village. Flyora tries to warn the townsfolk as they are being herded to their deaths, but is forced to join them inside a wooden church. Flyora and a young girl are allowed to escape the church, but the latter is dragged by her hair across the ground and into a truck to be gang raped. Flyora is forced to watch as several Molotov cocktails and grenades are thrown onto and within the church before it is further set ablaze with a flamethrower as other soldiers shoot into the building. A German officer points a gun to Flyora's head to pose for a picture before leaving him to slump to the ground as the soldiers leave.

Flyora later wanders out of the scorched village in the direction of the Germans, where he discovers they had been ambushed by the partisans. After recovering his jacket and rifle, Flyora comes across the young girl in a fugue state, her legs and face covered in blood after having been gang-raped and brutalised by German forces. Flyora returns to the village and finds that his fellow partisans have captured eleven of the Germans and their collaborators, including the commander, an SS-Sturmbannführer. While some of the captured men including the commander and main collaborator plead for their lives and deflect blame, a young fanatical officer, an Obersturmführer, is unapologetic and vows they will carry out their genocidal mission.

Kosach makes the collaborator douse the Germans with a can of petrol brought there by Flyora, but the disgusted crowd shoots them all before they can be set on fire. As the partisans leave, Flyora notices a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler in a puddle and proceeds to shoot it numerous times. 

As he does so, a montage of clips from Hitler's life play in reverse, but when Hitler is shown as a baby on his mother's lap, Flyora stops shooting and cries. 

A title card appears: 

"628 Belorussian villages were destroyed, along with all their inhabitants" 

(alternate translations: "628 Belarusian villages were burnt to the ground with all their inhabitants"; "The Nazis burned down 628 Byelorussian villages together with all the people in them"). 

Flyora rushes to rejoin his comrades, and they march through the birch woods as snow blankets the ground.

. . . come and see! 

Rita Kempley, of The Washington Post, wrote that; 

"directing with an angry eloquence, [Klimov] taps into that hallucinatory nether world of blood and mud and escalating madness that Francis Ford Coppola found in Apocalypse Now. And though he draws a surprisingly vivid performance from his inexperienced teen lead, Klimov's prowess is his visual poetry, muscular and animistic, like compatriot Andrei Konchalovsky's in his epic Siberiade." 

According to Klimov, the film was so shocking for audiences that ambulances were sometimes called in to take care of particularly impressionable viewers, both in the Soviet Union and abroad. During one of the after-the-film discussions, an elderly German man stood up and said:

"I was a soldier of the Wehrmacht; moreover, an officer of the Wehrmacht. I traveled through all of Poland and Belarus, finally reaching Ukraine. I will testify: everything that is told in this film is the truth. And the most frightening and shameful thing for me is that this film will be seen by my children and grandchildren."

The concept of time travel by mechanical means was popularised in H. G. Wells' 1895 story, The Time Machine.

The plot of the 1960 American film version of H. G. Wells' 1895 novella is set in London on the eve of 1900, but has been adjusted to fit the contemporary Cold War ideological narrative of the late 1950's. At a dinner on New Year's Eve, George says that time is "the fourth dimension". He shows David Filby, Dr. Philip Hillyer, Anthony Bridewell, and Walter Kemp a small model time machine and has one of them press a tiny lever on it. The device disappears, but his friends remain doubtful. A few days later, on January 5, the four friends arrive for a dinner at their inventor friend George, but he is absent. He arrives suddenly, bedraggled and exhausted, and tells them what has happened to him.

George has a full-size time machine which he uses to travel forward to September 13, 1917. He meets Filby's son, James, who tells him of Filby's death in a war. He then stops on June 19, 1940, during the Blitz, finding himself in the midst of "a new war". George resumes his journey and stops on August 18, 1966. People hurry into a fallout shelter amid the blare of air raid sirens. An elderly James Filby urges George to take cover. Moments later, a nuclear satellite detonates, causing a volcanic eruption. George narrowly makes it back to his machine ahead of the approaching lava, which rises, cools, and hardens, trapping him inside, as he travels far into the future. Eventually the lava wears away, revealing a lush, unspoiled landscape.  

The 2002 film version is set in 1899, with the protagonist Dr. Alexander Hartdegen, an inventor teaching at Columbia University in New York City. After a mugger kills his fiancée Emma, he devotes himself to building a time machine that will allow him to travel back in time to save her. When he completes the machine four years later, he travels back to 1899 and prevents her murder, only to see her killed again when a horseless carriage frightens the horses of a horse-drawn vehicle. 

Alexander realises that any attempt to save Emma will result in her death through other circumstances. He travels to 2030, where an advertising campaign proclaims that:

. . . the future is NOW! 

He tries to discover whether science has been able to solve his question of how to change the past. At the New York Public Library, a holographic librarian called Vox 114 insists time travel to the past is impossible. 

In general, time travel stories focus on the consequences of traveling into the past or the future. The central premise for these stories often involves changing history, either intentionally or by accident, and the ways by which altering the past changes the future and creates an altered present or future for the time traveler upon their return home. In other instances, the premise is that the past cannot be changed or that the future is predetermined, and the protagonist's actions turn out to be either inconsequential or intrinsic to events as they originally unfolded. Some stories focus solely on the paradoxes and alternate timelines that come with time travel, rather than time traveling itself. They often provide some sort of social commentary, as time travel provides a "necessary distancing effect" that allows science fiction to address contemporary issues in metaphorical ways. 

Come and See! Science Fiction and/or Historical Fiction? 

Time travel has been part of the storylines in Marvel's the X-Men, a fictional team of superheroes appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. Created by artist/co-plotter Jack Kirby and writer/editor Stan Lee, the characters first appeared in The X-Men #1 back in September 1963, and formed one of the most recognisable and successful franchises of Marvel Comics, appearing in numerous books, television shows, films, and video games. 

Many of the X-Men's stories delve into time travel either in the sense of the team travelling through time on a mission, villains traveling through time to alter history, or certain characters traveling from the past or future in order to join the present team. Story arcs and spin-offs that are notable for using this plot device include Days of Future Past, Messiah Complex, All-New X-Men, Messiah War, and Battle of the Atom. Characters who are related to time travel include: Apocalypse, Bishop, Cable, Old Man Logan, Prestige, Hope Summers, Tempus, and Stryfe.