Top 10 Time Travel Movies

I'm a sucker for a good time travel story and with the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Back to the Future movies, and the talk of the supposed cell-phone-using time traveler at the premiere of a Charlie Chaplan movie in the 1920's, people have been talking a lot about Time Travel of late.

Obviously someone who has discovered the secret of time travel would be talking on a modern cellphone.

In fact, I'm just going to call it, November is National Time Travel Month. To celebrate this prestigious event, you can go to one of those nerdy Time Travel Reception parties where people wait around for people from the future to show up...but seriously, if I had a time machine, I would already know that that party sucked without having to go. Instead, I am going to count down my favorite Time Travel Movies

No, Borg, attempting to change the past is futile.

10. Star Trek: First Contact

Star Trek is absolutely rife with time travel stories. In fact, there is an entire DVD boxed set of nothing but time travel episodes from the various series (and that’s still not all of them).

The miracle of Time Travel allows T. J. Hooker to meet A Man Called Hawk.

First Contact was not even the first Star Trek feature to deal with time travel (that would be Star Trek IV) but First Contact features elements of both The Terminator (the Borg get a hare-brained idea to travel back to the past to assimilate humanity and prevent First Contact with the Vulcans) and Back to the Future (Riker and his team must engineer events on the ground to make sure that the future takes its course), in a fun and action packed story filled with high stakes temporal paradoxes.

Hermione, why don't we hang onto this thing?

9. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

You don’t usually find time travel in fantasy movies like Harry Potter, but late in Prisoner of Azkaban we learn that young Hermione Granger has been using a magical device in order to be able to double up on her class load (seriously). Towards the end of the movie, Hermione and Harry use the device to double back on events that had already transpired. The time travel elements are very well-done and we realize that they were present in the movie before we even knew that Harry and Hermione were going to go back in time, creating a very clever and logical temporal loop. Azkaban is one of the few movies that does time travel right.

Strangely, this very useful device disappears after this movie, when it might have REALLY come in handy.

8. Déjà Vu

Denzel Washington stars in this tightly-plotted thriller in which a cop uses an experimental device that allows limited interaction with the past in order to investigate and, later, prevent a terrorist attack on New Orleans. The movie keeps it’s time travel elements small and “realistic” and for a time travel movie, Déjà Vu actually feels credible.

7. Star Trek

2009’s Star Trek beautifully illustrates one of the often ignored Golden Rules of time travel: travel to the past will likely create an alternate universe. The movie begins early in the continuity established by all of the previous movies and shows, but when a 24^th century Romulan ship arrives on the scene at almost the same moment that Kirk is born, a new alternate future is created and the Star Trek series is cleverly rebooted. It’s only logical.

6. Time Crimes

This Spanish thriller is one of those pleasantly confusing time travel movies that layers paradox on top of paradox almost to the point of absurdity and shows the complications of making repeated trips to the past in a confined geographical area. Time Crimes illustrates the other Golden Rule of time travel: If you travel to the past and DO NOT create an alternate universe, then all of your actions in the past will have been part of the present all along (see Prisoner of Azkaban). This movie is really good, check it out if you haven’t seen it.

5. Terminator

Terminator is great and problematic time travel movie. In a post apocalyptic future, machines have taken over the planet and fight bands of human rebels. When the humans finally achieve victory, the machines launch a desperate gambit: sent a cyborg back in time to kill the human leader’s mother so that he is never born. Of course, if he is never born, then there would be no need to send a terminator back in time to kill him…and so on.

Unless, Skynet was trying to seed the past with Terminator technology, to hasten its own creation in an alternate universe. But seriously, most of us are too busy worrying about what happens in our own universe to have time to think about others (see Fringe). Perhaps Skynet was looking to set up franchises in alternate dimensions. Like Starbucks.

4. Groundhog Day

Groundhog Day is more of a Temporal Anomaly movie, than a time travel movie. In this 1992 comedy, Bill Murray plays a man who is caught in some kind of time loop, and forced to repeat the same day over and over again until he gets it right. Groundhog Day is more concerned with comedy than science but its premise is intriguing and was even “borrowed” for an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. By the second half of the movie, Groundhog Day becomes a kind of cause and effect character lab as Murray repeatedly interacts with the characters in this small town until he finally figures out how to be happy.

3. Back to the Future

Back to the Future is the granddaddy of time travel comedies and just a great movie all around. 1980’s teenager Marty McFly gets accidentally sent back to 1955, where he prevents his parents from meeting and falling in love and endangers his own existence. After putting things right, he returns to his home to find his family changed for the better (?). While undoubtedly a classic, the time travel elements of the movie are a little goofy, due to a contrived temporal paradox, that Marty measures with a fading photograph of his family.

But let’s get real, Marty’s existence is in no real danger in Back to the Future. If we are to buy that there is a single universe paradox, then Marty’s trip to the past becomes part of established history and he was always meant to go back in time and help his parents get together. If this had been the case, Marty would have come back to the exact same family situation that he had left: his father a spineless nerd and his mother an unhappy drunk.

Instead, Marty comes back to a new douchey parallel 1985, in which his father is a rich and successful novelist who has hired his wife’s attempted rapist, Biff, to work as a manservant. No doubt, this new 1985 would have been different in countless ways for poor Marty. He might never have felt truly at home. It also begs the question, what happened to that future’s Marty McFly? And what about Marty’s poor family from his original timeline? To them, Marty simply would have vanished in the Twin Pines Mall parking lot during a botched terrorist attack. Tragic. But, again, no one cares about people in alternate universes.

Bite their shiny metal asses.

2. Futurama: Bender's Big Score

The first and best of the Futurama direct-to-DVD movies, Bender’s Big Score is a wild time travel romp that visits the past, present and future of this sci-fi animated series from The Simpsons creator Matt Groening. Always up-to-no-good robot Bender makes use of a time machine to steal precious artifacts from the past and soon creates a paradox that involves Fry and Leela, and even revisits the opening moments of the series in a funny riff on The Terminator.

1. Back to the Future, Part II

So, let’s get one thing out of the way, Back to the Future, Part II is nowhere near as good a movie as the original. In fact, one could make an argument that BTTF II is not so much a movie in its own right as it is a supplement to Back to the Future. People have criticized it for lacking the charm and the heart of the original movie, which is fair. But no other movie out there is as concerned with the actual time travel as this movie, which deals with the complications from time travel gone awry and Marty and Doc's attempt's to fix the past. The movie is so dizzyingly plotted that Doc Brown has to actually bust out a blackboard in the middle of it to explain what is going on.

The good thing is that Back to the Future, Part II mostly gets the time travel right in a way that the original did not. The movie jumps between the past events of the first movie (from a different point of view), the (now near) future, and an alternate universe 1985. Like any good time travel movie, it is a little confusing, but the plot is solid enough to withstand analysis, which makes Back to the Future, Part II the ultimate movie in the time travel genre.

Patrick Garone
www.patrickgarone.com
twitter.com/patrickgarone
facebook.com/cityofthegodsnovel