Time Travel in Movies: Who Got It Right?

[Deck Rickard]

Okay, so... a CERTAIN movie recently used time travel as a plot device and it cause a lot of discussion. Some people think it was used correctly, some feel it was used poorly, and for most of us (I think) the results were mixed on how it was used.

I'm curious which films you think got time travel "right", per se. It's one of those things where a movie has to lay out its own rules so that it makes sense within the context of the story. I feel like most movies who use time travel end up violating their own rules, but I guess that's okay? I don't know. A lot of times, I think movies want to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to this; they want to show how time travel could disrupt the course of history but also have something happen that "always" happened as a direct result of time travel. Anyway, here are movies that I enjoyed where I feel like it was used well, even if some things may have left me scratching my head:

Back to the Future trilogy
Safety Not Guaranteed
Terminator 1 & 2
Avengers Endgame
Dr. Strange
Star Trek (JJ Abrams)
X-Men: DOFP
Bill & Ted
Donnie Darko
12 Monkeys
Army of Darkness
Time After Time

 

[Dr.]

Haven’t seen Endgame, can’t comment.

Predestination (based on the Heinlein short story) was deliberately - mischievously? - convoluted and complicated. But as I recall, it adhered to its own “rules” pretty well.

Primer was very good too.

 

[Shinobi Shaw]

Back To The Future totally got it right because it’s simple: whatever you do in the past directly affects your future. And if you screwed something up, go back to that point in time before the screw up happens to divert it (ie: Marty taking back the almanac from Biff in 1955 before he could use it to make money).

Days of Future Past also had a good grip on time travel. I wish Endgame took a page out of that book for their rules.

 

[Mandon Knight]

H.G. Wells 'Time Machine', published in 1895, film made in 1960, the original version, the book is beyond it's years and the 1960 film, in terms of how it presents those ideas, is also.

 

[Travesty]

The only movies that I thought got time travel right are Timecrimes and Primer. Everything else takes pretty crazy liberties, which is fine. It's time travel, as it's all theoretical, so you're bound to run into paradoxes.

 

[DarkKnight88]

H.G. Wells 'Time Machine', published in 1895, film made in 1960, the original version, the book is beyond it's years and the 1960 film, in terms of how it presents those ideas, is also.

This.

Robert Zemeckis said he and Bob Gale borrowed the concept of time travel specifically from this.

Accurate of not - time travel doesn’t exist - The Time Machine and subsequently BTTF are the most iconic.

 

[Deck Rickard]

Yeah H.G. Wells’ original novel and the classic film were great; can’t believe I forgot to include them. The less said about the Guy Pearce version, the better. Lol

 

[KRYPTON INC.]

In regards to the elephant in the room...

 

[scarlet-witch]

I'm not sure if there really is a "right" but my favorite time travel movie is Looper.

 

[psylockolussus]

X-Men Days of Future Past and Avengers Endgame.

 

[samsnee]

Back To The Future totally got it right because it’s simple: whatever you do in the past directly affects your future. And if you screwed something up, go back to that point in time before the screw up happens to divert it (ie: Marty taking back the almanac from Biff in 1955 before he could use it to make money).

Days of Future Past also had a good grip on time travel. I wish Endgame took a page out of that book for their rules.

Disagree they got it "right". When 1985 Marty disappeared from his point in the timeline, he couldn't have visited himself in the future as he didn't exist for the next 30 years. They didn't time travel, they traveled to an alternate timeline. And then they fixed the past in that timeline. When the series ends, he returns to his own timeline with knowledge of how the alternate timeline turns out so makes sure his own timeline doesn't follow suit.

Time travel (at least in the cinematic version of it) isn't possible so it's hard to say who got it right. I think the ones who make a closed loop to avoid a grandfather paradox probably make the most sense.

 

[-JKR-]

No one.
I should know. I'm a time-traveller.

 

[Shinobi Shaw]

Disagree they got it "right". When 1985 Marty disappeared from his point in the timeline, he couldn't have visited himself in the future as he didn't exist for the next 30 years. They didn't time travel, they traveled to an alternate timeline. And then they fixed the past in that timeline. When the series ends, he returns to his own timeline with knowledge of how the alternate timeline turns out so makes sure his own timeline doesn't follow suit.

Time travel (at least in the cinematic version of it) isn't possible so it's hard to say who got it right. I think the ones who make a closed loop to avoid a grandfather paradox probably make the most sense.

I disagree with that too, 1985 Marty changed some things up but he didn’t do anything too drastic in 1955 to have his birth be tampered with. Everything else happened the way it was destined to go (his parents falling in love at the dance, the thunderstorm) so if you go by that it makes sense that he’s still alive in his own timeline.

Now if there was one character that kinda made their trilogy’s rules hokey it was Doc. If he went back to the Old West all those years ago how was he alive in 1955 when they started changing realities.

But for the most part I liked their concept of time travel the best.

 

[elgaz]

Saw this on my web travels and though I'd paste it in as it clarifies the 3 main theories nicely

 

[samsnee]

I think the third one with the multi-verse is the only one that "works". However, you can still return to your original timeline since once you change the past, you create a branch timeline. What happened in your original timeline remains unchanged.

I do believe you can't travel to your future from your present. You can only travel to the "future" back to your present when you go to the past. The future of your present hasn't happened yet as it is impacted by decisions made in your present.

 

[samsnee]

I disagree with that too, 1985 Marty changed some things up but he didn’t do anything too drastic in 1955 to have his birth be tampered with. Everything else happened the way it was destined to go (his parents falling in love at the dance, the thunderstorm) so if you go by that it makes sense that he’s still alive in his own timeline.

Now if there was one character that kinda made their trilogy’s rules hokey it was Doc. If he went back to the Old West all those years ago how was he alive in 1955 when they started changing realities.

But for the most part I liked their concept of time travel the best.

You're talking about the past, which I think does work in that movie. My point was that he can't travel to the future from his present timeline to visit his future self unless it's in a different multiverse.

 

[DarkKnight88]

Well the assumption would be that the Marty who travels to the future would eventually return to his present thus why there can be an older Marty in the future at the same time as a present Marty visits it.

 

[Dark Raven]

I wonder if time travel would work like a System Restore on Windows.

When you do that, in some sense you are experiencing going back in time. Not you personally, but you are wiping out all the events of the past week, for example, to go back to an earlier point in time. But in other ways, all of this has become part of your history. You aren't experiencing any change as such. It's the timeline on your computer that is.

When you go to that restore point , you begin a new timeline (which we will call X). But that old timeline (which we will call Y) doesn't continue to exist alongside timeline X as such, although you can return to it if you undo the system restore. Instead, that timeline Y is suspended or put into a holding place. And as time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to return to the Y timeline until at some point it becomes impossible. But if you were to try to return to the Y timeline within hours or even days of the system restore, you probably could do it.

Sometimes doing a system restore is easy, if there's nothing of much significance that has happened apart from one error or infection which has made you decide to go to an earlier restore point in the first place. But other times, you have installed other programs or things have changed on your computer, and going back to that restore point would undo too much and make it really difficult, so you have to either learn to live with it or find a way to keep all the things from before you restored.

 

[DarkKnight88]

Probably the best explanation for watching time travel.



Just enjoy yourself.

 

[Shinobi Shaw]

Probably the best explanation for watching time travel.



Just enjoy yourself.

My exact mindset half way into Endgame. I just said to hell with it.

 

[MovieSlave]

Well "Back to the Future" got it right and it wasn't hard considering they used the old and simplified version. You go back in time and change something, it affects your present when you return. Not alternate timelines or realities.

Personally I found the time travel in "Endgame" to make sense. I didn't see much wrong with it considering they explained the movie's time travel rules twice. The only thing I don't care for is the paradox fan theory that the writers kind of just confirmed.

Spoiler

That the kids we see in Peggy's photo at her bedside (I believe it was in Civil War) were Steve Roger's all along.

It's one of those chicken and the egg situations that annoy me at times. Similar to the first Terminator as well as the whole Hodor thing in Game of Thrones. I'm ignoring that part completely.

"Primer" did it well but I wasn't a fan of the overall movie. I remember reading an interview with the director/writer/actor and he was saying he didn't want to dumb the science down for the sake of the audience. Yeah well, really not that easy to do that and not come off as pretentious as all hell. Which he really is. I did enjoy "Upstream Color" though which is kind of funny because as far as pretentiousness goes that was a little higher up.

 

[elgaz]

I wonder if time travel would work like a System Restore on Windows.

When you do that, in some sense you are experiencing going back in time. Not you personally, but you are wiping out all the events of the past week, for example, to go back to an earlier point in time. But in other ways, all of this has become part of your history. You aren't experiencing any change as such. It's the timeline on your computer that is.

When you go to that restore point , you begin a new timeline (which we will call X). But that old timeline (which we will call Y) doesn't continue to exist alongside timeline X as such, although you can return to it if you undo the system restore. Instead, that timeline Y is suspended or put into a holding place. And as time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to return to the Y timeline until at some point it becomes impossible. But if you were to try to return to the Y timeline within hours or even days of the system restore, you probably could do it.

Sometimes doing a system restore is easy, if there's nothing of much significance that has happened apart from one error or infection which has made you decide to go to an earlier restore point in the first place. But other times, you have installed other programs or things have changed on your computer, and going back to that restore point would undo too much and make it really difficult, so you have to either learn to live with it or find a way to keep all the things from before you restored.

Interesting analogy.

I've read some articles recently on time travel and there's so many different fascinating interpretations and opinions on it. Science may have theories but it has not yet found a way to totally explain it so there is obviously a lot of disagreement out there.

One curious one I read put forth the idea that time we know it doesn't actually exist. Fundamentally, things happen in the universe and 'time' is simply a man-made concept - the metric which we use to describe the order in which we collate and record information about everything happening around us. To attest to this, they have carried out experiments which show that many of the major laws of physics can work just as successfully in reverse, so the notion of a flow-of-time in one direction is essentially meaningless.

Personally I believe that we will one day find a way to observe the past remotely via quantum tunnelling, but we will never be able to interact with it, thus preserving its integrity and eliminating the notion of both paradoxes and alternate timelines. As a very basic analogy, it's like watching a movie - we can reverse to any point and rewatch, but we can't actually go in and change what happens within the storyline on each run.

If we do reach that point though, it will raise so many other questions. Like - if we can observe events (which are essentially aural and visual information) from the past, where is that information stored? Is the universe a giant data storage device which records everything?[/I]

 

[TheGuy]

Interstellar. The ending which revealed that Cooper was the person who shook hands with Brand and was the cause of the gravitational anomalies in Murphy's room shows that the events repeat ad infinitum. No time travel rules established by the film were broken.

 

[Dark Raven]

Okay, so... a CERTAIN movie recently used time travel as a plot device and it cause a lot of discussion. Some people think it was used correctly, some feel it was used poorly, and for most of us (I think) the results were mixed on how it was used.

I'm curious which films you think got time travel "right", per se. It's one of those things where a movie has to lay out its own rules so that it makes sense within the context of the story. I feel like most movies who use time travel end up violating their own rules, but I guess that's okay? I don't know. A lot of times, I think movies want to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to this; they want to show how time travel could disrupt the course of history but also have something happen that "always" happened as a direct result of time travel. Anyway, here are movies that I enjoyed where I feel like it was used well, even if some things may have left me scratching my head:

Back to the Future trilogy
Safety Not Guaranteed
Terminator 1 & 2
Avengers Endgame
Dr. Strange
Star Trek (JJ Abrams)
X-Men: DOFP
Bill & Ted
Donnie Darko
12 Monkeys
Army of Darkness
Time After Time

There are other time travel movies which have been enjoyable but confusing and paradoxical. There's Somewhere in Time starring Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour and Christopher Plummer (which they mentioned in Endgame), and The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan starring Lindsay Wagner and Marc Singer (which is somewhat similar to Somewhere in Time).

 

[elgaz]

Timecrimes was a great (if low budget) take on a time travel movie also.