My Five Favorite Time-Travel Movies of All-Time

Travel through time is suprisingly a common plot device in movies. Army of Darkness, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me and of course the Back to the Future trilogy are all movies where the plot centers around a character or characters moving through time. However in each of the cited cases, the time travel is not as important as the characters being a fish out of water. The movie is not about time travel as much as time travel is a mechanism to create the plot.

I like movies that are centered on time travel itself. The time travel needs to be integral to the plot with the additional treat of questions of causality woven into it. The central metaphor is then not a fish out of water but a fish in the current of a river. The current may normally push the fish in a specific direction. But the fish is able to swim in many directions and not just where the current takes them. Since I like these types of movies, I've seen quite a few and these are my favorite five.



Groundhog Day

Probably the most popular movie on this list, it's the one which is 100% centered on time travel and it does it in a very innovative way. The idea is causality is not being something fluid where small changes have large impacts. Instead causality is something that you repeat over and over until you get it "right", a kind of destiny forcing your hand. Free will is out the door but except in your capacity to learn.

Add on to its uniqueness that this story could only have been a movie. If you tried to tell "Groundhog Day" as a short story, it would've been almost unreadable. The consistent hiccups in the The medium of film and the audience's familiarity with film editing makes this movie not only possible but also very enjoyable.



12 Monkeys

I liked this movie because it posits that everything that will happen will happen. It's not just regardless of the involvement of time travelers either but in some cases because of those time travelers. It puts a different spin on causality than the normal "butterfly effect."

According to 12 Monkeys, you can't go back in time and kill your grandfather because you didn't already. At the same time, there are things that happened in the past that are better understood from the perspective of the time-traveler. Once you know X precedes Z but follows Y, the entire story is changed. The time travelers' role is no longer God-like with a prescient knowledge but as a cog in the machine that serves a role in advancing history to where it was going all along anyhow.



Donnie Darko

Donnie Darko is largely indecipherable on its own. Richard Kelly's strength is what is in his head, not putting what's in his head onto the movie screen. Which is why a quick plunge into the extra material on the DVD is important to understanding this movie. This is especially useful if you get your hands on the director's cut.

Once you find out about the tangent universes, artifacts and the living receiver stuff, the movie makes a great deal of sense. One of the assumptions of most time-travel movies is that there is one true time stream and we can make tangential changes in it by traveling through it to another point. This movie is different by positing that making a tangent universe is actually a bad thing.



Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

Okay, this movie is on here for two reasons really. First, it was a movie I watched as much as any other when I was an adolescent. My mom figured out how to use our video camera to play videotapes we rented from the videostore through the VCR and dub them. So I had a copy of this movie before owning your favorite movies was common.

Second, it's a goofy movie. It's not a heavy-handed "Going back to kill your own grandfather" time travel story. They can and do come both with and without existential dread. Bill and Ted are traveling through time to collect historical figures to come speak at the final history presentation of the school year. Even Camus would've cracked a smile at something as absurd as that.



Primer

There was a brief couple of months in early 2005 where this movie made me lose my mind. I rented it from CinemaRevolution, watched it by myself and then promptly showed it to anyone who I could get to watch it with me. It's not a movie that you can really figure out in the first time through and also gets better with repeated viewings. I was so enthralled I literally watched the movie like an addict.

It was addicting because it has the most believable mechanism for time-travel in any movie I'd seen. Normally it's a device like a flux capacitor and we're asked to suspend our disbelief that this device is the reason time travel is possible. "Primer" used a version of realistic physics to explain how time travel could actually be possible in real physics. Seeing "Primer" was, for me, like having a dream that you wake from and are convinced that it was real.