The idea of ​​changing how things happen or will happen or have happened is tempting when it comes to science fiction. While the usual methods these films use to deal with time travel aren’t always theoretically more accurate or even well thought out, some filmmakers have managed to pull them through with no gaping plot holes.

CONNECTED: Marvel: 10 Best Time Travel Stories

While it can be easy to get lost in the details of how time travel and the science involved work, these films find a balance to keep things entertaining. The audience might even pick up a thing or two about the space-time continuum while driving.

10 Primer didn’t do it stupid

Shane Carruth was uniquely placed to create a film about time travel. The writer / director of Primer was a former engineer with a degree in mathematics. When creating his Low budget 2004 filmHe didn’t dumb up any of the science when two men accidentally discovered time travel. It has since been dubbed the closest movie version of how time travel would actually work.

The film deals with the physical and emotional consequences of using her time machine, the so-called box. It was an award winner at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and has become a cult classic.

9 12 monkeys shoot for a better tomorrow

In trying to find a cure for the virus that killed 99% of the human population in the 90s, the time travel geniuses are in 12 monkeys haven’t really stabilized the process of time travel. But they decide it’s good enough to send prisoners to … whenever.

This is more of a cautionary story against sending people through time for better or for worse than a solid example of time travel. The protagonist James Cole (played by Bruce Willis), cannot escape his own trauma. Will humanity be saved? Maybe – but it’s not likely.

8th Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home burns up on energy

Nobody likes time travel like Star Trek. In case of Star Trek IV: The Journey HomeWhile the physics of hurling a ship around the sun fast enough to break the space-time continuum is a bit of a hit and miss, the energy consumption shown makes the leap to the 1980s a little more scientifically plausible.

CONNECTED: Top 10 most powerful superheroes who can travel through time

While the crew of the Enterprise played fast and easy with the usual time travel rules, the whales were clearly worth the effort.

7th Planet of the Apes (1968) plays at the speed of light

The closer an object – for example a spaceship – comes to movement at the speed of light, the more time theoretically changes or expands around this object. While Charlton Heston speeds through space and fortunately is not aware that he is experiencing a time dilation, the monkeys take over the planet for a few millennia.

While the 2001 remake didn’t care much about how time travel actually worked in this world, the original was planet of monkeys The theory of special relativity and the unveiling of a broken Statue of Liberty wonderfully show where and when George Taylor landed.

6th Star Trek: First Contact Saves the Federation

The Borg are threatening Earth in the mid-21st century and the crew of the Enterprise must stop them. The technology of the Borg enables time travel primarily in the form of an artificial wormhole that represents the folding of space and time to travel to another point on the continuum.

At least this time, unlike her original cast mates, the Star Trek: the next generation The crew is trying to keep too much information away from people on the 21st century earth. She did enough to freak out the man who would make the first contact with the Vulcans. Fortunately, he was brought around, but telling him about the statue was probably a mistake.

5 The arrival is non-linear

Linguist Louise Baker, played by Amy Adams, communicates through thick fog with a shadowy alien through dark shapes in Arrival

Although it’s not a traditional time travel movie, Arrivals begs the question: if you know what’s coming, will you change course? While Louise Banks (played by) tries to communicate with aliens who have surfaced around the world Amy Adams) is separated from time and space as it knows it.

CONNECTED: Endgame: 10 Reasons Captain America’s Time Travel Paradox Makes Sense

While her body is not darting across the continuum, her mind does and she must weigh her options and choose to follow the path she saw for the good rather than turning away from the pain that is to come.

4th Groundhog Day attacks all logic

Groundhog Day and its time warp is an exercise in patience. While the rules of storytelling usually dictate that repetition is bad, this movie embraces them and uses them to build the world that way Bill MurrayPhil Connors is stuck.

Although Einstein allowed the possibility of warping time so much that it locks itself in on itself, most research now says that nature would not allow it. But with the recent surge in time loop titles on screens, physics doesn’t seem to matter.

3rd Back to the Future Part II is an introduction to branching timelines

In the original Back to the FutureViewers never got a glimpse of how changing the timeline worked, but in the second film, Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Lloyd breaks it open for everyone on his board, including Marty. He clearly illustrated how Biff, who got the sports almanac, split the timeline and changed everything. While Doc and Marty managed to change things back and delete that branch, that was the first step most fans took to figuring out how these things worked.

Doc didn’t go into how there was already a twofold timeline from the first movie where George learned to stand up for himself, but that didn’t really matter right now.

2 Interstellar communicates through time

Interstellar’s time travel depends almost entirely on the theoretical physics to which we already have access today, and extrapolates it from those who strive to save humanity. It deals with the concept of time dilation, or the idea that the closer you get to the speed of light, the slower time it moves for this individual.

Interstellar involves the idea of ​​communicating through time, sending messages to the past to give humanity an extra chance, and formulating that the “ghost” in Murph’s house as a child was actually their father in the future.

1 Terminator & Terminator 2 set the bar

The Terminator and John Connor sit on a motorcycle while the Terminator aims a shotgun at the oncoming attack in Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Loops of causality, free will or fate, the first two Terminator Films gave several generations the vocabulary to discuss movie time travel and some quippy Arnold Schwarzenegger quotes. The concept of going back in time to kill an enemy before they were born or as a child originated from the “grandfather’s paradox” of killing your own grandparent before conceiving your parent.

While the later sequels played with the time travel concepts and the concept of free will much faster and looser – John Connor watched the world burn in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines illustrated the inevitability of his life – the original two still hold up as great Examples of how to play with time in the cinema.

NEXT: 10 anime that give time travel a unique twist

Luke Leia and Han in Star Wars IV


Next
10 ways the Star Wars novels are better than the original trilogy

About the author

Amanda Rabski-McColl
(35 articles published)

Amanda Rabski-McColl is a graduate of the Journalism Program at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology. She is a lifelong fan of comics and superheroes with a focus on Marvel. Her love of comics found its way into her job as an opinion editor for Emery Weal on the SAIT campus, and she has written about the culture of fandom and its impact on its members. She’s also raising the next generation of comic book fans and her son is on Team Iron Man.

More from Amanda Rabski-McColl