Time Travel Movie Review

Time travel stories have always been troubling, since it is a paradox. It's both impossible and very real.

Physicists tell us that time travel is a common phenomenon – but only at one speed and in one direction. For human beings to “travel” into the future at an accelerated pace, or into the past, is as near to a technological impossibility as you're likely to find. This would only be possible by taking the subject outside its relative timeline or dimension, and transporting it to another point on that timeline, or onto a parallel timeline so close to its own as to be indistinguishable, except that the destination timeline began at a different point. So far, the only clue we have as to how to do this is from Einstein's idea that objects traveling near the speed of light decrease in aging relative to the universe around it. But that only works for traveling into the future. Traveling into the past would have to involve sidestepping time altogether.

That leaves us with the hard truth that no scientist of the 19th century, or 22nd century for that matter, can build a working time machine, no matter how many flashing lights and bundles of wires are attached to it. Surely H.G. Wells was aware of this when he wrote his classic novel The Time Machine over one hundred years ago. Wells was fascinated by history, both natural and “man made,” and used his invention as a device to expound on some of his theories about where history might eventually take us. Once you accept the fact that time machines are nothing more than tricked-up fantasy elements like the computerized genie of the lamp cooked up by John Hughes in Weird Science (1985), you should have no trouble enjoying any good story containing one. Right?

Unfortunately, no. Early science-fiction writers were quick to create, identify, and hammer into dull cliches the classic Time Paradox story, or the familiar “I killed my infant grandfather” plotline. Today, the Time Paradox story, like the Locked Room story of the mystery genre, is looked on affectionately as a nostalgic old chestnut, rarely used by authors once they're out of their teen years. Sadly, movie and TV plots are usually years behind prose fiction – the writing staff of Star Trek uses a Time Paradox every time they get lazy. To their credit, the Back to the Future and Bill & Ted movies did a wonderful job of sending up the whole idea. But the prevalence of the whole paradox theme in modern sci-fi movies can give one a headache. But as an extension of the paradox, time travel movies are among the most popular of all science-fiction films.

In The Terminator and its sequel, killer robots are sent back in time to eliminate their enemies from ever existing. But if they succeed in their mission, their mission becomes unnecessary, and so they are never sent to begin with, which would mean they'd failed. And so on. The story only works if you accept certain conflicting theories about the nature of time – thus, another paradox.

In Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah (1991, but still unfortunately unavailable in the U.S.), characters use their time machine to change events in the past, but those changes only take effect from the point in time they return to – events of the past remain the same, but the changes take effect in the “present.”

In Time Bandits, Terry Gilliam avoided the Time Paradox by using it as a convenient tool to get his characters from one brilliantly contrived fantasy to the next. But Twelve Monkeys ends up making the Time Paradox its platform, from which Gilliam launches dozens of finely tooled concepts, making this his most accessible feature to date.

If the hero of The Time Machine had stopped off in 1989 to watch Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, it may have saved him a lot of trouble. It's been argued that Marty McFly couldn't have met his older self in Back to the Future 2, but that's only true if it was an accepted condition of the story. Once you free the genie from the lamp, he can only grant you three wishes – unless he can grant you four.

So next time you watch a movie about time travel, think about what the consequences of time travel would really mean to the story. Or better yet, don't think about it. It will only give you a headache.