Time travel movies ranked by scientific logic and entertainment value

March 15, 2024 9:25 AM

The Ars guide to time travel in the movies: a non-comprehensive list and ranking of 20 time travel movies, exploring the plausibility of their time travel mechanics, and also, how entertaining they are.
posted by toastyk (91 comments total)

That chart is very upsetting to me.
posted by Jonathan Livengood at 9:33 AM on March 15 [14 favorites]

What, no Repo Man?!?
posted by chavenet at 9:42 AM on March 15 [10 favorites]

This, to me, is Timecop slander.

I really need to get around to watching Looper.
posted by General Malaise at 9:50 AM on March 15 [4 favorites]

If your so-called physics doesn't allow time to go backwards by spinning the earth around counter-clockwise, maybe you need some better physics.
posted by mittens at 9:51 AM on March 15 [23 favorites]

It seems to be mostly missing time-loop movies like Groundhog Day or Palm Springs, which is a shame, because talking about those movies gives a chance to encourage people to watch Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes and River(2023), which are pretty great if you like light comedy involving time travel and long takes.
posted by surlyben at 10:05 AM on March 15 [8 favorites]

Looper is great, I dearly love Rian Johnson.

This list is sus for how it denigrates Primer.
posted by macrael at 10:06 AM on March 15 [33 favorites]

Untill this shows the Z-Axis for Type-0 (single timeline, it always happened) to Type-1 (multiverse, everything happens and you can never get home again) it's worthless.

* the Type-0 Type-1 functions of time travel come from the Edinburgh University SciFi Society fanzine in the mid-nineties. Possibly lost forever, but I 've never found a better axis to measure on.
posted by ewan at 10:06 AM on March 15 [10 favorites]

Surely Primer deserves a higher science score. I wonder if it's being penalized for seeming to be too accurate.
posted by surlyben at 10:08 AM on March 15 [18 favorites]

Primer, less scientific AND less entertaining??
posted by UltraMorgnus at 10:08 AM on March 15 [16 favorites]

Two time-travel comedies I've enjoyed are Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (1977; Czechoslovakia), available on YouTube, and Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2022; Japan), available on Tubi.
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:09 AM on March 15 [8 favorites]

How does any movie about Time Travel get a Science score greater than 0?
posted by vacapinta at 10:10 AM on March 15 [16 favorites]

I'm bristly about time travel in entertainment. The more you try to convince me that time travel is somehow realistic, the more I bristle against it. This is one reason I prefer fantasy over sci-fi (usually)... fantasy doesn't try to make me believe its bullshit.
posted by SoberHighland at 10:11 AM on March 15 [2 favorites]

This, to me, is Timecop slander.

Indeed, I was just coming here to nitpick their nitpicking complaint about momentum.

The Earth is spinning, quite quickly in terms of absolute velocity when you're not near the poles- at the equator, you are traveling at about 1670 km/hr due to the Earth's rotation. That means your momentum is constantly changing direction as you go around in a circle. So your time machine would have to be able to do some sort of momentum correction to keep you stationary relative to the Earth when you arrived. Worst case, if you did a 12 hour time jump at the equator, you would suddenly find yourself with a difference of velocity between you and the surrounding objects - buildings, ground, etc. of about 3,300 km/hr. This would undoubtedly not be desirable, so clearly, the time machine must have some sort of safety system to correct your momentum relative to the surrounding objects.

So in short, using a time jump to arrest your momentum is probably the most scientific thing about the movie.
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:11 AM on March 15 [1 favorite]

As Marty inadvertently interferes with events that led to his parents first getting together, we see Marty’s brother and sister fade out of a photograph that was taken in 1985. [...] Why does the photograph fade then, i.e., in 1985? Marty’s shenanigans happened back in 1955. What kind of mystical cross-temporal connection must we imagine to make sense of such a delayed reaction?

I feel like this is a failure of imagination? Like, if we take for granted that there are infinitely many timelines that could branch off from any one moment, but that there is one "true" timeline (the one the protagonist is experiencing), the photo's fading is just a stand-in for how likely that particular branch is. At the start, Marty is on the timeline that leads directly to that photo. But he gradually removes possible timelines that lead to it.

Sure, the mechanic of fading each child individually is goofy, but from a standpoint of displaying what's happening -- this particular future becoming less likely until, ultimately, it's impossible -- I think it's pretty good.
posted by uncleozzy at 10:14 AM on March 15 [4 favorites]

Clicked over to confirm my deeply held belief that Back to the Futures (all of them) are both the most entertaining and most scientifically accurate of all time travel movies, and now I'm shaking.
posted by heyitsgogi at 10:15 AM on March 15 [1 favorite]

I wasn't sure how Superman reversing time by orbiting round the earth backwards got to be considered slightly more scientific than Back To The Future.

But then I remembered the famous fading-photograph scene (mentioned in the article) and I was like, oh yeah that's right.
posted by splitpeasoup at 10:16 AM on March 15 [1 favorite]

How does any movie about Time Travel get a Science score greater than 0?

Certainly all time travel to the future is bogus by definition. How can you go to some PLACE that hasn't even happened yet? The obvious counterargument to this involves relativity, the fact that as you travel closer to the speed of light, you actually travel into the future, such that if you went on such a space mission, then returned home, you'd find yourself having aged little compared to those you left behind. But this isn't travelling in time -- it's just a side effect of having travelled in space.

TIME BANDITS is, of course, the only truly great time travel movie.
posted by philip-random at 10:17 AM on March 15 [20 favorites]

There's no such thing as a "scientific" time-travel movie. (It's like saying there are movies with "scientific" magic.) But there are time-travel movies that have an internally consistent set of rules and try to mitigate obvious side-effects and paradoxes.

By that measure, Tenet is absolutely not a "scientific" time-travel movie. The "science" falls apart as soon as you take two seconds to think about it. It's inconsistent and has immediate and obvious paradoxes the moment you step outside of the very narrow confines of the story.

Primer, on the other hand, is pretty much the best example I've seen of trying to ground time-travel in scientific realism.
posted by chasing at 10:19 AM on March 15 [9 favorites]

Relatedly, Sean Carroll (co-author of the article) did a podcast episode on the physics of time travel in fiction.
posted by justkevin at 10:23 AM on March 15

> Certainly all time travel to the future is bogus by definition. How can you go to some PLACE that hasn't even happened yet?

I time travel to the future all the time. I'm doing it right now!
posted by chasing at 10:25 AM on March 15 [20 favorites]

I don't have a great deal of patience with nit-picking about time travel plausibility, because it's not plausible* no matter how you dress it up. What I care about is whether the source material cares about being internally consistent and following its own impossible rules, or, if they don't care much about any rules at all is it a fun enough movie to not care.

For movies like Looper and 12 Monkeys (and at a smaller level, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), they score an A on following an internal set of rules. For a movie like Back to the Future, it's just so darn fun that it gets a pass.


*unless you're going to get to weird exotic solutions to the general relativity tensors that require never-before observed things like negative energy densities, or know how to sneak inside a black hole's event horizon and can get back out
posted by tclark at 10:26 AM on March 15 [1 favorite]

Somewhere in Time, The Time Traveler's Wife
Time travel romance ignored! (Admittedly, there may be romance in this list but I have not seen several of them.)
posted by Glinn at 10:29 AM on March 15 [2 favorites]

How can you go to some PLACE that hasn't even happened yet?

...don't say it, don't say it!...

[fidgets uncomfortably]

Just sit down and wait!
posted by CynicalKnight at 10:33 AM on March 15

Someone didn’t understand Primer.
posted by iamck at 10:37 AM on March 15 [10 favorites]

I time travel to the future all the time. I'm doing it right now!

one breath at a time
posted by philip-random at 10:38 AM on March 15 [1 favorite]

My favorite is still The Time Machine (1960). I watched it every chance I could, which was whenever they broadcast it back in the 1960s/1970s. You just mount a nice armchair to a sled, make the whole thing sufficiently spinny and blinky, add some brass knobs, and suddenly it's the year umpteen million, big hairy cannibalistic Morlocks are eating little hairless vegan Eloi, and Yvette Mimieux wants to know how the women of your time do their hair.
posted by pracowity at 10:45 AM on March 15 [11 favorites]

OK, on the Superman thing, I think we're meant to understand that we're watching this from Superman's perspective. He's not actually reversing the rotation of the Earth, he's flying so fast that time is moving backwards and from his perspective that makes the Earth look look it's slowing and then rotating backwards.

Don't ask me how flying fast moves you back in time, but I think visually this makes sense.
posted by Eddie Mars at 10:48 AM on March 15 [6 favorites]

Scientifically speaking, as time travel is forward only, Superman flew so fast that he flung himself so far in the future he eventually lapped himself.
posted by mazola at 10:51 AM on March 15 [2 favorites]

How can you go to some PLACE that hasn't even happened yet?

If we're supposing that a person could only move backward in time, because any future destination does not yet exist, if a person did move backward in time, then that would set the future as a place that others from the past could go to (the present of the original traveler), but it would be impossible for the traveler from the past to travel to a time beyond that one. Yes, you're welcome.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 10:59 AM on March 15 [3 favorites]

I have come from the future to tell you that anyone who disses Primer will be taunted mercilessly until they recant.
posted by gimonca at 11:06 AM on March 15 [8 favorites]

What a weird article. I'm confused why there is even an "entertainment" score? It is clearly, based on the numbers listed in this article, too subjective to have any real value. As an example Timecrimes and Hot Tub Time Machine have the same Entertainment score. If you enjoyed both of those films at the same level of "entertainingness" you have a bizarre internal calculus of what you deem as "entertainment". And add to that it is missing a number of notable time travelling movies (just off the top of my head - Time Bandits, Terminator 2 [just as significant as the first], Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Midnight in Paris maybe even Somewhere in Time) which further renders the list confusing and flawed.
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:13 AM on March 15 [3 favorites]

, if a person did move backward in time, then that would set the future as a place that others from the past could go to (the present of the original traveler), but

no, once you go back, you're stuck there. Because even if all you do is clear your throat, you've already set the changes in motion. That future you came from is gone -- it never happened. Whatever ends up becoming will be a direct result of every little (and big) thing that happens from now on ... as the future always is.

Unless you believe in some form of determinism, in which case God (or gods, or superhumans or alien god brains or whatever) will tinker with events as needs be in order to get things back to how they are meant to be. But that all just feels like hogwash to me.
posted by philip-random at 11:15 AM on March 15

On my commute I'm steadily working my way through the Script Apart podcast of interviews with screenwriters.

So I spend one chunk of every day listening to scriptwriters bemoan the difficulty of exposition, and how every moment spent explaining drains tension and drama.

Then I spend another chunk of the day reading nerds complain about things being shown visually and why don't they just explain...
posted by TheophileEscargot at 11:20 AM on March 15 [2 favorites]

one of the more foolish things they teach in film school etc is that film is a visual medium, show don't tell.

But the vast majority of movies (certainly since 1930) are not primarily visual. They are audio-visual. Look at any pro screenplay. It gives you basically two things:

- what you see,
- what you hear.

Movies show and tell. The really good ones do both very well. Imagine something like Zone of Interest without its soundtrack.
posted by philip-random at 11:27 AM on March 15

This is Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah erasure.
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 11:31 AM on March 15 [5 favorites]

I time travel to the future all the time. I'm doing it right now!

Huh, I'm still seemingly always in the past.
posted by chavenet at 11:34 AM on March 15 [3 favorites]

Wobbuffet:..."Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2022; Japan), available on Tubi."

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is ASTONISHINGLY good.
posted by 40 Watt at 11:34 AM on March 15 [4 favorites]

I much preferred the version of this FPP you posted next week.
posted by lalochezia at 11:39 AM on March 15 [23 favorites]

chance to encourage people to watch Beyond The Infinite Two Minutes and River(2023), which are pretty great if you like light comedy involving time travel and long takes.

Those are legitimately delightful movies.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 11:57 AM on March 15 [3 favorites]

Also: holy shit everyone should see Lola (2023). Set in 1941, it's a bout a pair of sisters who invent a device they call the chronovisor that lets them pick up radio and TV broadcasts from the future. Initially, they use it to rock out to David Bowie and win at bets, but then they decide it will best be used to help fight the Nazis. Butterfly effects abound. Extra bonus fun: this is a found footage style film shot on vintage Bolex cameras.

Just look at this amazing trailer. And the movie is so good.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:01 PM on March 15 [19 favorites]

I much preferred the version of this FPP you posted next week.

Tut-tut! You forget your time travel grammar! It should be "this FPP you will have been posting next week."
posted by grubi at 12:03 PM on March 15 [3 favorites]

What, no Needle in a Timestack? (Ok it sucks.)

No Lakehouse? (Love that movie!)

I think the author of this listicle has some narrow views of what constitutes a time travel story, as others have noted.
posted by kittensofthenight at 12:04 PM on March 15 [3 favorites]

I had a book as a teenager called "The Science in Science Fiction." It was generally pretty hard core about what was possible and what wasn't; this was the first time I learned Bussard ramjets were nonsense, for example.

Then there was time travel. We don't know anything about how time works, so we can't rule anything out. It mentioned the movie Somewhere in Time, where Christopher Reeve travels back in time because he's in love with Jane Seymour's character and really wants to meet her. That's literally how it happens--he really wants it to happen. I rolled my eyes, but the book notes that this does not actually violate any physics (it would likely violate causality, but that applies to all time travel whether it's the powered by a flux capacitor or powered by love.)

I do like the article admits we don't know the science up front, their "science" score is really just an internal consistency score. Also they clearly love Time after Time which makes them OK in my book.
posted by mark k at 12:06 PM on March 15 [2 favorites]

Disappointed that this list is missing the flawless modern-day classic Next Stop, Christmas.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:09 PM on March 15

We Paid a Freelancer to Say a Time Travel Movie You Like Is Dogshit Because the Google/Facebook Duopoly Ate the Whole Digital Ad Market and Now Harvesting Hate Clicks Is the Only Viable Business Model for Online Media

And also "Run, Lola, Run" was snubbed so yeah fuck this list.
posted by AlSweigart at 12:12 PM on March 15 [27 favorites]

Timecrimes is a legitimately good film, although too grimy and mean spirited for many to really enjoy.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:14 PM on March 15 [5 favorites]

Someone didn’t understand Primer.

Someone did?
posted by The Bellman at 12:22 PM on March 15 [21 favorites]

As an example Timecrimes and Hot Tub Time Machine have the same Entertainment score. If you enjoyed both of those films at the same level of "entertainingness" you have a bizarre internal calculus of what you deem as "entertainment".

I enjoyed both movies at pretty much the same level of "entertainingness," which I agree is meaningless because the experience that led to a certain level of "entertainingness" was WILDLY different. Timecrimes rules, Hot Tub Time Machine is really fun to watch, charming comedic actors being charming!
posted by kittensofthenight at 12:22 PM on March 15 [1 favorite]

How does any movie about Time Travel get a Science score greater than 0?

Rust Cohle's got a take on this.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 12:23 PM on March 15 [2 favorites]

Someone didn’t understand Primer.

Since it hasn't been posted yet, here's a relevant xkcd.
posted by msbrauer at 12:31 PM on March 15 [11 favorites]

And also "Run, Lola, Run" was snubbed so yeah fuck this list.

"Run, Lola, Run" is not only one of the best time-travel movies, but also one of the best video game movies.
posted by rifflesby at 12:45 PM on March 15 [4 favorites]

Shameful to have omitted what I think is an excellent time travel movie and maybe the only time travel rom-com: About Time.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 12:46 PM on March 15 [3 favorites]

While clearly Planet of the Apes was a time dilation movie, it's shameful to have omitted the time travelling Escape From the Planet of the Apes.
posted by mazola at 1:13 PM on March 15 [3 favorites]

the Type-0 Type-1 functions of time travel come from the Edinburgh University SciFi Society fanzine in the mid-nineties.

ewan, you're in luck!
posted by zompist at 1:47 PM on March 15 [1 favorite]

Someone did?

I once saw an amazing chart that someone made to diagram all the various timelines and loops in Primer and how they aligned. I couldn’t follow it any better than the movie but I definitely believed that they understood it.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 2:14 PM on March 15 [3 favorites]

Yay! This is the thread where I get to mention Foggerty's Fairy, a mostly forgotten non-musical play by W.S. Gilbert from 1881!

Basically, Foggerty is a young man in Victorian England engaged to his childhood friend Jenny, who loves him but will only marry him on the promise that he's never loved anyone else before. But a few years prior, while in desperate times in Melbourne, Foggerty had gotten engaged to Ms. Spiff, a rich old woman, then fled back to England, and it turns out that Spiff is a distant relative of Jenny's and has just arrived in London. A fairy named Rebecca offers Foggerty an elixir that will let him change one event in his past, as well as a bunch of pills for if he needs to summon Rebecca again. Foggerty takes the elixir, erases Spiff (at least from his own story) and wakes up in a new timeline where the consequences of that choice have led to havoc and Foggerty has to figure everything out. As chaos ensues, Foggerty summons Rebecca again, but due to his having changed the past, she doesn't know him, and he has to basically blackmail her into setting things right through a legalistic argument about the timeline inconsistancies going on, as well as him having enough pills to keep summoning her ad nauseum.

It's... not a show that's aged well, for several reasons (mostly that the protagonist is thoroughly an unlikeable cad), but it's fascinating in that it's W.S. Gilbert, playing with alternate timelines in a remarkably modern way, in 1881.
posted by Navelgazer at 2:25 PM on March 15 [12 favorites]

I used to dunk on Superman setting back the clock by flying around the Earth counterclockwise, but maybe you could hand-wave some plausibility arguments. Kurt Godel showed that Einstein's equations had a solution in which the whole universe was rotating, and that made it possible to travel backwards in time (to have "closed timelike paths"). Maybe Superman is so Super that him flying around is equivalent to having the whole universe rotate?

Godel's rotating universe
posted by Schmucko at 2:36 PM on March 15 [1 favorite]

You forget your time travel grammar!

Probable-possible, my black hen.
She lays her eggs in the Relative When.
She does not lay eggs in the Positive Now
Because she's unable to postulate how.
posted by bonehead at 2:50 PM on March 15 [5 favorites]

there may be romance in this list
There is!

The Time Machine - Traveler/Wells and Weena
Superman - Supes and Lois, of course
The Terminator - romance is essential to the whole story
Time After Time - Wells and bank clerk
12 Monkeys - romance is key, and more so in the source film, La Jetée

etc.
posted by doctornemo at 3:05 PM on March 15 [1 favorite]

Star Trek IV: entertainment value is only 6?! Bah.
posted by doctornemo at 3:07 PM on March 15 [5 favorites]

Movies show and tell. The really good ones do both very well. Imagine something like Zone of Interest without its soundtrack.

I have never understood "show don't tell" to mean "images not sound" but rather to demonstrate rather than informing the audience of things. It's still an axiom with a million little exceptions and corollaries, but it's still a good rule of thumb. Don't tell us that two characters are in love, demonstrate it through the story. Don't tell us that so-and-so is an amazing basketball player, show us. Etc.

Basically, "show, don't tell" makes as much since in a purely audio storytelling medium, or in a novel, as it does with film or tv.
posted by Navelgazer at 3:16 PM on March 15 [3 favorites]

I once saw an amazing chart that someone made to diagram all the various timelines and loops in Primer and how they aligned

Maybe this one or this one? Both have been floating around for while.
posted by msbrauer at 3:21 PM on March 15 [3 favorites]

Time Loop situations like Groundhog Day present a troubling philosophical problem. When Phil ends his day and goes back to goes back to the beginning of the day, what happens to Rita, Ned, and everyone else in the world?

One possible answer is solipsism. Phil is the only real person in existence. Nothing that happens to anyone else matters, because they're not actually people. This is not a very satisfying answer.

Another possibility is that there's only one existence. When Phil restarts the day, everyone alive effectively dies, and is replaced by a clone of themselves from the point in time that Phil wakes up. This is deeply disturbing. (This is similar to the theory that the Star Trek transporter doesn't actually transport the individual being beamed. It kills the original and creates a copy that thinks it is the original.)

A third possibility is that this is taking place in a multiverse. Phil is not traveling in time. Instead, his consciousness travels to another dimension. The original universe continues after he leaves. But Phil's memories stop at the point on Groundhog Day (the day) when his day ends. He doesn't have memories of the rest of his life after Groundhog Day. In that case, what happens to the Phil in the old universe? Do you end up with one Phil that experienced Groundhog Day once, another Phil who experienced it twice, and so on? In the universes where Phil killed himself, is he actually dead, mourned by friends and family? Does the abandoned-universe Phil not remember the events of Groundhot Day because they were temporarily overwritten by our Phil for that day? This scenario is also deeply problematic.
posted by cruelfood at 3:22 PM on March 15 [4 favorites]

How can you go to some PLACE that hasn't even happened yet?

Speaking of which, although Coherence doesn't technically qualify as a time travel movie, it is certainly one of the best alternate place travel movies ever, and we all know that time and space are inextricably interwoven.

Also, The Endless deserves a mention as a very good indie time travel movie, even if the time travel is in personal, excrutiating endless time loops, maybe the worst kind of time travel. Chilling to think about.
posted by vverse23 at 3:32 PM on March 15 [6 favorites]

12 Monkeys will never match La Jetee. But the line, "I'm in insurance" is one of my all time favorites.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 4:27 PM on March 15 [5 favorites]

Surely in Groundhog Day (a total romcom, BTW) the whole universe and everyone in it resets to Feb 2, but Phil somehow remembers what happened before the reset. I suppose it sucks that all the rest of us are caught in a loop until Phil can figure out how to be a good person, but rest assured that he will eventually figure it out, whether it takes a hundred loops or a hundred billion.

there may be romance in this list
There is!

Safety not Guaranteed is on the list. If I'm reading the chart correctly, it says Avengers Endgame is more entertaining. I haven't seen that one, but I am going to assume that Avengers Endgame does not star Aubrey Plaza and therefore I don't have to read the rest of the article.
posted by polecat at 5:01 PM on March 15 [1 favorite]

Safety not Guaranteed is on the list. If I'm reading the chart correctly, it says Avengers Endgame is more entertaining. I haven't seen that one, but I am going to assume that Avengers Endgame does not star Aubrey Plaza and therefore I don't have to read the rest of the article.

It also gives Donnie Darko an entertainment score of only 5, which makes me question somebody's commitment to Sparkle Motion...

That said, Avengers: Endgame is, in fact, an incredibly entertaining movie for what it is: the "final" chapter to a 23-ish-movie-long-series. And the time-tgravel stuff is used sort of for a heist in it, which is all the better.
posted by Navelgazer at 5:19 PM on March 15 [3 favorites]

Surely Primer deserves a higher science score. I wonder if it's being penalized for seeming to be too accurate.

Well...I penalize it for mumbling. The sound mix is terrible and makes an already complex film into even more of a chore to watch and follow. I don't see any reason this couldn't be improved, though Carruth has never bothered to do it.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 5:26 PM on March 15 [1 favorite]

Primer, less scientific AND less entertaining??

Yeah, like several others, I am baffled by the one-scale-to-rule-them-all approach to measuring how entertaining something is. There are pleasures of attention and pleasures of diversion. I like Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and I like Far Side panels, but not for precisely the same reasons.

And I too have always considered Superman not to be somehow reversing the spin of the planet but merely personally travelling back a few hours, and this is just how it was depicted visually.

I don’t read much Ars Technica stuff: is it always this shoddy?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:05 PM on March 15 [1 favorite]

BREAKING: My wife has never seen 12 Monkeys.
posted by neuron at 6:41 PM on March 15 [3 favorites]

Shout out to Christopher Nolan for creating an innovative new spin on time travel that is simultaneously too smart for average people to understand and too dumb for science-minded people to understand, thereby confusing everyone in the audience while also deafening them.
posted by dephlogisticated at 7:02 PM on March 15 [9 favorites]

"Arrival" the movie doesn't question free will; Amy Adams' character makes her choices, knowing what will happen in the future. (That is why her husband is, in the future, upset with her, when he finds out that she knew.) She doesn't appear to feel coerced by her knowledge of the future.

Of course, it is an old debate in Christian theology, whether God's knowledge of the future means that things could not have happened otherwise.

Unfortunately the filmmakers did not get a chance to ask the heptapods their take on this issue :)
posted by Vegiemon at 8:06 PM on March 15 [1 favorite]

I don’t care how “smart” Nolan’s movies may be, they ring emotionally hollow and I promptly forgot about both “Tenet” and “Interstellar” upon leaving the theater. “Arrival” and “Looper” are much more compelling, character and narrative-wise.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 8:42 PM on March 15 [4 favorites]

This was a dangerous article to post because I have Opinions about time travel fiction, but mercifully I haven't watched quite as many movies recently so you don't have to read me infodumping on every single one.
* Back to the Future is great fun, and "scientific" models of time travel should change to allow fading photo/newspapers used as timeline litmus tests, not the other way round.
* Los cronocrímenes goes beyond mean-spirited. I could get on board with the idea of a time-travel slasher/thriller movie or whatever it was supposed to be, but all the characters beside the protagonist were cardboard cutouts and treated as such. That left no-one for me to connect with The protagonist himself was an incomprehensibly solipsistic confluence of stupidity, paranoia, cishet misogyny, wilful disregard for anything anyone says (even direct replies to his questions), scarcely-believable genre-blindness (even my granddad, unwaveringly dismissive of SF/F stories as "nonsense", would tape The Time Machine when it got broadcast), and all-too-believable drive towards hostility, threats, and violence as a first resort in unfamiliar situations. Like a straight reading of "No TV and no beer make Héctor something something". He deserved his suffering, but the rest of the cast didn't deserve him. The film played more like MST/RiffTrax fodder than entertainment for me (and it was frustrating because I expected the latter).
* Collider (2018) is a neglected and unfairly-maligned gem; more people should give it a chance. That means you.
* Primer is actually very easy to understand - ditch the spaghetti diagram and plot the number of timeclones you're aware of against the screentime (optional bonus: total number of things the characters are anxious about). Annotate with the characters' changing relationships. The sudden jumps are where the producer or someone said "this isn't a TV episode, get rid of the laugh track", and now we have a wonderful deadpan time-travel farce about anxious mumbly physicists who swerve between noble scientific striving and braindead techbro greed. And as a bonus it serves as fodder for tech/physics writers to make fanfic articles and spaghetti diagrams trying to explain it.
* Bill and Ted was fine but there's no way Beethoven wouldn't have punched Napoleon in the face on stage.

Metacomments:
* Single-travel-event stable time loop predestination stories are the least interesting type of time travel story. That's not to say that there aren't great time-travel stories in that category, but the elevation of "scientific accuracy" in the discourse around the time travel genre seems to push a lot of writers towards using strict type-0 or type-1 (thanks ewan!) models, and practising useless things like "restraint" or "elegance".
* Time loop stories are a bit hit-or-miss for me, especially when they decide to say "oh no, suddenly this loop is the serious one, if you fuck up too many times then it's permanent!" They feel less like having a time machine and more like absentmindedly redeeming that voucher for a couple weeks of instant processing time on a universe-simulation supercomputer that your weird cousin gave you for Christmas. *shrugs* Lola rennt was good!

Honourable mentions:
* Mega Time Squad for the dream me-plus-a-few-hundred-timeclones teamup of the milennium (content warning: casual racism throughout)
* The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi for making me cry every year and for loudly yelling "VALUE YOUR NEURODIVERGENT FRIENDS!" (but there's maybe 12 hours of TV episodes establishing the characters beforehand, plus content warnings for sexual assault)
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 3:41 AM on March 16 [5 favorites]

METAFILTER: like absentmindedly redeeming that voucher for a couple weeks of instant processing time on a universe-simulation supercomputer that your weird cousin gave you for Christmas
posted by philip-random at 8:37 AM on March 16 [3 favorites]

Tut-tut! You forget your time travel grammar! It should be "this FPP you will have been posting next week."

"Willan on-post," surely.
posted by MrBadExample at 9:24 AM on March 16 [2 favorites]

'Hey it was me who stole my dad's keys!'
Makes sense to me. How can you say that's not scientific? Or not entertaining?
posted by MtDewd at 3:26 PM on March 16

The best time-travel movie according to 1991-year-old me was Late for Dinner.
posted by user92371 at 3:56 PM on March 16 [1 favorite]

No one's ever proven that you can't reverse time by flying around the earth counter to its spin at superhuman speeds. Perhaps Superman learned how as part of his work at the Daily Planet. Or does ars simply hate journalists?
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 4:49 PM on March 16

My unified theory of time travel, faster than light travel, an afterlife, and a benevolent deity: of course those things aren't real, but people want to live forever, experience everything, and have justice done. They feel as if the universe owes them that much. So they will twist and turn logic to convince themselves that such things are real, or at least possible if we try hard enough.
posted by pracowity at 1:54 AM on March 17 [2 favorites]

I know I will have enjoyed this thread later, but I'm posting from the past to say:

@philip-random, Time Bandits gets mentioned a few times in the Groundhog-Day-style-time-warp Map of Tiny Perfect Things, which was a pleasant distraction during the time warp that was 2021 :/

Also, unrelated to all of the foregoing but something that's been stuck in my head since the first time I read The Great Divorce; C.S. Lewis says his central idea about how the realness of heaven compares with the much-less-than-real-ness of hell came from a Sci-Fi short story where the protagonist goes back in time, but can't change anything. "His Hero traveled into the past: and there, very properly, found raindrops that would pierce him like bullets and sandwiches that no strength could bite–because, of course, nothing in the past can be altered." Guess that's one more Type 0, @ewan.
posted by adekllny at 2:59 PM on March 18 [1 favorite]

I'm several days late to the party (which seems appropriate for a time travel movie thread), but I have to be pedantic and say that Run Lola Run is NOT a time travel movie. It is about alternate possibilities - how the story would play out differently based on choices and chances. Lola isn't reliving the plot each time.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 6:56 AM on March 19 [2 favorites]

Hence the voucher for a couple days of instant processing time on a universe-simulation supercomputer that her weird cousin gave her for Christmas.
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 7:52 AM on March 19 [1 favorite]

I'm several days late to the party (which seems appropriate for a time travel movie thread), but I have to be pedantic and say that Run Lola Run is NOT a time travel movie. It is about alternate possibilities - how the story would play out differently based on choices and chances. Lola isn't reliving the plot each time.

She is reliving the plot, she uses information gained in earlier loops, in later ones. How to work the safety catch on the pistol is one example of several.
posted by rifflesby at 9:10 PM on March 20 [2 favorites]

She is reliving the plot, she uses information gained in earlier loops, in later ones. How to work the safety catch on the pistol is one example of several.

I feel like Run Lola Run is ambiguous about this, in a great way. Lola isn't interacting with reliving the plot in the same way as, say, Phil in Groundhog Day. If anything, I think the interstitial segments with her and Manni set up the feel of dream-logic going on, and that when Lola restarts the events, she's carrying over about as much information as you'd get from waking up from a rapidly-fading dream. i.e., she's not consciously aware that she's reliving the events, as such, but she does know more each time.

Basically, because the movie is both so fast-paced and yet dream-like, it massively succeeds at ripping the audience along on its own sense of narrative logic, even while being fourth-wall-breakingly meta about that narrative logic. It's possible to read it as three different ways things could go based on (as best as I can recall) her three different reactions to the dog in the stairwell, but that's not super-satisfying as a character arc. If she's learning something each time, though, there's a real throughline, and the movie understands at a deep level that the audience is learning something each time and projecting into Lola as the protagonist, and so operates at that level.

Which is why the climactic moment in the Casino, which on paper shouldn't really work at all, instead plays like gangbusters. It "shouldn't" work because betting the money on a longshot is a very "passive" way to solve the problem, outside of the protagonist's control, and winning is a classic deus ex machina.

It totally works because the movie has set up so much up to that point via its own narrative logic - Lola's place in society is such that robbing the grocery store is basically her fate, but here she chooses otherwise - an active choice. Everyone in the casino is shooting her passive expressive glares that practically scream "YOU DON'T BELONG HERE!" but she presses on - a continuation of her confidence in this run-through that included jumping over the dog. And when she shrieks, it's a primal scream that encapsulates all the tension that's been building up for 80 minutes or so and also draws even more attention to her, and accomplishes the feat of giving her some magical-realism-control over the outcome of the roulette wheel that we as the audience are willing to 100% buy into by that point. God, it's one of my favorite moments in any movie basically ever. And it only works because it's in the third iteration of the events of the movie, both because it'd be real weird to not end with the successful run-through, but because the Lola of the first run-through wasn't in a place yet to make these choices and do these things.

I guess I just needed to expound upon what makes Run Lola Run so damn good, but yeah, I'd say that via its own dream-logic, it both is and isn't a time-travel movie. Yes, it's three different ways that things could go, and her experience living the three realities isn't like in Groundhog Day or Russian Doll or Edge of Tomorrow. But she's learning something each time, and the Lola that goes into the casino isn't the same as the Lola that goes to her dad.

I need to rewatch Run Lola Run today...
posted by Navelgazer at 9:52 AM on March 21 [6 favorites]

Ok and now I've started up Run Lola Run (which I haven't seen in many years) and I see that it starts off with a T.S. Eliot quote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Which I think really speaks to what's going on there.
posted by Navelgazer at 11:20 AM on March 21 [2 favorites]

Astrophysicist Claims He Has Cracked Equation For A Time Machine, But There's A Catch

His vision for a time machine centres on what he calls “an intense and continuous rotating beam of light” to manipulate gravity. His device would use a ring of lasers to mimic the spacetime-distorting effects of a black hole.

However, he said he would need "galactic amounts of energy" and didn't know how big this "time machine" would have to be to make it work. He is also not sure when or if it will be done, but added: "I figured out how to do it. In theory, it is possible."

posted by achrise at 6:29 AM on March 24 [1 favorite]

*sigh*
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:53 AM on March 24

Interesting that there's new news about that now. I remembering reading some stuff about Mallett's work forever ago, and it's still where my mind goes to whenever somebody brings up the "scientific realities" of time-travel.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:41 AM on March 24

However, he said he would need "galactic amounts of energy" and didn't know how big this "time machine" would have to be to make it work.

so ... he'd have to maybe build his own universe, galaxy anyway? As the song says ...

God said, Time belongs to me
Time’s my secret weapon
My final advantage
posted by philip-random at 11:12 AM on March 24

"galactic amounts of energy"

It's just 1.21 gigawatts, actually.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:19 PM on March 25 [1 favorite]