The Ars Guide to Time Travel in Film
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Since ancient times, people have imagined various ways to travel through time into the future or past. The concept has since become a staple of modern science fiction. In particular, the number of films making use of time travel has increased significantly over the decades, while real science has evolved alongside it, moving from simple Newtonian mechanics and general relativity to quantum mechanics and the idea of a multiverse or a multiverse is more exotic alternatives like string theory.
But not all time travel films are the same. Some provide fantastic entertainment, but the time travel makes no scientific or logical sense, while others may err in the opposite direction, foregoing good storytelling in the interest of technical accuracy. What we really need is a practical guide to help us navigate this increasingly crowded field and ensure we get the best of both worlds, so to speak. The Ars Guide to Time Travel in Cinema is designed to help us all make better, more informed decisions when it comes to choosing our time travel movie fare.
This is not an exhaustive list; Instead, we selected films that represented many different approaches to time travel across multiple subgenres and decades. We then rated each individual film based on a curve for its overall entertainment value and scientific logic, with the final overall rating determining a film’s place in the overall rankings. For the “scientific” part of our evaluation system, we took three factors in particular into account. First, does time travel make logical sense? Second, is the physical mechanism of time travel reasonably realistic? And third, does the film use time travel in a narratively interesting way? So a film like that Looperwhich makes absolutely no sense if you think about it too hard, gets points for thoroughly incorporating time paradoxes into the fabric of the story.
(In the interest of meaningful analysis, many spoilers follow below.)
Eric Bangeman
What modern science has to say about time travel can be summed up like this: You can travel to the future, but probably not to the past, although to be honest we’re not entirely sure. Einstein’s general theory of relativity – which states that space and time are united in “spacetime” and that the curvature of spacetime gives rise to gravity – allows us to at least consider the possibility of time travel in a scientifically plausible context. A “closed time curve” is a path through space-time that allows someone to move forward in time from their local perspective and still end up visiting their own past. However, such a context would involve astrophysically massive gravitational fields, possibly wormholes and negative energies, or something equally exotic. Essentially, none of the films we’ll be discussing even attempt to depict physically realistic time travel (with one exception: Interstellarwhich is only a partial exception).
Even without scientific rigor, we can still demand logical consistency. Unfortunately, this is also pretty rare, although there are real exceptions in this case. The easiest way to make sense of a trip to the past is to visit it but not be able to change anything – “Whatever happened, happened,” as fictional physicist Daniel Faraday memorably put it in the TV show Lost. Physicists have called this the “Novikov Self-Consistency Principle,” but really you can summarize it simply as “makes sense.” More ambitiously, we can imagine one or more alternative parallel timelines created by a sojourn in history. For the most part, however, our film heroes provide a cheerful mix of logic and narrative sense as they wander through their past.
Here are our 20 representative picks, discussed in chronological order of publication, to illustrate how Hollywood’s understanding and approach to time travel has evolved over the decades. There are some truly delightful posts here (plus a few stinky balances), but our deep dive into the subject has convinced us that the perfect time travel movie hasn’t been made yet. That’s a worthy goal for future filmmakers to strive for.
