With Terminator Genisys releasing this week, it’s only apt to discuss the most fun movie genre of all time – time travel. The first Terminator film and Back to the Future, we’ve had a ton of good time travel films like Groundhog Day, Twelve Monkeys, and more recently Looper, Source Code and Edge of Tomorrow. But under the mainstream radar are five time travel films one should absolutely not miss:
Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)
Dir: Colin Trevorrow
There’s a reason why director Colin Trevorrow got the gig to direct Jurassic World after making just one prior movie. His lone movie Safety Not Guaranteed had gorgeous character dynamics and an excellent subversion of the time travel genre with its wonderful end twist. The plot itself is fun – a college grad (Aubrey Plaza) notices a magazine ad about an intern needed to build a spaceship to go back in time. The protagonist (Mark Duplass) is kind of a nutjob who claims to be from the future, and the film keeps us on our toes the whole time, making us wonder if he is for real, while still delivering heartfelt laughs.
Frequency (2000)
Dir: Gregory Hoblit
Probably the most underrated film in this list, Frequency mixes up both the new age ‘Hollywood family drama’ of the late 90s and the serial killer elements of the same era to fun effect. Jim Caviezel discovers a ham radio that makes him connect with his presently dead father Dennis Quaid in the past when he was alive. Naturally the two connect and avoid the father’s death, but this causes ripples in the timeline and changes the present to much worse conditions. Few time travel films have the quiet thrill of ‘will the hero succeed or not’ – because it actually makes us care about what happens to the characters in the film. It was also the first Hollywood film to talk about the temporal spatial effects – at least it sounded intelligent in an era of films where an Austrian bodybuilder changed history.
Predestination (2014)
Dir: Michael and Peter Spierig
The predestination paradox is run through a saw mill in this tremendous Australian film by the Spierig brothers. It’s got a time travel police bureau, temporal agents who transverse dimensions and time, violin case shaped time travel machines, a terrorist plot, and a truly bizarre and shocking parable of the chicken and egg anomaly. If you thought Looper was a great film about meeting your other self in a different time zone, then this film wipes the floor with it. Amazingly, a love story anchors the complex balance between choice and fate and instead of coming off as mawkish, the ‘love’ factor actually matters to the timelines and ends up making your jaw drop at the big reveal.
TimeCrimes (2007)
Dir: Nacho Vigolondo
Nacho Vigolando’s Spanish language film probably appears in the dictionary next to the word ‘mind bending’. Unpredictable as hell and pumped up with hilarious and insane plot twists the film is a perfect example of how to escalate cinematic tension with every passing minute. Terror and humour go hand in hand as a harmless unsuspecting middle aged man gets entangled in a byzantine loop of events after noticing some strange activity at his neighbour’s place. There’s also a layer of morbid guilty pleasure, but the best thing about the film is that it has zero exposition dialogues – it just lets the visuals do the storytelling all the way to its strange but unforgettable climax.
Primer (2004)
Dir: Shane Carruth
If you thought Inception was hard to follow the first time, you’ll be amused to know that movie was like third standard maths compared to Primer. Director Shane Carruth became a living legend thanks to this movie which was made for $7000 but went on to become one of the most successful cult films of all time. The plot, simply, is that two friends create a time travel box and go through it multiple times because history and the future change to their disadvantage. But that’s just the molecule on the drop of frost on the tip of the iceberg. There are a billion technicalities and eventualities and anomalies all rendered through super detailed dialogue.
It’s not possible to understand this film on even the third viewing – on an average a human being needs to watch this film five to six times to completely get it. If you want to cheat, however, there are plenty of graphs, even an XKCD one, explaining what the hell happened. And even with the graphs it’s difficult to follow. Aptly, the film makes you go back in time as you hit rewind again and again to decipher it.
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