Though not a feasible technology yet, time travel has been widely used as a plot device for many years. This post is partly in honor of Groundhog Day (the movie and the actual day) and the fact that travelling through time presents many interesting cinematic opportunities.

Time travel allows modern-day characters to exist in a world different from their own time. Whether it be the future or the past it leads people to think “What would I do if I was in the middle ages” and can often provide interesting results by mixing different time periods.

Most time-travel movies seem to follow a similar line of thinking. Someone uses a time machine or is in some way transported to a different time and things are not quite as they expected and they need to get back to their “own time” or fix things from before the time-traveling occurred.

I will start with the movie Groundhog Day. It is a classic comedy starring Bill Murray as a weather man named Phil Connors who reluctantly has the job of having to report on Punxsutawney Phil’s winter predictions. After doing the report, Connors and his crew try to leave town but are stuck by a blizzard. The next morning Phil wakes up and the radio announces it is Groundhog day, again.

Clip of Phil waking up for the second time on Groundhog Day and realizing it is the same day as yesterday.

Every day Phil wakes up is Groundhog day. This is an example of a “time-loop”. The main character is aware they are continually going through the same time space, but nobody else is. I am not going to say how (or if) he eventually breaks out of the time loop and wakes up on February 3, but it is a very interesting take on time travel in movies. And for those who are more interested in action films, Edge of Tomorrow is a great sci-fi movie where a soldier is stuck in a time-loop and goes into the same battle every single day. One other time-loop movie of interest is Looper, where hitmen are sent targets from the future to kill and dispose of, but eventually they are forced to kill their future selves to “close the loop”.

An example of someone trying to “restore the order” after a time traveling incident is with the Terminator movies. Here a death-machine killer robot is sent from the future to eliminate the person who will become the leader of the human resistance, John Connor (and for those of you wondering, no the last name “Connor” is not a time travel thing I know of), while another is sent to protect him.

Picture of the T-800 Terminator, part of its “face” is burned off revealing the robot interior.

In the first movie the target is John Connor’s mother, and in the second (and arguably better) the target is John as a young boy. The movie blends terrifying technology with the present day and the protagonists’ mission to not only survive but attempt to stop the coming “Judgement Day” when robotic assassins become sentient. In addition it provides a unique view where the antagonist is the time traveler and must be disposed of to restore order.

Although I think that, by far, the best movie to depict time travel is Back to the Future. In it a “crazy” scientist, Doc Brown, creates a time machine by putting a flux capacitor in a converted DeLorean car.

Clip revealing the DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future.

Once it is loaded with Plutonium and hits 88 mph it can travel through time in spectacular fashion. Due to an unintended series of events 1985 Marty McFly finds himself stuck in 1955, with almost no conceivable way of getting home (because the Plutonium fuel “in 1955, it’s a little hard to come by”). Besides being very entertaining overall, the movie is quite smart about how it deals with time travel. Things that happen in the past change the future (there are tons of little nods to this throughout the movie, but you have to pay attention). Most critically, Marty’s parents fell in love in 1955 at the school dance, but Marty’s presence has skewed their paths away from each other. As it seems less and less likely that they will get together, Marty begins to disappear. Much like the grandfather paradox, if his parents do not meet, he is not born and cannot exist. I strongly recommend you watch this one, and there are even two sequels that are also quality movies (Back to the Future Part II and III) set in different times.

However, in a sense every movie is somewhat of a time travelling experience. When a character says they are going to travel somewhere, poof! they are right where they need to be in the blink of an eye, when they go to sleep they wake up in the next frame. The viewer only watches the important parts of the story, skipping from one to the next, travelling forward or backward as deemed by the director and editors. This makes sense because watching someone sleep for 6-8 hours would not be very exciting. But it is an important device that separates movies from reality, “movie time” is the interesting bits while in life you have to go through everything in between.