Time travel movies are a strange subgenre of science fiction. Audiences go into these movies already prepared to admit that, damn it, it’s not going to make any sense. Or if it does make sense, it’s going to be so impossibly complicated that the casual observer may never understand just what the hell happened. We suspect that this weekend’s release of Mr. Peabody & Sherman is probably going to go easy on its younger demographic, playing time travel for fun and games instead of headscratching paradoxes, but we also suspect that – good or bad – it’s probably not going to be the best time travel movie ever made.
So what is The Best Time Travel Movie Ever Made? This looks like a job for the CraveOnline film critics – William “Bibbs” Bibbiani, Witney Seibold, Fred Topel and Brian Formo – who every week convene to pick The Best Movie Ever in a certain genre, from a certain director, starring a certain actor and so on. Two of our critics are in complete agreement this week, but the other two picked films that couldn’t possibly be more different… except for the whole time travel thing.
Take a look at their arguments and then vote for yourself at the bottom of the page!
Witney Seibold:
Time travel is so much fun in movies, largely because it never works. Issues of causality have yet to be written perfectly, without any plot holes (although Shane Carruth’s Primer comes awfully close). What’s more, there is always a sense of itching inevitability to more time travel movies; time is cyclical, and certain events are going to happen, no matter how hard you try to undo them. We are inextricably linked to our pasts and to our futures. All movies about time travel are going to be about undoing a previous temporal transgression (i.e. chasing after a bad guy with a time machine), or accidentally messing up your own present by mucking about with fate. As such, the best time travel movies deal with fate.
I hate to be the jerk who skews arty, but the best time travel movie of all time is Chris Marker’s 1962 short film La Jetée, the film on which 12 Monkeys was based. Told almost entirely with still images, the film follows an unnamed prisoner (Davos Hanich) who is being used in a series of time travel experiments after WWIII, haunted by the memory of a pretty woman from his childhood, and the trauma of witnessing a man’s death on the same day. When the prisoner flees his captors, he sues the time machine to travel back to that memory to meet the mystery woman, only to discover that he was pursued and killed by a cop from the future. The trauma he experienced as a child was his own death.
La Jetée is about, then, the realization of your own mortality. Symbolically, the young boy realized he was going to die by literally seeing his own death. His death was the very thing that brought about his coming of age, if you will. And isn’t this is the way memory works? Your current experiences affect both the past and the future. I could write much more about the intricate thematic complexities of this 28-minute film school touchstone, but I’d rather you seek the film out for yourself.
Brian Formo:
It’s only 27 minutes long, and it’s been made into a very good feature length film. But because dreams exist outside of real time and because imitation is the highest form of flattery, La Jetée is the best time travel film ever.
Before I say much more, here’s the beauty of choosing a short film: you can watch it on your lunch break.
Okay now that you’ve put down your baguette to watch and we’re back, you probably know the ending a mile away because you saw 12 Monkeys. But, while 12 Monkeys is really great, La Jetée is just so original and (in certain ways) different from the Terry Gilliam film that it can stand apart. Ultimately, 12 Monkeys is a cocktail of La Jetée and Vertigo, but because Chris Marker’s short film is more rooted in emotional selectivity there’s a stronger hangover.
In Marker’s film, it is not the convicts who time-travel. It is people who pass a test for immense focus on emotional images. They are asked not for clues to who detonated nuclear war, but to bring back food and energy to sustain the survivors through the dark years (post World War III, not post Brad Pitt spoiled brat lunacy). It’s a very French feeling ode to regret and nostalgia – because – the only way humans actually know how to time travel is through emotional response to their past.
If you haven’t watched, the film is told through photographs and narration. That is how memory works. That is how we time travel. Still, despite no motion, Marker makes the travel very believable with enjoyable gadgets. It is a remarkable achievement from an experimental filmmaker who left far too little behind for us to view. But it is one of the few foreign films that became a very good remake as an Americanized homage to Hitchcock and redemption. It deserves more than a look. It deserves a coffee table book.
Fred Topel:
I suppose I should pick Detention for this because it has a time traveling bear, which is by far the best time machine ever. However, time travel is only one aspect of that movie I adore, so I think Detention will forgive me for picking something else this time. Time! Ha, I didn’t even mean that to be a pun.
I am so glad to see the world come around to the Back to the Future sequel because I remember when I was the only one saying, “No really, this is awesome.” Back to the Future is a perfect movie and hits the emotion and comedy like little else. Back to the Future II has so much more time travel though and plays with time in some of the most clever and interesting ways ever.
We get the future of 2015 as we were promised, and it’s a fun, colorful world. Seriously, we need a Back to the Future IV to come out in the real year 2015, but the sequel gets far more interesting when Doc and Marty return to a different 1985 and figure out Biff went back and changed things. The dark 1985 is scary and pretty awesome to see the warped way in which Biff uses success. The master stroke however was going back into 1955, the 1955 we all saw in Back to the Future, and interacting with the original movie. I do wish Back to the Future II had an actual ending, and not just an intermission before BTTF III, but the time travel is so ambitious and fulfilling, it is the Best Time Travel Movie Ever.
Wiliam Bibbiani:
For a concept that doesn’t make any practical sense, there sure are a lot of great movies about time travel. Despite protracted internal debates about choosing Nicholas Meyers’ clever and witty Time After Time (in which H.G. Wells follows Jack the Ripper into the 1970s), Mamoru Hosoda’s swirling and emotionally devastating The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, as well as the old stand-by favorites Back to the Future, Terminator 2, The Time Machine (1960), La Jetée and Primer, I finally settled on a film that not only captures the utter confusion that stems from fiddling with the space-time continuum, but uses that anxiety to perfectly encapsulate the existential dilemma we face every day, with or without a time machine.
Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes stars Karra Elejalde as Héctor, a middle-aged schmoe who spies a naked woman undressing in the woods behind his house. Intrigued, he approaches to take a closer look, only to be stabbed by a mysterious and terrifying man whose head is wrapped in pink bandages. He pursues his would-be killer only to wind up in an isolated science lab, where a scientist (Vigalondo) refuses to tell him exactly what’s going on. What is going on? It would take a Beautiful Mind flowchart to explain, but it sends poor Héctor on a strange journey full of inexplicable coincidences that he will eventually approach from multiple angles, altering the course of his destiny while simultaneously assuring that everything happens the way it always has.
Most time travel movies depend on the notion that the future can be changed. Timecrimes wrings impossible drama out of the simple idea that it can’t; but if the future can’t be changed, but time travel still exists, then all time must be circular, and we are all trapped within our lives. Everything we do is what always happened, and every effort we make to affect our future is both futile and absolutely necessary for survival. We are but pawns in the universal game, unaware of the rules but cruelly defined by them, and time travel is but a pathetic taunt we lobbed at ourselves: the fantasy of control, the pursuit of which only makes us all the more helpless. Timecrimes is one of the great science fiction puzzles, and solving it only forces us to acknowledge that we’ll never understand the mysteries that really matter most. Damn it, it’s the best time travel movie ever.
