The Top 10 Best Time Travel Movies
Time Travel Movies Prove that Sometimes Science-Fiction is Cooler than Science Fact
If there’s one thing I know, time travel is complicated stuff. What with all the different spacetime geometries and issues with relativity approaches… Luckily, time travel movies are relatively straightforward even when they get complicated. For the most part, you just have to keep track of the past, present, and future… and potential paradoxes resulting from different people messing with key moments in the time-space continuum. Just to make things a little easier to process, I’ve decided to only include time travel movies and not time loop films. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll get to a list of them… when I have the time!
On that note, I’d like to apologize for making such a terrible pun and get down to this list of the best time travel movies of all time. Well, so long as no one goes back and messes with the past…
How about this, if you don’t see Timecop in the number one spot, then we’re still in the right timeline.
10. Army of Darkness
While the first two Evil Dead movies followed the traditional cabin in the woods premise, Army of Darkness decided to flip the script and became one of the best time travel movies of all time. Iconic final guy, Ash Williams is hurled through a time-rift back to the middle ages. As if being lost in time wasn’t bad enough, turns out the place he landed is infested with deadites hellbent on eliminating all of mankind. Ash isn’t the kind of guy to just sit by idly and let that happen. So, with the help of his trusty boomstick and a brand new hand, he sets out to save the past in order to make it back to his future. It’s filled with plenty of gruesome bad guys and classic Sam Rami slapstick comedy. Some time travel movies can get really complicated, really quickly, but Army of Darkness keeps it simple, making it a perfect popcorn flick for this list.
9. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Not many TV shows manage to make a smooth transition from the small screen to the big, but Star Trek became a juggernaut of both. J.J. Abrams’s reboot has some temporally displaced characters, and First Contact revolves around the crew protecting the past. However, when it comes to time travel movies, The Voyage Home is one of the best not just in the series but of all time. When the future is threatened by a mysterious ship transmitting an indecipherable signal, the crew of the Enterprise risks everything in a mission to 1986 San Francisco. Their mission? To find the only thing that will save the universe and bring it to the future with them: a pod of Humpback Whales. That proves to be a little harder than they anticipated given the limitations of the time period, but with a little ingenuity and gumption, Kirk and his crew manage to save the universe, once again.
8. Time Bandits
The next entry on this list of time travel movies shifts from the realm of science fiction into fantasy, as some diminutive rouges attempt a time heist in order to get rich quick. The thing is that these thieves aren’t exactly Ocean’s Eleven, and they pretty much bungle everything from the start. First, they were dumb enough to steal a wormhole map from the Supreme Being. Then they picked up an uninvited hitchhiker while fleeing said Supreme Being. Once they get going through time the messes don’t stop there, and we’re lucky they didn’t destroy the whole universe with their shenanigans. They did come pretty close a few times though. So many time travel movies try to explain the impossible with theoretical physics that it’s nice to watch one that’s going to look you dead in the eye and say, “this is what it is because I say so”. Besides, Terry Gilliam has the kind of messed up mind perfect for the genre.
7. Looper
Look, I’ll admit that Looper has some pretty glaring plot holes, but where else can you see Joseph Gordon-Levitt do his best Bruce Willis impression? See, in Looper, Levitt plays the younger version of Willis who is an assassin working for the mob in the future… Let me try that again. So, in the future when the mob wants someone killed they send them back to the past where a guy shoots them. That way the body can still be discovered in the future… Wait, that doesn’t make sense either. As I said, there are some plotholes in Looper, but that’s true of all the time travel movies on this list. All you really need to know is that Willis is sent back from the future and Levitt is supposed to kill him. That doesn’t sit well with Willis and once he escapes from his younger self he sets off to prevent the future that leads to all this, while Levitt tries to hunt him down again. Trust me, this is actually a pretty great film and definitely worth a watch.
6. 12 Monkeys
See, I told you, Terry Gilliam has the perfect messed up kind of mind for time travel movies. In the not too distant future, a bioengineered virus is released by a terrorist group that decimates the world’s population. In an effort to find a cure, a man (Bruce Willis makes another appearance on this list) is sent back to get a sample of the original virus before it mutates. It turns out that time travel isn’t an exact science in this flick, and the guy ends up in the wrong year. Hoping to complete the mission he seeks help. Can you guess what happens to people who say they’ve come from the future to stop the end of the world? You guessed it, they end up getting an all-expense-paid trip to the loony bin! 12 Monkeys follows Willis’ character as he tries to find the man responsible for the virus and discovers that the asylum he’s in might just be his best chance at saving the world.