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Time travel is tricky. The very things that make it appealing are the things that make it tough to depict with any sort of logic or continuity. Need to rewrite a tragic ending? Boom. Time travel. Lose a loved one? Bam. Time travel. You get the picture. It’s a storytelling trick that the MCU and DCU have been relying on for the past couple years, but as many fans have been quick to point out, their application doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. There are plot holes galore.
In the interest of providing an alternative to these confusing, oftentimes contradictory superhero timelines, we decided to pick out the genre films and TV shows that utilize time travel in more effective ways. There are some obvious picks, but there are some others you may not have seen/heard of, and we urge you to check them out as well.
Primer (2004)
Primer is a science fiction masterpiece. It’s also one of the scientifically grounded depictions of time travel ever, and a lot of this grounded-ness has to do with the fact that the writer/director/star, Shane Carruth, studied mathematics and developed simulation software.
Primer is ridiculously hard to understand on a first viewing, but the more you watch it (and the more you consult explanation videos) the more you come to realize that every single consequence of time travel was taken into account, and there are no plot holes or forgotten details.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (2016-17)
Max Landis is persona non grata these days, and with good reason. That said, the short-lived series Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency might be the best thing he ever did. The series straddled a number of genres, including comedy and film noir, and it did an exemplary job of mixing in time travel with the device known as Webb’s machine.
It’s difficult to recount all of the ways in which Webb’s machine is used throughout the show, but it is consistently unpredictable and leads to dramatic revelations that we usually don’t see coming. Definite points for creativity here.
Looper (2012)
Looper is a tech-noir triumph that sees Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis playing dueling versions of the same character. The latter gets sent through time, and vows to stop his younger self from making the mistakes that led to him being sent back in the first place.
Looper works so well because writer/director Rian Johnson understands what to explain and what not to explain. He even mocks the idea of films that over-explain their time travel logic by having Willis make a joke about “making diagrams with straws.” Shane Carruth also worked on the time travel effects for the film, which gives it an extra boost of credibility.
Donnie Darko (2001)
There’s something fascinatingly abstract about time travel in Donnie Darko. There aren’t any time machines or devices used to send people back, but rather an intuitive ability to know what’s going to happen, and a strange, amorphous blob that protrudes from people’s chests and points them in the right direction.
There’s a broader explanation of how it all works in the original version of the film, and a more detailed explanation in Richard Kelly’s director’s cut. Either way, the key to understanding it stems from the book that the titular character gets a hold of: The Philosophy of Time Travel.
Interstellar (2014)
Tenet (2020) is another Christopher Nolan that involves time travel, but it’s so dense and confusingly depicted that we can’t say for sure whether it’s done well. Interstellar, on the other hand, is pretty easy to follow and packs a dramatic punch.
Nolan consulted theoretical physicist Kip Thorne while he was writing the screenplay, and the end product is a fantastical yet somewhat fact-based depiction of interstellar space travel and wormholes. Besides, is there a more devastating depiction of time travel than when McConaughey’s character sees his children age via video messages? Murph!
12 Monkeys (1995)
12 Monkeys is about a convict (Bruce Willis again!) who gets sent back in time to investigate a disease that eradicated most of mankind. Things don’t go smoothly: the convict gets sent to the wrong year and winds up incarcerated in a mental hospital. He also gets shot in the leg during a brief instance in which accidentally finds himself on a World War I battlefield.
12 Monkeys is such a unique time travel film because it depicts how messy and imprecise it would really be. It also depicts the reality of a time traveler being treated as a mental patient because who would actually believe someone who claimed to be from the future? The film’s writer/director, Terry Gilliam, really hit it out of the park.
Predestination (2014)
Predestination is one of the lesser-known entries on the list, and we hope that changes. The film is about an aging temporal agent named Doe (Ethan Hawke), who agrees to go on one last time-travel assignment to prevent a criminal from launching a terrorist attack that claims thousands of lives. When we say time-travel assignment, we mean it: the character spends the entire runtime jumping around decades in the 20th century.
Predestination is written and directed by the Spierig Brothers, and they do an exemplary job of keeping things exciting and unpredictable while simultaneously keeping things sensical. Hawke is solid as always, and Sarah Snook shines in a pre-Succession role.
Source Code (2011)
Jake Gyllenhaal tussled with time travel in Donnie Darko, and he returned for the exciting sci-fi thriller Source Code. The actor plays a U.S. Army Captain who gets sent into an eight-minute digital recreation of a real-life explosion, in order to determine who caused it and how to stop it.
Duncan Jones knows how to make idiosyncratic genre fare, and the director manages to give this blockbuster a personality that most of its peers lack. The supporting cast, made up of Jeffrey Wright, Michelle Monaghan and Vera Farmiga, certainly helps in that department.
Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)
Colin Trevorrow was an indie darling before he graduated to the Jurassic World franchise, and Safety Not Guaranteed is proof that the director knows how to tell engaging, small-scale stories. The film is about an outcast (Mark Duplass) who befriends a magazine intern (Aubrey Plaza) and decides to bring her on a trip back through time.
Safety Not Guaranteed is a perfect hybrid of indie and science fiction, and part of its success has to do with the performances by Duplass and Plaza. There are so antithetical to the people we usually see time traveling in films, so it’s a refreshing change of pace.
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
There must’ve been something in the air in 2014: Interstellar and Predestination were both time travel standouts, and then there was Edge of Tomorrow, which remains Tom Cruise’s best non-franchise film of the last decade. The actor plays a cowardly soldier who gets blessed/cursed with the ability to respawn whenever he dies on the battlefield.
So many films have tried and failed to replicate the Groundhog Day (1993) formula, but director Doug Liman and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie manage to do just that with a skillful blend of action and comedy. Plus, Emily Blunt has rarely been better.