What Are Your Favorite Time Travel Movies?

[Dynamo of Eternia]

Originally Posted by Moviefan2k4

I didn't see this listed, so I decided to start it. Here's some of mine, to start things off:

Back to the Future
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
Blast From the Past
Field of Dreams
Flight of the Navigator
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Star Trek: First Contact
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III
Terminator 2: Judgment Day

While I like Blast From the Past a lot (and it's one of my wife's favorites), I wouldn't count it as a "Time Travel" movie. Nobody actually travels through time in it. They just live in a fallout shelter for over 30 years and just miss out on the changes in their local town and society in general. Nobody actually goes forward or back in time. It's more of a 'fish out of water' story than anything.

Otherwise I agree with most of your list (and would extend Back to the Future to include the entire Trilogy, and with that by far being at the top of my list). I don't know if I would include Turtles III, though. I don't hate it quite as much as many other people do, but it's still not that great (but that's just me).

Hot Tub Time Machine was fun. And I liked the Austin Powers sequels, so I guess that kind of counts, though I don't focus on them as "time travel movies" per say (even though time travel is part of their plots).



As for another film that a few people have listed, Timecop.... Bah! I hated that movie. I only saw it all the way through once, and that was many years ago, so I don't have a fresh memory of movie. But I recall it basically being one big plothole after another. I know that it's difficult to make a time travel movie without at least some amount of contradiction or arguable plotholes, but that movie takes the cake! I actually had a running jokes years ago with a couple of friends of mine... whenever we would see it on the shelf at a store, we would joke that it has so many plotholes that it's also sucking in the plots of the movies sitting next to it on the shelf.

And don't get me started on the whole "the same matter can't occupy the same space at the same time" thing. DIFFERENT matter can't occupy the same space at the same time. If I touch my own 2 hands together, technically one hand is occupying the space immediately next to the other one, and NOT the same space. Not to mention that if I recall correctly, on the few occasions where they had 2 of the same person together (and the one case where we see the supposed 'consequence' of 'the same matter occupying the same space') one version of the person is many years older than the other. Given things like how we shed skin cells and they reproduce, etc, the person wouldn't technically be made up of the "same matter" as his duplicate anyway. The same DNA, sure, but not the same matter. If it was the same person from like an hour in the future, I could maybe see the argument for it (but even then it would be stupid), but this is even more absurd. I know some people will argue that I'm "over thinking" things, but IMO this is basic common knowledge, and stuff like this just pops out at me and bugs me when it's clear that they are writing this stuff for the lowest common denominator of viewers.

I also laughed hard at an episode of South Park where the kids were shopping at Wall-Mart (the change in spelling intentional from the show), and Cartman was going to buy a pack of 3 copies of Timecop for something like $10 (a joke off of multiple crappy movies being packed together for cheap, only in this case, the same movie), and Kyle questions the logic in it and says, "I'm going to buy 1 copy for $5..... wait a minute, I don't even like Timecop!"