Last week I posited that due to daylight savings and the way I try to write these up in advance it is like I am the world’s least effective time traveler. If I were a more regular person that had a more focused writing style I would then have gone on to talk about time travel in movies and finally culminate in a time travel related prompt last week. Instead I am somewhat distracted a good deal of the time (except when I am super distracted) so rather than follow logic I instead talked about spies without even attempting any kind of segue, since segue is not how I roll in any context.

But sometimes I like to Looper Back to the Future for an Excellent Adventure. And in this case last week got me thinking about time travel and movies. Like spy movies last week there have been many takes on time travel in movies and one of the things I like best about it’s use is since we do not actually know how time travel would actually work this allows the movies to write their own time travel rules. Obviously this will lead to a lot of movies with sketchy time paradox and not that well thought out stuff, but on the flip side we get a lot of creativity and fun or really great stories and even an “Aha!” moment mixed in every now and again. Basically the better the movie, the less I care about the “rules”. The very best movies may incorporate time travel overtly and make it central to the plot, or more covertly and use it as a minor means to get on with it and tell the story they want to tell. It can be a jump forward in millennia or a simple 13 second jump backward in time, or maybe even a movie where time does not jump at all, but rather runs on a loop for some… time, I mean given the wide array of movies available the ‘travel’ part of time travel is somewhat optional (more on that in just a few lines). We can tell stories about who we are, were and would like to be or just have some innovative take on the concept.

So then the prompt is timely somewhat straight forward this week: What is your favourite movies involving time travel? And feel free to go above and beyond with this one, is it because you like the “rules”? Did you have to suspend a lot of disbelief? For me personally I really liked Arrival, which technically does not involve any time travel but rather perceptions of time itself (spoiler incoming, it is an almost 10 year old movie though… it could be argued that the main character’s consciousness travels through time I suppose). It is well written interesting sci-fi that really comes together by the end of the film to tell a great story. It is innovative in it’s use of time and I just really thought it was great. Since I was young I have always liked the concepts of time travel and often have had some really great experiences watching these stories and look forward to taking some of the suggestions here to find new movies to see.