Best Time Travel Movies
soulbrono1
205 Posts
From the perspective of least flawed concept on going between past and future I have to ride for 12 Monkeys. Plus you get Bruce Willis' typical crazy tough beaten the hell up character and Brad Pitt playing a loony tune. I know most of y'all will hate though...so what is your nominee?
Comments
Ha! Beat me to the punch.
Biff rules.
i had forgotten about this movie until i saw the title of this thread! gotta add this to the collection....
Last night's ep of LOST.
That movie was horrible. I couldn't finish it.
Both 12 Monkeys and Time Bandits are by the same director, Terry Gilliam.
I thought Frequency was an alright time travel movie. And Butterfly Effect was surprisingly good all things considered.
slaughterhouse 5
Amazing stuff. Highly recommended.
It improved as it went on. I'll be the first to admit that the attempt at realistic overlapping dialogue during the set up was pretty horrible and slowed things down considerably but thought it was an interesting exploration of the theme, particularly the way it dealt with small instances of time travel rather than on an epic scale. I know lots of people who hated it though so each to their own.
Apart from that and the ones above, Groundhog Day would be the obvious addition.
It's a time travel movie made for only $7,000. You gota give it some respect.
I'll ride for this French psych-tinged time-travel comedy/drama/romance/tragedy... showed it in Baltimore for free a few months ago without having seen it before and was very pleasantly surprised.
But 12 Monkeys is definitely one of my favorite Hwood films of the 90s...
I loved this movie, watched it three times. I think a little too much was going on in the last 20 minutes though.
I thought it got worse as it went on. I know the bad acting and lack of sets had to do with the low budget, but the story went from mildly interesting to completely ridiculous as it turned from a semi-scientific exploration of time travel into a clumsy, pseudo-action movie with a psychotic killer and only minutes to save a bunch of lives. It was obnoxiously contrived and amateurish.
It may not be the best movie ever made in the genre, personally I'm not a huge fan, but getting an completely independent movie made is a pretty big deal. Doing it for as little money as they did is just amazing. The fact that it's in a genre that usually = big budget and special effects, makes it pretty fuckin special.
I get it. It was low-budget. So was My Dinner With Andre, which didn't suck.
flaws aside, i found it very compelling in terms of the narrative technique - the way stuff just changes without explanation - thats the way it would appear to the characters. granted, it requires a lot of catching up by the audience, and it does move too fast in the last third so that its truly hard to follow, AND the ending is rather goofy - but i still think concept-wise this is the best time travel film. If it was remade for like, $15,000, well, THAT would be the jam.
"Terminator of Data - And your rhymes are Sarah Conner.."
I thought Primer was great, a movie made by nerds, for nerds. Sure there are issues with acting and pacing and it's relatively inpenatrable for its lack of exposition, but it's one of the few time travel movies that made an effort to seem realistic. If you look online you can find maps that lay out all of the interacting timelines in the movie, but I choose to avoid those. It just makes me feel better knowing that the filmmakers sat down and really carefully considered how events would unfold. Compare Primer to Donnie Darko, a movie which I liked for its creepy stylishness, but it was clear that Richard Kelly couldn't be bothered to really think out the parameters of his time displacements and was really going on his intuitive sense.
My vote goes to the Roswell That Ends Well episode of Futurama.
"Ohh, a lesson in not changing history from Mr. "I'm My Own Grandfather"! Let's just steal the damn dish and get out of here! Screw history! "
Crazy stuff man... LOST is