It's About Time

DVD Features

It's About Time
Time travel in films is all about getting back to the future.

It flies when you’re having fun, waits for no man and heals all wounds. It’s time, and whether you want to venture into the past with winning lottery numbers or catch a glimpse of what the undiscovered country of the future might hold, temporal travel remains the ultimate in wish-fulfilment and the perfect plot device for movies and TV programmes, whether they be romance, comedy, action or science fiction.

   With holograms, cloning and genetic manipulation now science fact, how long until those clever scientists begin manipulating quantum physics and extrapolating Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to make time travel a reality? Or have they already done it? How could we have had visitors from the future when time machines haven’t been invented yet? And how can we travel into the future when it hasn’t happened yet? It messes with the head.

Stephen King’s story The Langoliers pitched that it was also impossible to travel into the past, as a group of airline travellers discover when they’re catapulted through a time rift into a stale and empty yesterday that’s being consumed by pacman-like monsters.

From one century and into the next, time travel and all its paradoxes and possibilities have entertained us through countless films and TV episodes. And the various modes of travel into the past or future are often as inventive as the events that unfold there.

H.G Wells’s The Time Machine, adapted for the screen in 1960 (forget the awful Guy Pearce remake) allowed Rod Taylor to travel backward and forward in time at his leisure, until he wound up in a far future where a complacent humanity was preyed upon by ugly underground trolls. Moreover, Time Lord Doctor Who’s blue police telephone box, the TARDIS (an acronym of Time And Relative Dimensions In Space), could virtually go anywhere and anywhen, even into parallel worlds. The phone box idea was also appropriated by high school slackers Bill and Ted for their excellent adventure through history. The time vehicle was given a cool makeover when Doc Brown unveiled his souped-up DeLorean in Back to the Future. “If you’re going to build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style,” he explains.

   Beyond the idealised concept of a time machine, the gateway to the past or future could take the form of a temporal anomaly (favoured by Star Trek) that was usually realised as a swirling vortex-like phenomena; or even more creative permutations such as a ham radio set capable of contacting a dead relative (Frequency); hypnosis (Somewhere in Time); and quantum wormholes (Timeline, Donnie Darko). Even something as simple as being locked up in a bomb shelter for 35 years and then released into a strange new world (Blast from the Past) can be considered a method of time travel – and an entirely possible one. Further unconventional time travelling techniques also include fainting at your high school reunion (Peggy Sue Got Married), and a magical remote control that whisks the user into a black and white ‘50’s sitcom world (Pleasantville).

   The aforementioned fish-out-of-water concept, in which people from the past are transported into the future, can also be seen in The Philadelphia Experiment, in which a pair of sailors are transported 40 years into the future from 1943; Catweazle, the brilliant British children’s show that sent a Norman wizard into a contemporary world of “electrickery” and “telling bones”; and The Visitors, which delivered more medieval-meets-modern mayhem.

   More popular, however, is sending future visitors into the past where the possibility of changing history and creating timeline-destroying temporal paradoxes is rife. Sometimes, if these incursions are severe enough, like killing a relative or preventing somebody’s death, they can threaten to tear the entire space/time continuum apart, which basically means the end of everything.

   Further inventive history-changing possibilities include the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Nimitz appearing prior to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor in The Final Countdown; far future tourists travelling into Earth’s past to witness cataclysmic disasters (Timescape); destroying the sentient Skynet A.I. before it can nuke humanity in the Terminator films; the Borg’s attempt to assimilate the human race prior to alien contact in Star Trek: First Contact; and Biff’s use of a future sports almanac to accumulate unlimited wealth in Back to the Future II.

   Temporal tampering like Biff’s can result in a drastically altered timeline, as found in films like The Sound of Thunder, where the simple crushing of a butterfly by a time-tourist to the Cretaceous era upsets evolution. For more warped alternate realities see also The Butterfly Effect and Groundhog Day.

So while we enjoy the above scenarios, paradoxes and temporal travels from the safety of the couch or cinema, whether any of it is remotely possible – or has already happened and we don’t know it because we are part of it – only time will tell.