Aaron Yap on his favourite films that feature sci-fi’s most mind-boggling plot device.
Timecrimes (2007)
Mode of Travel: Like a high-tech spa with a top that lowers on top of you once you’re in the water.
Reason for Travel: It’s a bit complicated, and part of the fun is not knowing the deets, but it boils down to being punished for being a peeping tom. A man named Hector (Karra Elejalde) spies on a naked girl with his binoculars and soon finds himself stabbed by a mysterious bandaged-head figure, and lured into a vat of liquid that takes him back an hour or so in time…
Overall Travel Experience: Fresh, narratively mindbending, yet tightly plotted, Nacho Vigalondo’s low-budget film gave the genre a much needed shot in the arm when it came out.
Back to the Future Part II (1989)
Mode of Travel: As in the first trip, the American sports car the DeLorean with its iconic gull-wing doors, but now modified with hover wheels that allow it to fly.
Reason for Travel: Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) tells Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) his family has fallen apart in the future. To fix this he must travel to year 2015, but in doing so also inadvertently messes up the present, which requires them to travel back to the past again to fix that.
Overall Travel Experience: A whole lot darker, knottier and more imaginative – and arguably better – than the first one, this is The Empire Strikes Back of time travel movies. Robert Zemeckis really let loose with the design, special effects and space-time-continuum-disrupting twists here.
The Time Travelers (1964)
Mode of Travel: A screen portal where you can walk through into another time.
Reason for Travel: Scientists invent a time-viewing “window” which lets them peek into the past, present and future. But when they discover its time-travelling capabilities and get zapped 107 years into the future, they become trapped in a wasteland populated by cave-dwelling mutants.
Overall Travel Experience: Cheesy, goofy and hampered by a shoestring budget, but Ib Melchior’s B-movie gem also has the most tripped-out, thoroughly time-warped ending of the genre.
La Jetée (1962)
Mode of Travel: A most minimalist process involving lying on a hammock and putting two wired pads on your eyes, and walla!
Reason for Travel: It’s post-World War III and Earth is in ruins. The only hope for survival is “a hole in time through which to send food, medicines, sources of energy”. A prisoner, known as “the Man”, volunteers to take part in this military experiment, partly to unravel the mystery of a recurring childhood memory.
Overall Travel Experience: Simply haunting, beautiful, unforgettable, and entirely constructed from black-and-white photographic stills and narration. No time travel movie comes close to touching the lingering enigmatic power of Chris Marker’s 29-minute short.
The Time Machine (1960)
Mode of Travel: A steampunk-looking sled with red velvet chair, levers, springs, dials and a massive spinning saucer at the back.
Reason for Travel: Oh it’s just turn-of-the-century inventor extraordinaire H.G. Wells (Rod Taylor) testing his time machine. It works, and he is catapulted into the year 802701 (!). Society is now divided into two camps: the passive Elois and an underground species of cannibals called Morlocks who eat them.
Overall Travel Experience: A genre classic, with George Pal’s pioneering effects still retaining their charm. Also much, much better than the dreadful 2002 remake.
Primer (2004)
Mode of Travel: Constructed in a garage, this is one of the simplest, most economical designs around, pretty much an oblong box held together by tape, wiring and piping.
Reason for Travel: A bunch of entrepreneuring college grads looking to engineer the next big thing stumble onto it by accident and try to make some extra moolah at the stock market.
Overall Travel Experience: Featuring seriously dense tech-speak and a puzzling, richly convoluted narrative, Shane Carruth’s lo-fi wonder is one of the most unique and baffling time travel movies out there. You’ll keep coming back because you’ll never understand it… but want to.
Groundhog Day (1993)
Mode of Travel: Simply waking up – good morning, you’re back to yesterday, ad nauseam.
Reason for Travel: Weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) isn’t a particularly nice fellow, so he’s forced to relive the same much-reviled day over and over again until he learns to grow a heart.
Overall Travel Experience: A true comic masterpiece, consistently inventive screenplay, Murray at the height of his game, just plain bloody funny. Everything clicks (including Andie MacDowell).
Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey (1988)
Mode of Travel: Good old fashioned hard labour. Digging a tunnel via mine shaft that takes you from Medieval England to ‘80s New Zealand.
Reason for Travel: The Black Death. The plague’s killing everyone on the planet and an eight-year-old boy’s premonitions of the future may hold the key to keeping his village safe.
Overall Travel Experience: Dark, atmospheric, dream-like, visually arresting; in many ways Vincent Ward’s triumph, to have mounted such an ambitious vision on clearly what is not a very huge budget.
Frequency (2000)
Mode of Travel: An old ham radio that gives you the chance to have long catch-up conversations with your long-deceased father.
Reason for Travel: Not exactly “travel” in the physical sense as such, but the ability for cop John Sullivan (Jim Caviezel) to communicate across 30 years with his firefighter dad (Dennis Quaid), which could help catch a serial killer.
Overall Travel Experience: The thriller stuff is suspenseful, exciting, and more than a little ludicrous, but Frequency wins points more for those moving, heartwarming moments where father and son connect over a very unusual way. Caviezel and Quaid knock one out of the park, even though they never actually appear in a scene together.
Triangle (2009)
Mode of Travel: A yacht, a storm and an abandoned cruise ship.
Reason for Travel: The initial travel is a seafaring vacation for Melissa George and her friends, but later there’s no particular reason for what happens – just pure bad luck to be caught in a messed-up time-mangling scenario.
Overall Travel Experience: One helluva loopy rollercoaster ride which apparently took writer/director Christopher Smith a couple of years to nut out. Simultaneously makes perfect sense and none at all. At the very least you’ll be thinking about it long after.
