time travel 2014

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

• About Rotten Tomatoes®
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening This Week
• Top Box Office
• Coming Soon to Theaters
• Certified Fresh Movies

Movies at Home

• Fandango at Home
• Prime Video
• Most Popular Streaming Movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• 88% Transformers One Link to Transformers One
• 75% Rob Peace Link to Rob Peace
• 97% His Three Daughters Link to His Three Daughters

New TV Tonight

• 100% Colin from Accounts: Season 2
• 100% Matlock: Season 1
• -- Grotesquerie: Season 1
• -- Nobody Wants This: Season 1
• 50% Rescue: HI-Surf: Season 1
• 100% Brilliant Minds: Season 1
• -- Murder in a Small Town: Season 1
• -- Everybody Still Hates Chris: Season 1
• -- Doctor Odyssey: Season 1
• -- Social Studies: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• 94% The Penguin: Season 1
• 81% Agatha All Along: Season 1
• 63% The Perfect Couple: Season 1
• 60% Twilight of the Gods: Season 1
• 47% Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story: Season 2
• 86% High Potential: Season 1
• 74% Kaos: Season 1
• 84% The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Season 2
• 100% From: Season 3
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV

Certified fresh pick

• 81% Agatha All Along: Season 1 Link to Agatha All Along: Season 1
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

The Best ’90s TV Shows

The 100 Best Movies of 1994, Ranked by Tomatometer

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

8 Best Films From The Fall Festivals

Weekend Box Office: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Three-peats by a Narrow Margin

• Trending on RT
• Hispanic Heritage Month
• TV Premiere Dates
• Transformers One First Reviews
• Marvel Shows Ranked

The History of Time Travel

Where to watch.

Watch The History of Time Travel with a subscription on Prime Video, or rent on Prime Video.

Critics Reviews

Audience reviews, cast & crew.

Ricky Kennedy

Krista Ales

Dr. Vanessa Byers

Elizabeth Lestina

Daniel W. May

Edward Page (Younger)

Stephen Adami

Richard Reenactor

Valerie Black

Anne Reenactor

The History of Time Travel

Rentals include 30 days to start watching this video and 48 hours to finish once started.

Customers also watched

726 global ratings

How are ratings calculated? Toggle Expand Toggle Expand

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Registry & Gift List
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Currently available on 3 streaming services.

The History of Time Travel (2014)

30-DAY FREE TRIAL

71min - English

30 Days Free

Then $8.99 / month

Watch similar movies on Apple TV+ for free

7 Days Free

Then $9.99 / month

Didn't find what you were looking for?

Let us notify you once it becomes available on more services.

We checked for updates on 236 streaming services on September 22, 2024 at 10:13:58 AM. Something wrong? Let us know!

The History of Time Travel streaming: where to watch online?

Currently you are able to watch "The History of Time Travel" streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Video with Ads or rent it on Amazon Video online.

A fictional documentary about the creation of the world's first time machine, the men who created it, and the unintended ramifications it has on world events.

Videos: Trailers, Teasers, Featurettes

Where does The History of Time Travel rank today? The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

The History of Time Travel is 11499 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The movie has moved up the charts by 5640 places since yesterday. In the United States, it is currently more popular than Give 'em Hell, Malone but less popular than Strange Nature.

Streaming charts last updated: 5:19:56 AM, 09/23/2024

Popular movies coming soon

Upcoming Science-Fiction movies

Similar Movies you can watch for free

Letterboxd — Your life in film

Forgotten username or password ?

• Start a new list…
• Add all films to a list…
• Add all films to watchlist

Add to your films…

Press Tab to complete, Enter to create

A moderator has locked this field.

Add to lists

Where to watch

The history of time travel.

Directed by Ricky Kennedy

Would We Even Notice?

A fictional documentary about the creation of the world's first time machine, the men who created it, and the unintended ramifications it has on world events.

Stephen Adami Krista Ales Valerie Black Ryan Blackburn Garland Buffalo Peter J. Calvin Cater Cartwright Trey Cartwright Ben Everett Christopher Fenley Tim Hogle Justin Lee Hughes Ricky Kennedy Noah Larive Elizabeth Lestina Brad Maule Daniel W. May Dudley May Roy May Herbert Midgley Hannah Patton Peyton Paulette David Raine Fazia Rizvi Jody Ryan Micah Scott Bill Small Michael Tubbs

Director Director

Ricky Kennedy

Writer Writer

Editor editor, cinematography cinematography.

Justin Herring

Executive Producers Exec. Producers

William Arscott Susan Kennedy Terry Kennedy

Production Design Production Design

Nancy Andrew

Art Direction Art Direction

Alexander Karkosh Victoria Stone

Composer Composer

Herbert Midgley

Pineywood Pictures

Drama Science Fiction

Humanity and the world around us Thought-provoking sci-fi action and future technology Show All…

Releases by Date

Theatrical limited, 25 oct 2014, releases by country.

• Theatrical limited NR Austin Film Festival

71 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Jason Pettus ★★★★★ 2

2019 movie viewings, #82. This highly enjoyable no-budget sci-fi movie uses an extremely clever premise to derive virtually all of its fun. It's supposedly a documentary set several hundred years from now about the invention of a time machine in the early 21st century; but every time the talking heads divulge one more moment of this alt-history timeline, the details of each of the talking heads' environments change (different newspaper headlines in the background of a museum box, different styles of clothes, etc), to essentially let us know that the entire future has changed butterfly-style effect every time one of these events is mentioned, with the timeline being discussed by the historians shifting from one moment to the next depending…

Review by SlasherFan ★★★★

Way to wring a lot of creativity out of a tiny budget. Despite some unconvincing line readings, I was able to just go with it and ended up really enjoying this. Hope the director gets the chance to work with a bigger budget some day.

Review by DreamScape40 ★★★½

Intrigued concept

Review by mrbalihai ★★★★

I tend to view time travel in film as a lazy cop-out by unimaginative screenwriters...a tacit admission that they couldn't come up with a creative way to resolve a complex plot. I can think of a couple of exceptions, most notably "12 Monkeys," where the vagaries of time travel and paradoxes form the core of the film and take a creative and interesting look at how it could potentially affect both history and the time-travelers themselves, but by-and-large, time travel serves simply as an often-ludicrous Deus ex Machina .

"The History of Time Travel" falls into the former category. It's a supremely clever examination of how altering history might impact future events, and how humanity would (or wouldn't) notice those changes.…

Review by gavin ★★★★ 2

GAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA

GENIUS! GENIUS premise. thirty minutes in once I realized what this film was all about I had to pause and laugh with joy. how often does a film fill you with that much excitement that you have to pause to take a moment to appreciate how fun it is

Review by We Love Movies!!! 🎬 ★★★★

I only wish Christopher Nolan could explain time travel as well as this does.

A History of Time Travel is a very clever , fictional documentary about the creation of the worlds first time machine, the men who created it, and the unintended ramifications it has on world events.

It takes a few minute to get into this film . or should I say adjust to it .  It’s telling a fiction story about a family who invent a time machine but because they try to go back and change time the fictional documentary changes with it.   The changes are very subtle.  It might be the posters on the walls , badges of their lapels or the colour the countries…

Review by Tim McClelland ★★★½

An imaginative and wonderfully constructed faux documentary that was really well done. It plays out pretty normal for the first half-hour, but then it begins to take some intriguing twists and turns with little more than a few small changes. A very unique film that is worth checking out for any fans of time travel films.

Review by Madame Psychosis ★★★★ 2

When I saw this the first time I was so twisted up when I realized what happened that I went back and diligently watched it trying to catch every detail. That made this rewatch less intriguing, but I still enjoyed it.

While the conceptual stuff is fun, I appreciate the tragedy. The story itself (themselves) is human and hopeless and in the end makes this have a purpose beyond just intellectual theory. The way it progresses gives the story this Victor Frankenstein type of damnation..a warning against defying our place in the universe and letting ego and ambition rise too high.

And it's neat for an experiment that has so much passion behind theoretical science to leave the audience with a message against reckless intellect, or even nihilistically indifferent to it, which is actually scarier. So I say good sci fi.

Would we even notice?

Review by Adam Zell ★★★★★

that moment in the movie… it’s amazing

Review by hendo ★★★★½

WHAT THE FUCK (better than Primer)

Review by erik reeds ★★★½

this was fun! wish more nerd media was like this, something earnest and interesting and not, you know, guys being weird dudes or what have you

Review by Whit Ripley ★★★★

This film is damn clever! Needs multiple re-watches to catch everything, I love how subtle it is.

Seen at the 2016 Phoenix Film Festival

Similar Films

Select your preferred backdrop

Select your preferred poster.

The History of Time Travel

Cast & crew.

Krista Ales

Dr. Vanessa Byers

Elizabeth Lestina

Daniel W. May

Edward Page (Younger) / Aden Page

Stephen Adami

Richard Reenactor

Valerie Black

Anne Reenactor

Information

Copyright © 2024 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.

Internet Service Terms Apple TV & Privacy Cookie Policy Support

• Rankings FA
• TV Premiere Calendar
• Coming in 2024
• Latest Reviews

The History of Time Travel documentary

• Credits 
• Image gallery  [1]

All images are copyrighted by their respective copyright holders and/or producers/distributors.

All copyrighted material (movie posters, DVD covers, stills, trailers) and trademarks belong to their respective producers and/or distributors.

User history

The History of Time Travel (2014)

Movie Details

Stream & watch the history of time travel.

Cast & Crew

Similar movies.

Movie Reviews

Follow Moviefone

Latest trailers.

• Show Spoilers
• Night Vision
• Sticky Header
• Highlight Links

Follow TV Tropes

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheHistoryOfTimeTravel

The History of Time Travel

The History of Time Travel is a 2014 sci-fi docu-fiction movie written and directed by up-and-coming film student Ricky Kennedy about the history behind the invention of time travel as framed as a network TV documentary on the subject.

The movie's plot involves an Alternate Timeline where a letter by Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning FDR of the potential Nazi time travel program and urging him to start one as well, resulting in the creation of the Indiana Project with the express purpose of creating time travel before Those Wacky Nazis can. It chronicles the life of Edward Page, a scientist working on the Indiana Project and his son Richard who continues his work after his death and the process which resulted in the creation of the time machine and the younger Page's attempt to save his mother from dying from Polio when he was a child.

This film provides examples of:

• Alternate History : The film begins in an alternate history where the Nazis begin experimenting in creating a time machine, inspiring a US government research project into time travel called the Indiana Project. Resulting in Richard Page's success in creating a time machine in the 1980s. Which in turn results in several more alternate timelines as Page alters history.
• Bland-Name Product : "You're watching History Television "
• Dramatic Irony : In one of the altered timelines where the Soviets use a stolen time machine to handily win the Cold War, one of the interviewees comments that time travel must be the only explanation for how the Soviets were able to get Sputnik into orbit before anything American-made, despite the fact that in actual history, Sputnik was the first unmanned space satellite, without the aid of time travel. Of course, the interviewees don't know this due to not having Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory , as detailed below.
• Foreshadowing : The Soviets winning the Cold War is foreshadowed by a globe in the background of an interview altering as the film goes on to have more and more nations shaded in red, implying that each successive alteration of the timeline resulted in the USSR-aligned bloc getting bigger and bigger .
• Mockumentary : The film is presented as an in-universe history documentary about the events and people surrounding the creation of time travel.
• Giving Radio to the Romans : Richard attempts to help his father expedite his research in the 1940s by leaving him a prototype and all necessary notes. Unfortunately part of Edward's inability to make a breakthrough was that 1940s technology wasn't sufficiently advanced for his needs and Edward is unable to recreate his success after the KGB steals the prototype and destroys the Indiana Project facilities.
• He Knows Too Much : Edward Page is tailed by the CIA and KGB in one timeline because of his knowledge of time travel; both he and his wife are eliminated when Edward attempts to use facilities at MIT to replicate his 1940s work with the Indiana Project .
• Despite the Soviets using time-travel to gain an advantage over the United States at every stage of the Cold War in one Alternate Timeline , history broadly follows the same pattern - a US President is assasinated in 1963 (though it's Nixon rather than Kennedy), the first man walks on the moon in 1969 (though it's Yuri Gagarin rather than Neil Armstrong) etc.
• Kid from the Future : In one timeline, Edward encounters his two time-traveling adult sons from the future, who give him the completed time machine and their time-travel research. Decades later, when he tells their younger alternate selves about this encounter, they initially refuse to believe him and take it as a sign of his deteriorating mental health.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero : Richard and Aden attempt to alter history by giving their father their completed time machine and the research used to build it during WWII in an attempt to alter their family history after their mother kills herself. The end result is KGB infiltrators stealing the prototype and the research papers, destroying the Indiana Project to prevent the Americans from building another one and then the Soviets use the time machine to effectively win the Cold War, the implication being that in the altered 2014, the USA is one of the few if not the last remaining capitalist nation on Earth .
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup : Averted completely. Edward Page's hidden research notes allow Richard to build a working time machine in two different timelines. Ultimately invoked in the end when Richard makes one last trip to the past to completely destroy the Indiana Project, break his father's obsession with time travel research in order to save his family, and deny success to the KGB agents who had infiltrated the project .
• Our Presidents Are Different : at least from 1960 onwards in one timeline, with Nixon beating Kennedy and then subsequently being assassinated, with the implication that the Soviets orchestrated the assassination. A segment taking place in 2014 has the picture on the wall switch from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton repeatedly.
• Reset Button Ending : The film ends with history being altered by the Page Brothers so that time travel was never invented, the Page family earns their (mostly) happy ending and the documentary goes from being a history documentary to a sci-fi documentary where the stillborn Indiana Project is mentioned as a point where time travel could've been invented in real life but wasn't .
• Ret-Gone : In his attempts to save his mother's life through time travel, Richard manages to unwittingly pull this on one of the people currently being interviewed about the story. After preventing his mother from dying in a car crash, a newspaper reveals that the crash instead claimed the lives of a couple with the same last name as an older man being interviewed in the present, who we can presume are his parents. The next time that interview location is shown, the man has been completely replaced by a younger woman, who remains there until the end of the movie where the time-travel machine prototype in the 40's is destroyed, thus preventing the story from ever happening in the first place, at which point the man returns.
• Ripple Effect Indicator : This film itself is intended to be one for the audience , with the "History of Time-Travel" that the interviewers are discussing changing throughout the course of the film every time a time-traveler changes history, with none of the characters in-universe being any wiser. Word of God describes this film as being analogous to Marty McFly's photograph in Back to the Future .
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory : Averted. Changing the past results in the time traveler lapsing into a 3-day coma upon returning to the present, from which they emerge with their memories altered to match the new timeline and only vague recollections of the old one. It's taken up to eleven when the whole documentary crew and all the interviewed talking heads likewise lose all memories of the original timeline and treat the new one as if it was always the history they knew mid-movie, with their clothes, hairstyles and interview locations changing as well (in one case, the interviewee changes completely from an older man to a younger woman) and the same title cards appearing multiple times as different versions of the same events are recapped and discussed .
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong : The whole movie chronicles successive attempts to do this beginning with Richard Page attempting to save his mom from dying from Polio when he was young and ending with his cosmic retconed-in brother traveling back to destroy the Indiana Project in order to prevent time travel from ever being invented .
• also, Richard remains in a coma that Aiden expects him to wake from.
• Spoiler Cover : The ads for the film show an astronaut planting a soviet flag on the moon. When you watch it, you know it's gonna happen.
• Stupid Jetpack Hitler : The in-universe justification for the creation of the Indiana Project, create time travel before the Nazis can. Which leads to Soviet Superscience when KGB agents infiltrate the Indiana Project and steal the prototype time machine, allowing the Soviet Union to beat the US to the Moon, stay one step (or more) ahead of every advance in US military technology, and change the geopolitical picture for the remainder of the 20th century completely.
• Temporal Sickness : Time-travelers who return to the present after successfully changing the past suffer a form of this - inexplicably slipping into a coma, and reawakening with no memory of the original timeline or what they've done. In the final timeline, Richard never recovers from his coma.
• Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel
• Science Fiction Films
• Hot Tub Time Machine
• Hi, Mom (2021)
• Time Travel Tales

Important Links

• Action Adventure
• Commercials
• Crime & Punishment
• Professional Wrestling
• Speculative Fiction
• Sports Story
• Animation (Western)
• Music And Sound Effects
• Print Media
• Sequential Art
• Tabletop Games
• Applied Phlebotinum
• Characterization
• Characters As Device
• Narrative Devices
• British Telly
• The Contributors
• Creator Speak
• Derivative Works
• Laws And Formulas
• Show Business
• Split Personality
• Truth And Lies
• Truth In Television
• Fate And Prophecy
• Image Fixer
• New Articles
• Edit Reasons
• Isolated Pages
• Images List
• Recent Videos
• Crowner Activity
• Un-typed Pages
• Recent Page Type Changes
• Trope Entry
• Character Sheet
• Playing With
• Creating New Redirects
• Cross Wicking
• Tips for Editing
• Text Formatting Rules
• Handling Spoilers
• Administrivia
• Trope Repair Shop
• Image Pickin'

Advertisement:

Search for movies, TV shows, channels, sports teams, streaming services, apps, and devices.

The History of Time Travel

A fictional documentary about the creation of the world's first time machine, the men who created it, and the unintended ramifications it has on world events.

Stream The History of Time Travel Now

Movie trailer, where can you watch the history of time travel online, suggested movies.

The Streamable uses the TMDb API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDb.

The Streamable uses JustWatch data but is not endorsed by JustWatch.

Movie Score

October 25, 2014,

Ricky Kennedy

Stephen Adami, Krista Ales, Valerie Black, Ryan Blackburn, Garland Buffalo, Peter J. Calvin

Drama, Science Fiction

DIRECTV STREAM Cash Back

Let us know your e-mail address to send your $50 Amazon Gift Card when you sign up for DIRECTV STREAM.

You will receive it ~2 weeks after you complete your first month of service.

Offer Terms

• Only valid for new DIRECTV STREAM subscribers.
• Only valid once per household.
• You must pay and maintain service for at least one month to be eligible.
• Purchase must be completed on the DIRECTV STREAM website.
• You’ll receive gift card 4-6 weeks after purchase (~2 weeks after your first month).
• Cannot be combined with any other promotion and won’t be eligible if you try to use a coupon code or cash back from another site.

Sling TV Cash Back

Let us know your e-mail address to send your $25 Uber Eats Gift Card when you sign up for Sling TV.

• Only valid for new Sling TV subscribers to Sling Orange, Blue, or Sling Orange + Blue.
• You must click from The Streamable and complete your purchase on the Sling TV website.

Hulu Live TV Cash Back

Let us know your e-mail address to send your $35 Amazon Gift Card when you sign up for Hulu Live TV.

• Only valid for new Hulu Live TV subscribers.
• You must click from The Streamable and complete your purchase on the Hulu Live TV website.

• Trending on RT

Total Recall

15 must-see time travel movies, with mr. peabody & sherman hitting theaters, we run down some of the most memorable journeys across time and space..

Back to the Future

Great Scott! On one hand, Back to the Future is quintessentially 1980s — you’ve got Huey Lewis on the soundtrack, Michael J. Fox in the lead, and a DeLorean for a time machine — but on the other, it’s a charmingly old-fashioned comedy that sends its hero back in time as much to save his own father from growing up to be a schmuck as it does to laugh along with the audience at the many ways in which American pop culture changed between 1955 and 1985. The sequels had their moments, but it’s the original that still really hits the spot; as Adam Smith wrote for Empire Magazine, “To put it bluntly: if you don’t like Back to the Future , it’s difficult to believe that you like films at all.”

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Two teenage idiots, George Carlin, and a magic phone booth. They don’t sound like the most likely ingredients for cinematic glory, but then there’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure , starring Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves as our two non-intrepid heroes, a pair of high school buddies destined for greatness — but only if they can pass an upcoming history test. They get a little extra help courtesy of Rufus (Carlin), a citizen of the future utopian society inspired by the music Bill & Ted go on to record, who travels back in time to help them study by giving them some most excellent face time with historical figures like Napoleon, Socrates, Billy the Kid, and Abraham Lincoln. Not the most serious fare ever spun from the time-travel premise, but it works; as Larry Carroll wrote for Counting Down, “This is the rare kind of movie that you could watch along with your kids and actually feel like you’re teaching them something.”

Donnie Darko

Time travel, a falling jet engine, and a dude in a bunny suit: From these disparate ingredients, writer-director Richard Kelly wove the tale of Donnie Darko , a suburban teenager (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) charged with repairing a rift in the fabric of our dimension. Or something. To call Darko “open to interpretation” would be understating the case a bit — it’s been alternately confounding and delighting audiences since it was released in 2001 — but its dense, ambiguous plot found stronger purchase with critics, who cared less about what it all meant than about simply having the chance to see an American movie that took some substantial risks. Though a few reviewers were confused and/or unimpressed (Staci Lynne Wilson of Fantastica Daily called it “derivative,” and Joe Leydon dismissed it as “a discombobulating muddle” in his write-up for the San Francisco Examiner), overall critical opinion proved a harbinger of the cult status the film would eventually enjoy on the home video market; as Thomas Delapa wrote for the Boulder Weekly, “If the sum total of Donnie Darko is hard to figure, there’s no questioning that its separate scenes add up to breathtaking filmmaking.” Despite a paltry $4.1 million gross during its original limited run, Darko returned to theaters in 2004 with a director’s cut — one whose 91 percent Tomatometer actually improved upon the original’s.

Groundhog Day

Under the right circumstances, time travel sounds like quite a bit of fun. Finding yourself trapped in a time loop in Punxsutawney, PA, on the other hand, is a living nightmare — at least for Phil Connors (Bill Murray), the obnoxious newscaster at the heart of director Harold Ramis’ classic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day . But for the audience, Connors’ torment is an invitation to cinematic bliss — first courtesy of Murray’s perfectly deadpan depiction of the callous Connors, then through his progressively more unhinged reaction to the discovery that he’s doomed to repeat the same 24 hours of his life seemingly forever, and then finally in his expected (but no less sweet) moments of self-discovery in the final act. “ Groundhog Day may not be the funniest collaboration between Bill Murray and director Harold Ramis,” admitted the Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan. “Yet this gentle, small-scale effort is easily the most endearing film of both men’s careers, a sweet and amusing surprise package.”

Hot Tub Time Machine

The 1980s got kind of a bum rap at the time, but that hasn’t stopped those of us who grew up during the decade from giving in to nostalgia during the 21st century, or from fetishizing the era’s best films — which is why it was such a winkingly self-referential treat to see 1980s hero John Cusack lead an ensemble cast through Hot Tub Time Machine , director Steve Pink’s ribald comedy about a group of schlubby friends given a surprise chance (via magic hot tub, natch) to revisit the best years of their lives. It’s an unabashedly goofy premise, but screenwriter Josh Heald manages to leave the whimsy with a few dashes of surprising poignancy; as Laremy Legel wrote for Film.com, “Well played, Hot Tub Time Machine , well played. You defied expectations, in a good way, and managed to evolve from ‘potentially silly concept’ to ‘fairly funny film.'”

Plenty of people would love to take the opportunity to travel back in time and see our younger selves, but Rian Johnson’s Looper takes this premise and adds a nasty twist. When a hit man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) realizes his latest quarry is his older self (Bruce Willis) — an event known among his peers as “closing the loop” — he muffs the job, allowing him(self) to escape and setting in motion a high-stakes pursuit that puts a widening circle of people in danger. Tense, funny, and surprisingly heartfelt, Looper may suffer from some of the same scientific story flaws as other time travel movies, but it also manages to turn its by-now-familiar basic ingredients into an uncommonly affecting and thought-provoking sci-fi drama. “ Looper imagines a world just near enough to look familiar,” mused Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum, “and just futuristic enough to be chillingly askew.”

Like any genre, science fiction has its share of clichés — and anything relating to time travel probably belongs on that list. But few films have ever dealt with time travel — or the many personal and ethical questions that could arise from ownership of the technology — with the level of intelligence that Shane Carruth’s ultra low-budget Primer brought to the table. The story of two garage scientists who accidentally build a time machine, Primer eschews whiz-bang special effects for a nuts-and-bolts look at the science behind the device, and a cold, hard look at how quickly and easily a friendship can be torn asunder by unchecked power and bottomless greed. It certainly isn’t for everyone — the reams of technical dialogue prompted critics such as the BBC’s Matthew Leyland to dismiss it as “one of the most willfully obscure sci-fi movies ever made” — but if you can absorb the material, it’s uncommonly gripping. Time Out’s Jessica Winter was appreciative, saying “this film imagines its viewers to be smart, possessed of a decent attention span and game for a challenge. It doesn’t happen all that often.”

Somewhere in Time

Time travel has been used as a plot device to set up all kinds of stories, but rarely has it been employed with the sort of three-handkerchief weepie abandon brought to bear on 1980’s Somewhere in Time . Starring Christopher Reeve as a starry-eyed playwright accosted by a mysterious older woman who pleads with him to “come back to me” before pressing a locket into his hand and disappearing, Time slowly morphs into a fantastical tale about coming unmoored in time via self-hypnosis in order to be with the one you love — even if that love is inspired by a portrait of someone you don’t remember ever knowing. A divisive cult classic, Time has always been dismissed by less patient or romantically inclined viewers, but for others, it’s well worth watching. “Above all,” argued Apollo Guide’s Ryan Cracknell, “this film captures a romantic part of the imagination that is often left unexplored.”

Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home

Having explored the outer limits of space, Star Trek spent much of its fourth cinematic installment in decidedly more familiar environs — namely, the America (specifically the San Francisco bay area) of 1986, thanks to a storyline, conceived by returning director Nimoy, that had the crew of the Enterprise traveling 600 years back in time to retrieve a humpback whale in order to… Well, it isn’t important, really; what mattered — at least to the folks who helped Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home to a $133 million worldwide gross — was that it lived up to Nimoy’s goal of showing audiences “a great time” with a feature that played up the lighter side of a franchise whose humor was often overshadowed by its big ideas. Weathering a number of pre-production storms — including William Shatner’s refusal to come back without a raise and the chance to direct the next sequel — Voyage triumphantly emerged as what Roger Ebert referred to as “easily the most absurd of the Star Trek stories — and yet, oddly enough… also the best, the funniest and the most enjoyable in simple human terms.”

The Terminator

It was made with a fraction of the mega-budget gloss that enveloped its sequels, but for many, 1984’s The Terminator remains the pinnacle of the franchise — not to mention one of the most purely enjoyable movies of the last 30 years. Subsequent entries would get a little hard to follow, but the original’s premise was simple enough: A scary-looking cyborg (Schwarzenegger) travels back in time to kill a woman (Linda Hamilton) before she can give birth to the child who will grow up to lead the human resistance against an evil network of sentient machines. Tech noir at its most accessible, Terminator earned universal praise from critics such as Sean Axmaker of Turner Classic Movies, who wrote, “Gritty, clever, breathlessly paced, and dynamic despite the dark shadow of doom cast over the story, this sci-fi thriller remains one of the defining American films of the 1980s.”

Time After Time

What if H.G. Wells really built a time machine — and what if Jack the Ripper used it to flee into the future? That’s the intriguing premise behind Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time , starring Malcolm McDowell as Wells and David Warner as the killer. After Jack travels to 1979, Wells pursues him, setting in motion a cat-and-mouse thriller, culture-clash comedy, and love story all in one, with a dash of sharp social commentary thrown in for good measure. “ Time After Time is still a fun fish-out-of-water flick that deserves more attention than it has received in the thirty years following its release,” wrote Simon Miraudo for Quickflix. “But there’s still plenty of time for that.”

Time Bandits

Terry Gilliam and time travel: A match made in cinematic heaven. Years before he proved it for a second time with the much darker 12 Monkeys , Gilliam directed a far sillier — and visually dazzling — venture into the genre with 1981’s Time Bandits , uniting a stellar cast (including Shelley Duvall, John Cleese, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, and Sean Connery) in service of a deceptively thought-provoking caper about an 11-year-old history buff (Craig Warnock) on a journey through time with a group of dwarves. A solid critical and commercial hit, Bandits proved a favorite for writers like Roger Ebert, who pronounced it “amazingly well-produced” and applauded, “The historic locations are jammed with character and detail. This is the only live-action movie I’ve seen that literally looks like pages out of Heavy Metal magazine.”

In a career dotted with cult classics, 1994’s Timecop manages to stand out as one of the cultiest. And okay, so it’s hard to call a movie that raked in more than $100 million worldwide a “cult” picture — but if you’ve seen the way Timecop takes a cool premise (time travel, natch) and renders it both impenetrably complicated and irrelevant to the action, you know it’s essentially the very definition of the term. (Also, it stars Ron Silver.) The plot is full of holes, but as the filmmakers knew, once you accept the notion of Jean-Claude Van Damme as an officer of the Time Enforcement Commission, you can buy into pretty much anything, and by the time you get to Timecop ‘s final act — in which past and future versions of Van Damme battle past and future versions of Silver — you’ve reached that wonderful place where the laws of logic no longer exist. The highest-grossing movie of Van Damme’s career, Timecop spun off a sequel, a short-lived television show, and even a series of books. Not bad for a movie that Roger Ebert described as “the kind of movie that is best not thought about at all, for that way madness lies.”

The Time Machine

This isn’t the only time Hollywood’s tried adapting H.G. Wells’ classic story, but it’s definitely the best. Starring Rod Taylor as the Victorian time-traveling scientist George and featuring Oscar-winning special effects from Gene Warren and Tim Baar, director George Pal’s version of The Time Machine might seem somewhat quaint by today’s standards; still, whatever it lacks in modern-day visual pizzazz, it more than makes up in the stuff that matters — right down to Wells’ vision of a distant post-human future populated by docile creatures and the monstrous Morlocks who use them for food. It’s “Somewhat dated, and not quite up to the source material,” admitted Luke Y. Thompson of New Times, “but still some good retro fun.”

Any time director Terry Gilliam manages to wrangle one of his films through the studio system, it’s a cause for celebration — and that goes double for a picture like 12 Monkeys , which almost seamlessly weds Gilliam’s signature flights of fancy with good old-fashioned commercialism to produce a knotty time travel story starring a pair of matinee idols (Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt) in an apocalyptic thriller that never stops asking questions — or forcing the audience to answer their own as they hustle to keep up with the unfolding drama. “There’s always overripe method to his madness,” observed Janet Maslin for the New York Times, “but in the new 12 Monkeys Mr. Gilliam’s methods are uncommonly wrenching and strong.”

Take a look through the rest of our Total Recall archives . And don’t forget to check out Mr. Peabody & Sherman .

Finally, here’s what happened when Peabody and Sherman met Ludwig Van Beethoven:

Related News

All 46 DreamWorks Animation Movies Ranked by Tomatometer

100 Best Computer-Animated Movies, Ranked by Tomatometer

New on Netflix in August 2022

More Total Recall

The Worst Horror Movies of All Time

Marvel Movies Ranked Worst to Best by Tomatometer

Jurassic Park Movies Ranked By Tomatometer

Movie & TV News

Featured on rt.

8 Best Films From The Fall Festivals

September 23, 2024

Weekend Box Office: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Three-peats by a Narrow Margin

The Best ’90s TV Shows

30 Most Popular Movies Right Now: What to Watch In Theaters and Streaming

Top Headlines

• The Best ’90s TV Shows –
• The 100 Best Movies of 1994, Ranked by Tomatometer –
• 30 Most Popular Movies Right Now: What to Watch In Theaters and Streaming –
• 25 Most Popular TV Shows Right Now: What to Watch on Streaming –
• 50 Best New Action Movies of 2024 –
• 50 Popular Complete Series You Can Binge Right Now –

• [ April 3, 2024 ] Giordano Bruno Quotes About Astronomy Astronomy Lists
• [ March 28, 2024 ] Shakespeare Quotes: Comets, Meteors and Shooting Stars Astronomy Lists
• [ March 28, 2024 ] Shakespearean Quotes About The Moon Astronomy Lists
• [ November 30, 2022 ] The Night Sky This Month: December 2022 Night Sky
• [ November 22, 2022 ] James Webb Telescope Turns Its Attention To The Kuiper Belt News & Events

Predestination (2014) Explained

November 29, 2014 James Miller Sci-Film Reviews 501

Based upon a 1959 short story titled All You Zombies by sci-fi writer Robert A.Heinlein, Predestination (2014) is a stylish time-travel movie exploring the paradoxical nature of time and time travel. With its intricate chronology of events, this cerebral sci-fi thriller navigates through multiple twists of fate as the story’s tragic key character is gradually revealed to be a self-created entity trapped within a closed loop in time.

This excellent sci-fi thriller stars Ethan Hawke (“the Barkeep”) as a temporal agent who stops crimes before they happen, Sarah Snook (Jane/John) as an androgynous writer known as “The Unmarried Mother, and Noah Taylor as the Temporal Bureau’s mysterious boss Mr Robertson. It was written and directed by the Spierig brothers.

What is the Predestination Paradox in the movie?

The Predestination Paradox alluded to in the movie’s title indicates that any attempt by a time traveler to change events in the past would result in that person playing a role in creating the event they are trying to prevent. In other words, events are predestined to happen the same way over and over again.

One example of a predestination paradox in the movie is John wanting to save Jane from all the heartache caused by her mysterious lover leaving her, but instead falling in love with Jane and becoming the very mysterious stranger he was trying to save her from.

Another example is the Barkeep inadvertently causing the accident which leads to John being burnt and surgeons giving him the new face of the Barkeep. By the surprised look on the Barkeep’s face, he realizes it was he who causes the distraction which delays John from disarming the bomb in time, leading to John burning his face. Ironic, but that’s the concept behind a predestination paradox. However much you try to alter the past, the event has already taken place resulting in your current timeline, and is therefore predestined to happen.

This is all necessary because despite their sadness over the decisions they make, if either Jane/John/Barkeep/Bomber make any decisions other than the ones that they were predestined to make then their very existence would be nullified. In this way, they all depend on one another to make the same choices they make throughout the movie in order to exist, making the character a predestination paradox from beginning to end.

Is there a Bootstrap Paradox in Predestination?

The movie also presents an example of a Bootstrap Paradox , a temporal phenomenon in which a time traveler (person, object or information) is a self-created entity existing within a closed loop in time. In this movie, for example, John is the cause of his own birth and has to travel back in time and have sex with himself (Jane), who then gives birth to a child who subsequently travels back in time and grows up to become them.  The result is a bootstrap paradox that takes the ‘chicken or egg’ causality dilemma to a whole new level.

John’s his own Parents and Granda

As John is the source of his own birth, he is his own father, mother, and grandfather. In fact, John’s very future depends upon him traveling back to 1970 and persuading his 25-year-old self to travel back to 1963 and impregnate his 18-year-old female self (Jane). To complete the loop, he must then drop the 9-month-old child (granddaughter) off in 1945 at the orphanage, where she could grow up to become them.

John is forced to repeat the process over and over again inside an endless loop, or else cease to exist. This temporal loop is symbolized by the Ouroboros mentioned in the movie, an ancient Greek symbol of a snake eating its own tail, signifying infinity and the eternal cycle of birth and death. A brief outline of the dilemma facing Agent Doe can be found on wikipedia, which states:

“ He tells John that he needed John to meet with Jane in order for her to become pregnant and give birth to a child that would eventually grow up to be them and that he deceived John as he had no intention of getting him to kill the Fizzle Bomber. If the temporal agent had not kidnapped the child and transported her back to 1945, or had not set up John and Jane, all of them would not exist. John states that he doesn’t want to leave Jane, but the temporal agent insists it has to be .”

Who is the Fizzle Bomber?

Only after following a lead to the laundrette given to him by Robertson does The Barkeep discover that the elusive Fizzle Bomber was actually an older version of himself all along, driven psychotic and delusional in later life because of the temporal the Barkeep’s continued use of the time machine which failed to deactivate on his retirement to New York City in 1975.

Therefore, Jane, John, the Barkeep, and the Fizzle Bomber all turn out to be the same person caught inside a closed time loop, with the Barkeep becoming the Fizzle Bomber in the 1970’s part of that cycle. This all, of course, is facilitated by the invention of time travel in 1981.

The Fizzle bomber explains that by bombing the people who would have gone on to commit terrorist attacks he was preventing even more people from being killed, regardless of the collateral damage he incurs in the process. In other words, he was using a tragedy to stop countless other tragedies from happening, and it’s worth remembering here that to the Fizzle bomber’s warped way of thinking he is doing good. As an agent, after all, the Barkeep was originally tasked with stopping disasters from occurring by traveling through time.

By subsequently killing the Fizzle Bomber in the Laundromat, the Barkeep ensures he will continue the cycle by becoming him over time, and that his (now the Fizzle Bomber) actions will eventually give John the reason he needs to eventually travel back in time to halt the Fizzle Bomber. Thus, the loop sustains its succession of events and remains unbroken for the cycle to start over again.

Time Agent gets his Face Burnt

In the very first scene of the movie, we see our main character descend upon a New York building in 1970 from 3 different timelines (or different stages along the time loop). We see John from 1992 enter the building before trying to defuse the bomb, we see the Fizzle Bomber try to stop John, and while John manages to contain most of the blast within his field kit, his face is badly burnt. Struggling to survive, the Barkeep arrives on the scene in time to give John his time-travel violin box and return him to 1992 in for treatment and reconstructive surgery where he becomes the Ethan Hawke character. The Fizzle bomber escapes.

Meanwhile, near the end of the movie, we then see that the Barkeep’s presence was due to him making a jump to the same location in one last attempt to stop the Fizzle Bomber. The Barkeep’s decision seems based upon the advice of a recorded message left to him by his future self saying “if you ever want to stop the Fizzle Bomber you will never get another chance”.

The Barkeep then arrives on the scene before John and sees the Fizzle Bomber complete planting his bomb. The two of them then have a fight and the Barkeep is knocked unconscious in another part of the building. In the meantime, John arrives to defuse the bomb and after a shoot out is delayed from sufficiently diffusing the bomb in time, thus leading to his horrific burns. The Barkeep recovers in time to push John his time travel device.

The piece of the bomb John recovers from the scene and hands to Robertson provides information allowing the Barkeep to track the Fizzle Bomber to the laundrette and eventually kill him, thus assuming his part, and so on. Robertson’s decision to hand the Barkeep the information would seem to indicate he is ensuring that all events inside the loop continue to play out exactly as they already happened.

Time Loop vs. Split Timelines

At the movie’s end, we never find out if the time loop continues as a predestination paradox, or whether the Barkeep manages to break the loop and split it into alternative timelines (many worlds theory). In one version the Barkeep is stuck in a temporal causality loop after killing the Fizzle Bomber before succumbing to psychosis and then becoming him; while in another scenario, the paradox unravels and is split into two separate but concurrent timelines, with the Barkeep living the rest of his life out from 1975 on, while John is in 1992 and now moving forward with his life outside of the time loop.

Both theories can be supported. On the one hand, a predestination paradox states that if time travel were possible, it would be impossible to change the past, and any attempt to do so would become the precipitating event for the change we are trying to make. An example of which being a time traveler going back in time to save a friend from being hit by a car, only to discover he is the man driving the car that killed his friend. On the other hand, the “many worlds” theory would say that every time you travel back in time and actually manage to change events, you are only ever managing to create a new alternate timeline.

The Bureau’s Involvement and Mr. Robertson

Head of the Temporal Bureau, Mr. Robertson views Jane/John/Barkeep as a unique and unexpected gift to the world. He is also fully aware of his importance to the Bureau, as having no family ties makes him a perfect under-the-radar agent, while possessing two sets of sexual organs means he can procreate with himself, resulting in a self-sustaining agent with no historical ties.

It was likely Robertson’s intention to create a paradox involving the agent’s origin so as to have a temporal agent capable of operating from both inside and outside the loop at the same time, possibly needed to help the Bureau carry out its mission of preventing disasters from happening. While no further details are given as to how this may work, one imaginative speculation proposed by online poster Not-Now-John, is as follows:

“It seems to me that there is a single timeline that has been edited (perhaps we are seeing the “final” version) and they must be intentionally creating loops. Its the only way to prevent disasters in the future. Think about it, if you go back and kill Hitler, in the new timeline, there is no Hitler, so there’s no reason to go back and kill Hitler [ Let’s Kill Hitler Paradox ]. But if you create a loop where someone has knowledge of the alternate future, they can go back to kill Hitler, while being the only ones aware of the need for this to happen. What better way to do this, than to create someone that only exists within the edited timespace.”

While the Fizzle Bomber may have been an unintended consequence of the paradox, Robertson seems at ease with the situation, stating as he does that “we all learned things from him, he’s made us better at our jobs,”, explaining that the Fizzle Bomber has helped the organization grow.

Interestingly, Robertson even seems to give Barkeep all the encouragement he needs to carry on using his decommissioned time machine after his retirement to New York in 1975, stating how much more he believed the Bureau could accomplish if it had an agent working free from constant bureaucratic controls. Robertson gave this advice despite knowing how affected the agent had become from his numerous time jumps, indicating he most likely needed the Barkeep to become the Fizzle Bomber to continue the loop. As Robertson tells the agent before he is retired:

“You are here to create history and influence what is to come. Understand, you are more than an agent, you are a gift given to the world through a predestination paradox. You are the only one. Free from history, ancestry. You must complete your mission. You must lay your seeds for the future. We’re counting on you.”

How was the Paradox Created?

As far as Predestination is concerned, we do not see the original timeline which actually started the causality loop, and the movie only ever shows us the timeline of events that unfold in the loop once its actually been created. In other words, there is no beginning to the events in the movie because we do not see the original timeline but only observe a closed time loop.

Even though there may be no explanation as to why such a phenomenon may have spontaneously occurred, just like we may never know what caused the Big Bang, for the sake of this movie we can still allow ourselves to speculate as to possible causes.

While there may be many ways in which the original loop may have been created, one possibility is that in the original timeline Jane was born in 1945, became pregnant by some other man (not John) leading to the operation in which she became a man.Or it may be that surgery became necessary at some stage in her life due to medical problems connected to her having both sets of reproductive organs. Either way, Robertson could have then recruited John for Space Corp, while planning to devise a plan in which he uses John’s “hermaphroditism” to create a predestination paradox in which John travels back in time and impregnates Jane.

The reason for Robertson wanting to create such a paradox is unclear, although he does seem to indicate having an agent freely operating outside of normal time inside a closed time loop represented a vital part of the Bureau’s operation.

“ The By-Laws of Time ” Quotes

“Never Do Yesterday What Should Be Done Tomorrow.” “If at Last You Do Succeed, Never Try Again.” “A Stitch in Time Saves Nine Billion.” “A Paradox May Be Paradoctored.” “It Is Earlier When You Think.” “Ancestors Are Just People.” “Even Jove Nods.”

The Timeline of Predestination

1970, John has face burnt whilst trying to stop the ‘Fizzle Bomber’ who manages to escape. The Barkeep appears and helps John activate his portable time machine.

1992 , John travels forward in time to the Temporal Bureau, an organization founded in 1985 after the invention of time travel, and has reconstructive facial surgery. We later find out that the Fizzle Bomber killed 11,000 people in New York in 1975.

1970 , The Barkeep goes back to New York posing as a bartender and seems keen to engage a man calling himself ‘Unmarried Mother’ in conversation. The man explains he was originally a girl called Jane who was left at an orphanage in 1945. In 1963 Jane fell in love with a mystery man, who then disappeared. Jane had a baby who 9 months later was stolen. She then had a sex change operation and became a writer called John.

The Barkeep says he suspects the mystery man was the Fizzle Bomber and offers John the chance to go back to 1963 and kill the man who ruined his life. In return, he insists John must then join the Temporal Bureau. They then travel back to 1963 together.

1963 , John accidentally meets his younger, female self Jane, falls in love, and impregnates her with a child that eventually would grow up to be them. Meanwhile, the Barkeep travels to 1970 to confront the Fizzle Bomber and help badly burnt John. The Barkeep then travels to 1964 and takes Jane’s baby and drops her off at an orphanage in 1945 . The Barkeep then drops John off in 1985 to enlist in the Temporal Bureau.

1975 , The Barkeep then retires to 1975 but he still retains the use of the time machine which fails to deactivate itself. The retired agent soon tracks down the Fizzle Bomber, who actually turns out to be himself in the future. He seems to have become insane from using the non-deactivated time machine too often as he sought to travel in time and avert disasters from occurring. However, his actions actually caused thousands of other untold deaths to happen in the process, and so disgusted with his future self, the Barkeep shoots and kills the Fizzle Bomber, thus ensuring he becomes him.

• Entertainment

Related Posts

© Copyright 2023 Astronomy Trek

Time travel: Is it possible?

Science says time travel is possible, but probably not in the way you're thinking.

Albert Einstein's theory

• General relativity and GPS
• Wormhole travel
• Alternate theories

Science fiction

Is time travel possible? Short answer: Yes, and you're doing it right now — hurtling into the future at the impressive rate of one second per second. 

You're pretty much always moving through time at the same speed, whether you're watching paint dry or wishing you had more hours to visit with a friend from out of town. 

But this isn't the kind of time travel that's captivated countless science fiction writers, or spurred a genre so extensive that Wikipedia lists over 400 titles in the category "Movies about Time Travel." In franchises like " Doctor Who ," " Star Trek ," and "Back to the Future" characters climb into some wild vehicle to blast into the past or spin into the future. Once the characters have traveled through time, they grapple with what happens if you change the past or present based on information from the future (which is where time travel stories intersect with the idea of parallel universes or alternate timelines). 

Related: The best sci-fi time machines ever

Although many people are fascinated by the idea of changing the past or seeing the future before it's due, no person has ever demonstrated the kind of back-and-forth time travel seen in science fiction or proposed a method of sending a person through significant periods of time that wouldn't destroy them on the way. And, as physicist Stephen Hawking pointed out in his book " Black Holes and Baby Universes" (Bantam, 1994), "The best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future."

Science does support some amount of time-bending, though. For example, physicist Albert Einstein 's theory of special relativity proposes that time is an illusion that moves relative to an observer. An observer traveling near the speed of light will experience time, with all its aftereffects (boredom, aging, etc.) much more slowly than an observer at rest. That's why astronaut Scott Kelly aged ever so slightly less over the course of a year in orbit than his twin brother who stayed here on Earth. 

Related: Controversially, physicist argues that time is real

There are other scientific theories about time travel, including some weird physics that arise around wormholes , black holes and string theory . For the most part, though, time travel remains the domain of an ever-growing array of science fiction books, movies, television shows, comics, video games and more. 

Einstein developed his theory of special relativity in 1905. Along with his later expansion, the theory of general relativity , it has become one of the foundational tenets of modern physics. Special relativity describes the relationship between space and time for objects moving at constant speeds in a straight line. 

The short version of the theory is deceptively simple. First, all things are measured in relation to something else — that is to say, there is no "absolute" frame of reference. Second, the speed of light is constant. It stays the same no matter what, and no matter where it's measured from. And third, nothing can go faster than the speed of light.

From those simple tenets unfolds actual, real-life time travel. An observer traveling at high velocity will experience time at a slower rate than an observer who isn't speeding through space. 

While we don't accelerate humans to near-light-speed, we do send them swinging around the planet at 17,500 mph (28,160 km/h) aboard the International Space Station . Astronaut Scott Kelly was born after his twin brother, and fellow astronaut, Mark Kelly . Scott Kelly spent 520 days in orbit, while Mark logged 54 days in space. The difference in the speed at which they experienced time over the course of their lifetimes has actually widened the age gap between the two men.

"So, where[as] I used to be just 6 minutes older, now I am 6 minutes and 5 milliseconds older," Mark Kelly said in a panel discussion on July 12, 2020, Space.com previously reported . "Now I've got that over his head."

General relativity and GPS time travel

The difference that low earth orbit makes in an astronaut's life span may be negligible — better suited for jokes among siblings than actual life extension or visiting the distant future — but the dilation in time between people on Earth and GPS satellites flying through space does make a difference. 

Read more: Can we stop time?

The Global Positioning System , or GPS, helps us know exactly where we are by communicating with a network of a few dozen satellites positioned in a high Earth orbit. The satellites circle the planet from 12,500 miles (20,100 kilometers) away, moving at 8,700 mph (14,000 km/h). 

According to special relativity, the faster an object moves relative to another object, the slower that first object experiences time. For GPS satellites with atomic clocks, this effect cuts 7 microseconds, or 7 millionths of a second, off each day, according to the American Physical Society publication Physics Central .  

Read more: Could Star Trek's faster-than-light warp drive actually work?

Then, according to general relativity, clocks closer to the center of a large gravitational mass like Earth tick more slowly than those farther away. So, because the GPS satellites are much farther from the center of Earth compared to clocks on the surface, Physics Central added, that adds another 45 microseconds onto the GPS satellite clocks each day. Combined with the negative 7 microseconds from the special relativity calculation, the net result is an added 38 microseconds. 

This means that in order to maintain the accuracy needed to pinpoint your car or phone — or, since the system is run by the U.S. Department of Defense, a military drone — engineers must account for an extra 38 microseconds in each satellite's day. The atomic clocks onboard don’t tick over to the next day until they have run 38 microseconds longer than comparable clocks on Earth.

Given those numbers, it would take more than seven years for the atomic clock in a GPS satellite to un-sync itself from an Earth clock by more than a blink of an eye. (We did the math: If you estimate a blink to last at least 100,000 microseconds, as the Harvard Database of Useful Biological Numbers does, it would take thousands of days for those 38 microsecond shifts to add up.) 

This kind of time travel may seem as negligible as the Kelly brothers' age gap, but given the hyper-accuracy of modern GPS technology, it actually does matter. If it can communicate with the satellites whizzing overhead, your phone can nail down your location in space and time with incredible accuracy. 

Can wormholes take us back in time?

General relativity might also provide scenarios that could allow travelers to go back in time, according to NASA . But the physical reality of those time-travel methods is no piece of cake. 

Wormholes are theoretical "tunnels" through the fabric of space-time that could connect different moments or locations in reality to others. Also known as Einstein-Rosen bridges or white holes, as opposed to black holes, speculation about wormholes abounds. But despite taking up a lot of space (or space-time) in science fiction, no wormholes of any kind have been identified in real life. 

Related: Best time travel movies

"The whole thing is very hypothetical at this point," Stephen Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Oregon, told Space.com sister site Live Science . "No one thinks we're going to find a wormhole anytime soon."

Primordial wormholes are predicted to be just 10^-34 inches (10^-33 centimeters) at the tunnel's "mouth". Previously, they were expected to be too unstable for anything to be able to travel through them. However, a study claims that this is not the case, Live Science reported . 

The theory, which suggests that wormholes could work as viable space-time shortcuts, was described by physicist Pascal Koiran. As part of the study, Koiran used the Eddington-Finkelstein metric, as opposed to the Schwarzschild metric which has been used in the majority of previous analyses.

In the past, the path of a particle could not be traced through a hypothetical wormhole. However, using the Eddington-Finkelstein metric, the physicist was able to achieve just that.

Koiran's paper was described in October 2021, in the preprint database arXiv , before being published in the Journal of Modern Physics D.

Alternate time travel theories

While Einstein's theories appear to make time travel difficult, some researchers have proposed other solutions that could allow jumps back and forth in time. These alternate theories share one major flaw: As far as scientists can tell, there's no way a person could survive the kind of gravitational pulling and pushing that each solution requires.

Infinite cylinder theory

Astronomer Frank Tipler proposed a mechanism (sometimes known as a Tipler Cylinder ) where one could take matter that is 10 times the sun's mass, then roll it into a very long, but very dense cylinder. The Anderson Institute , a time travel research organization, described the cylinder as "a black hole that has passed through a spaghetti factory."

After spinning this black hole spaghetti a few billion revolutions per minute, a spaceship nearby — following a very precise spiral around the cylinder — could travel backward in time on a "closed, time-like curve," according to the Anderson Institute. 

The major problem is that in order for the Tipler Cylinder to become reality, the cylinder would need to be infinitely long or be made of some unknown kind of matter. At least for the foreseeable future, endless interstellar pasta is beyond our reach.

Time donuts

Theoretical physicist Amos Ori at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, proposed a model for a time machine made out of curved space-time — a donut-shaped vacuum surrounded by a sphere of normal matter.

"The machine is space-time itself," Ori told Live Science . "If we were to create an area with a warp like this in space that would enable time lines to close on themselves, it might enable future generations to return to visit our time."

Amos Ori is a theoretical physicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. His research interests and publications span the fields of general relativity, black holes, gravitational waves and closed time lines.

There are a few caveats to Ori's time machine. First, visitors to the past wouldn't be able to travel to times earlier than the invention and construction of the time donut. Second, and more importantly, the invention and construction of this machine would depend on our ability to manipulate gravitational fields at will — a feat that may be theoretically possible but is certainly beyond our immediate reach.

Time travel has long occupied a significant place in fiction. Since as early as the "Mahabharata," an ancient Sanskrit epic poem compiled around 400 B.C., humans have dreamed of warping time, Lisa Yaszek, a professor of science fiction studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, told Live Science .  

Every work of time-travel fiction creates its own version of space-time, glossing over one or more scientific hurdles and paradoxes to achieve its plot requirements. 

Some make a nod to research and physics, like " Interstellar ," a 2014 film directed by Christopher Nolan. In the movie, a character played by Matthew McConaughey spends a few hours on a planet orbiting a supermassive black hole, but because of time dilation, observers on Earth experience those hours as a matter of decades. 

Others take a more whimsical approach, like the "Doctor Who" television series. The series features the Doctor, an extraterrestrial "Time Lord" who travels in a spaceship resembling a blue British police box. "People assume," the Doctor explained in the show, "that time is a strict progression from cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff." 

Long-standing franchises like the "Star Trek" movies and television series, as well as comic universes like DC and Marvel Comics, revisit the idea of time travel over and over. 

Related: Marvel movies in order: chronological & release order

Here is an incomplete (and deeply subjective) list of some influential or notable works of time travel fiction:

Books about time travel:

• Rip Van Winkle (Cornelius S. Van Winkle, 1819) by Washington Irving
• A Christmas Carol (Chapman & Hall, 1843) by Charles Dickens
• The Time Machine (William Heinemann, 1895) by H. G. Wells
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Charles L. Webster and Co., 1889) by Mark Twain
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Pan Books, 1980) by Douglas Adams
• A Tale of Time City (Methuen, 1987) by Diana Wynn Jones
• The Outlander series (Delacorte Press, 1991-present) by Diana Gabaldon
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Bloomsbury/Scholastic, 1999) by J. K. Rowling
• Thief of Time (Doubleday, 2001) by Terry Pratchett
• The Time Traveler's Wife (MacAdam/Cage, 2003) by Audrey Niffenegger
• All You Need is Kill (Shueisha, 2004) by Hiroshi Sakurazaka

Movies about time travel:

• Planet of the Apes (1968)
• Superman (1978)
• Time Bandits (1981)
• The Terminator (1984)
• Back to the Future series (1985, 1989, 1990)
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
• Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)
• Groundhog Day (1993)
• Galaxy Quest (1999)
• The Butterfly Effect (2004)
• 13 Going on 30 (2004)
• The Lake House (2006)
• Meet the Robinsons (2007)
• Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
• Midnight in Paris (2011)
• Looper (2012)
• X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
• Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
• Interstellar (2014)
• Doctor Strange (2016)
• A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
• The Last Sharknado: It's About Time (2018)
• Avengers: Endgame (2019)
• Tenet (2020)
• Palm Springs (2020)
• Zach Snyder's Justice League (2021)
• The Tomorrow War (2021)

Television about time travel:

• Doctor Who (1963-present)
• The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) (multiple episodes)
• Star Trek (multiple series, multiple episodes)
• Samurai Jack (2001-2004)
• Lost (2004-2010)
• Phil of the Future (2004-2006)
• Steins;Gate (2011)
• Outlander (2014-2023)
• Loki (2021-present)

Games about time travel:

• Chrono Trigger (1995)
• TimeSplitters (2000-2005)
• Kingdom Hearts (2002-2019)
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (2003)
• God of War II (2007)
• Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack In Time (2009)
• Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time (2013)
• Dishonored 2 (2016)
• Titanfall 2 (2016)
• Outer Wilds (2019)

Additional resources

Explore physicist Peter Millington's thoughts about Stephen Hawking's time travel theories at The Conversation . Check out a kid-friendly explanation of real-world time travel from NASA's Space Place . For an overview of time travel in fiction and the collective consciousness, read " Time Travel: A History " (Pantheon, 2016) by James Gleik. 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Get the Space.com Newsletter

Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!

Vicky Stein is a science writer based in California. She has a bachelor's degree in ecology and evolutionary biology from Dartmouth College and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz (2018). Afterwards, she worked as a news assistant for PBS NewsHour, and now works as a freelancer covering anything from asteroids to zebras. Follow her most recent work (and most recent pictures of nudibranchs) on Twitter. 

The bubbling surface of a distant star was captured on video for the 1st time ever

Just how dark is the universe? NASA's New Horizons probe gives us best estimate yet

This Week In Space podcast: Episode 129 — Back From Mars!

Most Popular

• 2 Moonquakes could 'pose a possible hazard' to Artemis moon missions, study finds
• 3 Boeing Space & Defense chief Ted Colbert is leaving: reports
• 4 Cards Against Humanity sues SpaceX for $15 million over land dispute
• 5 India aims for 2028 launch of Venus orbiter as part of ambitious space roadmap

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

At the age of 21, Tim discovers he can travel in time and change what happens and has happened in his own life. His decision to make his world a better place by getting a girlfriend turns ou... Read all At the age of 21, Tim discovers he can travel in time and change what happens and has happened in his own life. His decision to make his world a better place by getting a girlfriend turns out not to be as easy as you might think. At the age of 21, Tim discovers he can travel in time and change what happens and has happened in his own life. His decision to make his world a better place by getting a girlfriend turns out not to be as easy as you might think.

• Richard Curtis
• Domhnall Gleeson
• Rachel McAdams
• 929 User reviews
• 283 Critic reviews
• 55 Metascore
• 3 wins & 9 nominations

Top cast 99+

• Jimmy Kincade
• Ginger Jenny

• Mary's Father, Fitz

• Mary's Mother, Jean

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

• Trivia Richard Griffiths 's last movie.
• Goofs After Tim and Kit Kat go back in time to fix her life, she knows all about her new life with Jay as soon as they return, but Tim doesn't know about his daughter Posy becoming a boy after he accidentally alters her existence.

Tim : [voiceover] We're all traveling through time together, every day of our lives. All we can do is do our best to relish this remarkable ride.

• Connections Featured in Ellie Goulding: How Long Will I Love You (2013)
• Soundtracks The Luckiest (Instrumental) Written by Ben Folds (as Benjamin Folds) Performed by Ben Folds Courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment, Inc.

User reviews 929

• Aug 8, 2019
• November 8, 2013 (United States)
• United States
• United Kingdom
• Official Facebook
• Official site
• Cuestión de tiempo
• Portloe, Truro, Cornwall, England, UK (on location)
• Working Title Films
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $12,000,000 (estimated)
• $15,322,921
• Nov 3, 2013
• $87,100,748

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 3 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Surround 7.1
• Dolby Atmos

Related news

Contribute to this page.

• IMDb Answers: Help fill gaps in our data
• Learn more about contributing

More to explore

Recently viewed.