Time travel is a rules problem dressed as a premise, and the rules are where most stories fail. This tag collects reviews of time travel films and what consistent mechanics do for tension.
1980sOctober 21 is Back to the Future Day, the date Marty McFly lands in 2015 in Part II. The occasion is a fan joke about hoverboards. The film behind it is a screenplay built so tight that almost every line…
2020sTenet (2020) rates 6 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Nolan bought a real 747 to crash because it cost less than building a model, and then mixed the film so that a substantial number of people could not…
2020sLoki Season 1 (2021) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. The best thing the Marvel streaming era produced, because it has a governing idea and obeys its own rules. A bureaucracy that files away every life that…
2020sLoki Season 2 (2023) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. It finishes an argument the first season opened instead of starting a new one, and it ends with a decision that cannot be taken back. Almost nothing…
1980sSomewhere in Time (1980) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Universal halved the budget, the actors' strike stopped Reeve and Seymour promoting it, the critics were brutal, and it ran three weeks. Cable and video then turned…
1960sIndiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) rates 1 out of 10 on the rewatch scale, and that is generous. Three hundred and eighty-seven million dollars, a loss of a hundred and thirty-four million, and trash from the first…
1990s12 Monkeys (1995) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A time travel film in which the loop cannot be broken and everybody involved eventually works that out. Gilliam made it for twenty-nine million dollars in Philadelphia and…
2000sThe Time Machine (2002) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. H. G. Wells's great-grandson directed it, collapsed from exhaustion, and Gore Verbinski shot the last eighteen days. The first act is genuinely good and the film throws…
1960sThe Time Machine (1960) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. George Pal made it for under a million dollars, won an Academy Award for a time-lapse effect built out of stop motion and melting wax, and kept…
AprilFirst Contact Day marks the day in 2063 when a drunk who wanted to get rich flew a warp ship built from a nuclear missile, and the Vulcans noticed. The founding moment of the utopia belongs to a man far…
Book ReviewsKarl Glogauer travels back to AD 28 to witness the crucifixion, but finds the historical Jesus cannot be what history needs him to be. Moorcock's bleak novella-turned-novel asks what a myth requires, and answers that it requires somebody to fill…
Fiction WritingThe more you explain time travel, the weaker the story gets. The strongest time-travel fiction normalizes its mechanism and spends its attention on the human
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