Jonas Ferry’s blog

Something about time travel has always fascinated me. I’ve read books, both fact and fiction, articles, played roleplaying games and even written a small game about it in Swedish called Tempora.

I enjoy the mental excercise of spotting paradoxes, even if paradoxes increase my enjoyment rather than detract from it. I suppose there’s some wishful thinking about changing the past, and a certain sense of exploration. Our three dimensions are mapped out, at least around Earth. Exploration of parallel dimensions can be fun, but are usually too removed from our reality too really have an impact on normal life. You always experience time, so it’s fun to think about what would happen if you could alter it.

There are a lot of films about people manipulating time. I’m going to list my five favorites. I’ll have to exclude a lot of great films. Anyway, the list:

1. Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001). Donnie is a disturbed young man who meets a giant bunny that announces the end of the world. The film doesn’t say if Donnie has schizophrenic hallucinations, if the whole film is a near-death experience of if he’s actually in a timestream broken off from the normal. Watch the director’s cut, as it explains a lot more. One thing is that you get to see pages from Grandma Death’s book The Philosophy of Time Travel.
2. Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993). This Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell comedy is an excellent take on time loops. A news anchor gets stuck reliving the same day over and over. At first he’s excited, later annoyed and finally tries to break the loop. For romantic comedies, this is about as good as they get.
3. Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004). A down-to-earth take on time travel, if that’s possible, where two friends build a time machine almost by mistake. When they carefully try it out things spiral out of control. The viewer follows one time stream, which is visited by multiple versions of the time travellers, so you could spend some time trying to map exactly what happens when, and why. People have, of course.
4. The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984). A killer robot is sent back to stop the birth of a future resistance leader by killing his mother. A neat cause-and-effect loop is created when the man sent back to protect the resistance leader’s mother becomes his father.
5. Returner (original title: Ritana) (Takashi Yamazaki, 2002). A woman comes to the present from the future to stop the start of a devastating war between humans and aliens. She brings a neat time-manipulating toy that can slow down time, creating stunning matrixesque action scenes. The most sci-fi of the films on my list.

Do you have a favorite time travel film I didn’t include?