Listen, before you get mad, I need to make a few clarifications about what constitutes a “sci-fi time travel” movie.
- The movie must include a person or persons moving backward in time or skipping forward into the future all within our own timeline.
- The method by which those persons are able to time travel must be due to a scientific reason, and not because of god-like/supernatural powers.
The second one, I’m hoping, should be self-explanatory. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and The Terminator are both sci-fi time travel movies. Groundhog Day, while amazing, isn’t a sci-fi movie because presumably there’s a higher being keeping Phil captive in Punxsutawney until he achieves some level of enlightenment and becomes a better person. In fact, outside of Edge of Tomorrow, most time loop movies either don’t explain the non-linear time movement or vaguely hint at what it can be, and Edge of Tomorrow doesn’t get to win this competition because its name is Edge of Tomorrow and not Live, Die, Repeat the way it should be (this is also the reason I’ll never watch the Hugh Jackman movie that was called something other than Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots. /strong> That movie is dead to me). Basically magic time travel isn’t sci-fi time travel, and if that statement seems controversial to you, you’re not going to love the second point.
The first point I made about the definition of “time travel” I chose very carefully for one specific reason: Back to the Future isn’t a time travel movie.
Ok, but wait, just give me one second. I’m not saying that Back to the Future isn’t an absolute classic. It is. It’s got Michael J Fox and Huey Lewis, and that is more than enough reason for me to love it ’til death finally wins. What I’m saying is that if a movie featuring time travel ends with the present being different from how the protagonist knew it before the time travel, they did not solely travel through time. The actual defining feature of those movies is that the time traveler used time travel to move into an alternate dimension.
Which is exactly what Marty does.
Now I am not a fan of the Multiverse Theory, but it’s really the only way to explain how someone could go back in time and change the past. If the events play out in a way that is not your previous understanding of how history worked, watch out, you’re dimension traveling. You’ve not only changed which dimension you end up in when you travel back to your future, but you’ve also left your previous one behind. Basically, in Reality One, Lame Lorraine and Lame George woke up to their son’s empty bed, his dead best friend, and a van with Lebanese terrorists crashed into the parking lot at the local mall. Do they assume that he was kidnapped because of Brown’s involvement with stolen uranium and they’ll never see him again? They sure fucking should. Also, this means there’s a possibility that Reality Two Marty will stroll up to his house at any moment and wonder why his girlfriend is making out with an imposter. Unless, of course, there are enough realities similar enough for all the Martys and Docs to play a sort of Musical Universes, and they all just move one to the left. Except for that original one where Doc’s super, one-hundred-percent dead.
(As a minor intermission, I didn’t include time travel shows in this post because the scope would be too wide, but this does mean that Dr. Sam Beckett never put right what once went wrong. What he did was leap dimension to dimension watching events play out as they were always going to within that universe while impacting them in no significant way, and then he bounced. Rear Admiral Al Calavicci was either there to keep him barely sane, or he was a real sadistic son of a bitch.)
I’m not arguing that time travel doesn’t take place in Back to the Future, I’m arguing that the resolution of the movie was to give Marty a happy ending by changing his present. Imagine if he’d gone back to 1955, struck out with his mom on prom night, and invented rock ‘n roll, only to still be stuck in his same lame reality. You’d be furious, right? Because what’s the point of going back in time if you can’t change things? Sci-fi time travel movies are what happens when someone goes back in time and is unable to change the events of the past. And those movies are. Entirely. My. Jam. The aforementioned Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and The Terminator, but also movies like Primer, Tenet, and to a lesser degree Interstellar (which I think we can all agree is not Christopher Nolan’s best work. That’d be The Prestige).
And obviously, 12 Monkeys. To start with, there’s just the fact that it’s a good movie. I rewatched it over the weekend, and the thing I’d mostly forgotten was how loudly the opening scenes announce “THIS IS A TERRY GILLIAM MOVIE.” Bruce Willis somehow manages to play a relatable protagonist despite being propped up in a carnival chair for significant portions of the movie, Madeleine Stowe acts exactly as a sane person would up until she realizes the entire world might be insane. Like everything and everyone is just completely out of their minds, and then Brad Pitt decides, you know, fuck subtle.
So it’s a good movie that still (mostly) holds up, and manages to successfully execute a single
It’s also not that the Multiverse world isn’t fun or entertaining because it allows for unlimited possibility and imagination (I’ll say it: Rick and Morty), but that doesn’t give you the wildly satisfying feeling of watching all of the plot points come together to tell a cohesive story that always had to be that way. Willis as James Cole flat out tells us repeatedly that he can’t stop the virus, that that’s not even the point of his time travel. We watch the entire movie knowing that the virus will still kill five billion people, but we watch to find out how it comes together. The point of single-universe, time travel movies isn’t that you could do anything. It’s about both the surprise and inevitability of plot pieces falling into the only places they could have. It’s watching the plot slowly reveal why the only thing that could happen is that thing that already did happen.
“Like the past, the movie never changes. It can’t change, but every time you see it, it seems different, because you’re different. You see different things.”
