Time After Time, a movie about Jack the Ripper using H.G. Wells’s time machine to travel to 1980’s San Francisco and being followed by Wells. One of the bes time travel tales ever.
The only reason Bill and Ted had a deadline is because they’re too dumb to realize they don’t have a deadline.
Actually, the presentation they give at the end would have taken quite a while to prepare. Like, days or weeks. And they have lighting effects and everything, so I assumed that later/earlier Bill and Ted were acting as crew for onstage Bill and Ted.
One of my favorite animated films is “The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya”. It contains some mind-bending time travel convolutions. It wouldn’t mean much unless you’ve seen the Haruhi Suzumiya television series, especially the time travel episode titled “Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody”, but I love the show and think it’s well worth watching too.
Because they and utopian George Carlin were too dumb. He’s the one who told them that the deadline was still in effect.
Unless I’m remembering wrong, in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams, an elderly professor uses his time machine to watch TV shows because he can’t figure out how to program a VCR.
Other things also happen, of course.
I’d just like to pop in to generally nominate Star Trek’s later series’ (Voyager and Enterprise) time travel episodes and arcs. For not doing a particularly good job at them writing-wise, repeatedly inserting more time travel into a setting regardless of tepid audience response (at best), and for trying to do them on a TV budget, run time, and production deadline. Excelsior!
Not true at all. His actions make all the difference–had he not gone back in time, Buckbeak would have been executed, and Harry, Hermione, and Sirius would have had their souls eaten. You are allowing yourself to be misled by the fact that the effects of his changes were already in effect at the point from which he traveled back.
What it actually means is that there is at least a limited form of predestination in the Potterverse; meddling with time, either by time traveling or via prophecy, appears to have the potential to lock people into certain courses of action.
The fact that you disparage BttF time travel so strongly suggests to me that you have not thought it through properly. It’s actually a reasonable, subtle, and largely internally consistent take on the subject. I have gone into considerable detail about it in a number of threads.
A sweet movie, the most interesting part being to see Malcom McDowell play the good guy after seein him in A Clockwork Orange.
Read a short story where a bank is started in Venice in the late Middle Ages. This bank grows and grows throughout the centuries having a secret agenda which is once it reaches our present to have accumulated enough wealth to fund research to build a time machine to go back to the past and start a bank in Venice …
Star Trek went a little overboard with all the time traveling back and forth. Saving the whales was just a bit much. No one has mentioned all the time traveling from The Terminator movies either. I thought that the first movie in the series was very well done and thought provoking, some of the later movies, not so much.
Wow!
I was surprised they didn’t get mentioned until now, as well.
[ul]
[li]I saw T1 and thought it was perfectly consistent within itself. I was actually a bit irritated that anyone thought to make a T2 – but really enjoyed the romp as a fun movie on its own (in spite of the anti-violence preaching).[/li][li]I saw T3 and thought it knocked things back on-track as far as consistency, but it wasn’t as strong of a flick.[/li][li]I didn’t bother with T4 or the TV show; I’d grown tired of it all and it seemed to have turned into a gun-fest instead of a time-travel SciFi piece.[/li][/ul]
Really, after T1 I figured an appropriate sequel would have been to dwell on the War Against the Machines and maybe just show a cameo appearance of Arnold* in a flashback and eventually close the movie with Reese stepping into the machine to chase T1. It would have been best not to even hint that it was a Terminator movie; just make a great movie about two guys in a distant future who become war buddies for some reason…
As for other great time-travel pieces, I enjoyed Poul Anderson’s Annals of the Time Patrol short stories and the novel The Shield of Time.
I also enjoyed this relatively obscure book I found in the 1970’s called The Overlords of War by Gerard Klein. – so much so that I hunted down another copy and I’m reading it again.
—G!
*White-coated geek: Uhh…Nice Inauguration speech, Governor! Now we’re just going to take a sample of your skin and blood – DNA sequences in case an impostor tries to kidnap and impersonate you. It’s all standard for our new political representatives. If you don’t mind holding out your index finger…
No-one mentioned Primer yet? The time travel logic is so tight that it is almost impossible to fathom on the first watch. Its so complex that people have to draw diagrams to understand what is actually going on in that film…
The most satisfying time travel story I’ve read recently is The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang. I’ll have to read it again to see if I can find any faults with it.
The Novels of The Company, starting with In the Garden of Iden, by Kage Baker, explore the actions of the immortal cyborg employees of Dr. Zeus, Incorporated, the company that created them to be time travel agents. If you poke about on the Kage Baker Website, you can find the first chapters of more than a dozen novels, although not all of them are Company novels.
I’ve read the first three and enjoyed them. From the Iden exerpt online:
Any author who places restrictions like this on time travel hasn’t been paying attention to reality. Of course you can travel forward in time. It’s easy. It’s so easy, in fact, that it’s impossible or nearly so to do anything else.
Seconded. Also, from the anime genre, The Girl Who Leaped Through Time is superb, as she continuously tries to rewrite time to stop a deadly accident.
The episode “Roswell that ends well” from Futurama was one about time travel that seemed logically consistent. Definitely put a whole new spin on the idea of a “grandfather paradox!”
I think it won an emmy, too.
Bender’s Big Score also used time travel as a plot device and it was handled very logically and consistently as far as I remember. (First Futurama movie)
Yeah. This was a fantastic book. Just the pure mind bending nature of the narrative structure would have made it an interesting experience, but the way the story fits onto that skeleton makes it a great one.
I realize this poster asked the question almost six years ago, but since I actually know the answer, I wanted to put it out there just in case anybody else was curious.
It’s a short story by Philip K. Dick called “The Skull.” I got it along with several other Dick stories for free when I started filling my iBooks library after buying my iPad last year.
That is all. It is a good story, by the way, although anybody paying the least bit of attention will figure the ending out about three pages in.
The 2007 spanish film Timecrimes is IMO a perfect example of time travel done properly. One man goes back by about an hour several times trying to fix something, and in doing so causing it to come about, but then there is a superbly chilling ending as the protaganist puts the pieces together and realises that he has a way out of his dilemma. It’s not a nice way out, but it fits beautifully.
Clever, clever, film.
I think that this film is exactly what you are looking for. It’s apparently being remade but I bet they drop the ending. Pah.