When Film And TV Does Time Travel Right!
- Zebediah Oke
- Nov 1, 2021
- 3 min read
Updated: Dec 21, 2021
After the introduction of the Multiverse into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel has been exploring different timelines in it’s anthology of What If?
The theory of multiverses has long been linked to time travel, with many stories of heroes going back in time to create brand new realities. Sometimes, this trope is done well and sometimes… not so well.
Here are some of the best:
1) Loki
After Loki sneaks away with the Tesseract in Endgame he is apprehended by the Time Variance Authority, a cosmic organisation charged with governing “The Sacred Timeline” as they monitor and prevent "Nexus Events" from branching off and creating chaos.
What’s great about Loki is, rather than just a sole protagonist traveling through time, we have an entire institution tasked with upholding Time’s laws. The TVA, The Sacred Timeline and the idea of Nexus events turn time-travel from a thing of a science fiction to a detective drama.
2) Future Man
Josh Futturman, a laboratory janitor, successfully completes the notoriously unbeatable favorite video game, Biotic Wars and the game's main characters, Tiger and Wolf, appear from the future and recruit Josh to save the world. Josh and his companions travel through time to change the future.
Future Man’s absurd narrative and obscene humour adds a level of playfulness to the often serious concept of time travel. Time travel almost always means life-and-death stakes, either on an interpersonal level or on a cosmic stage. Future Man deals with the same stakes, but it also includes: an oppressive future brought about by a Herpes cure, genital swapping, sex with a preserved brain stem and a time-travelling Bin Laden. So… Yeah.
3) Steins;Gate
A self-proclaimed “mad scientist”, Rintaro Okabe runs the “Future Gadget Laboratory” out of an apartment with his friends Mayuri Shiina and Itaru "Daru" Hashida. While attending a conference, he finds the neuroscientist, Kurisu Makise - dead. Okabe texts Daru about it and returns to the apartment, only to discover that Kurisu is alive. The laboratory members soon learn that the cell phone–operated microwave oven they are developing can send text messages back in time.
Steins;Gate’s is a brilliant blend of funny, nerdy, thrilling and tear jerking. Rather than leap right into sending people back and forth through time, we’re anchored by this realistic yet groundbreaking discovery of “time-defying texts”, and due to the restriction of only being able to send messages, the show naturally creates an interesting set of logics and an even more interesting set of questions that it has to answer.
4) Arrival
When multiple spaceships land across the world, Louise Banks, a linguistic professor leads a team of investigators to find a way to communicate with the alien visitors before their appearance pushes the nations of Earth into an international war.
Probably the most thought provoking piece on the list, saying that Arrival is a film about “time travel” may be doing it, and the short story it’s based on, a disservice. The film challenges our sequential understanding of time through the perspective of the “Heptapods”, their language and even cinematic techniques. In the end, Arrival wants us to rethink what time is and does, rather than how we travel through it.
5) Interstellar
A NASA physicist, Professor Brand, is trying to save mankind by sending Earth's population to a new planet but before he can transport everyone, he tasks NASA pilot Cooper and a group of researchers to journey through a wormhole and across the galaxy to discover which of three planets could be mankind's new home.
By incorporating ideas such as time dilation, it is no secret that Christopher Nolan extensively studies science for accuracy in his films. Interstellar’s most fascinating contribution to the time travel genre is in it’s causal loops - how events in the past influence events in the future and how those future events require an act that affects the past.
What are some of your favourites in the time travel genre?
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