If it were so easy, everyone would be doing it trying to outdo their enemies. It would be non stop time traveling until no one existed. Klingons go back in time and get a president elected on Earth who is weak on defense and is hell bound to tax everything and then own all the businesses and corporations. Wait.......ah.......hummmmmm.

If you want to see a really good time travel movie, then track down "Retroactive" (1997). It shows the dangers of trying to change even the recent past.

David.

I LOVE Retroactive!

Back when I had cable TV, It came on and I wasn't paing attention, but then I began watching and noticed the time travel aspect, and then I was hooked on watching the rest of it.

:rolleyes:

Try Primer.

If it were so easy, everyone would be doing it trying to outdo their enemies. It would be non stop time traveling until no one existed. Klingons go back in time and get a president elected on Earth who is weak on defense and is hell bound to tax everything and then own all the businesses and corporations. Wait.......ah.......hummmmmm.

Do you really want to go there?
It could have been worse, the Klingons could have installed a president who liked to dress up in costumes and posture like he was strong on defense, but was so corrupt and incompetant that he totally sucked at it.

And boy, aren't all time travel movies terrible. Other than the George Pal The Time Machine, Trancers, The Terminator, The Fountain, Time After Time, Pleasantville, Time Bandits, Groundhog Day, Planet of the Apes, 12 Monkeys,The Jacket, Frequency, Army of Darkness, Austin Powers, Slaughterhouse 5, The Final Countdown, The Philidelphia Experiment, Star Trek IV, Star Trek First Contact, and Back to the Furure, I can barely think of one time travel movie that didn't totally suck.

In the hands of hack writers, time travel can be a cheap and overused deux ex machina. Or it can be a device for classic literature and social satire from Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. Or high comedy, like the Back to the Future trilogy, or Star Trek IV: The One With the Whales.I LOVE Retroactive!

Back when I had cable TV, It came on and I wasn't paing attention, but then I began watching and noticed the time travel aspect, and then I was hooked on watching the rest of it.

I was hooked on Retroactive as soon as I saw Kylie Travis.

http://content9.flixster.com/photo/35/25/67/3525671_tml.jpg

Do you really want to go there?
It could have been worse, the Klingons could have installed a president who liked to dress up in costumes and posture like he was strong on defense, but was so corrupt and incompetant that he totally sucked at it.


You could try to resist for once, ya know. :lol:

I've always liked "Time After Time". And the first "Terminator" is a great time travel movie.

Donny Darko if you like your time travel dark and disturbing.

'Frequency' with Dennis Quaid was one of the best time-travel movies I've seen. It had a very unique twist - no one traveled in time. The two main characters (a son whose father had died years later) could communicate sometimes via ham radio.

And yes, I know what you mean about the 'if we could do it, we would never stop doing it'. One of the many reasons 'First Contact' was weak. Why is the Borg just traveling in time now, this once? Why don't they do it all the time? You'd think anyone with time travel would be INVINCIBLE.

I dunno. We can avoid historys mistakes by reading about them, but we don't, and we do.

Humor. It is a difficult concept. It is not logical.

Do you really want to go there?
It could have been worse, the Klingons could have installed a president who liked to dress up in costumes and posture like he was strong on defense, but was so corrupt and incompetant that he totally sucked at it.


Did you really have to drag Bill Clinton into this? That's just harsh!

Did you really have to drag Bill Clinton into this? That's just harsh!

Couldn't have said it better myself, Southpaw.

Steve

WARNING: FORBIDDEN ZONE AHEAD.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ZzhKqCSNjzw/SYmaTplQ_aI/AAAAAAAAIYg/SBvjxX1sGTg/s400/3248807941_effe671b2a_b.jpg

WARNING: FORBIDDEN ZONE AHEAD.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ZzhKqCSNjzw/SYmaTplQ_aI/AAAAAAAAIYg/SBvjxX1sGTg/s400/3248807941_effe671b2a_b.jpg

Oh, like they've never been there before.:p

This is another good opportunity to point out Vincent Ward's "The Navigator: a Mediaeval Odyssey" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095709/

It can be found on DVD overseas if you've a region-free player.

This is another good opportunity to point out Vincent Ward's "The Navigator: a Mediaeval Odyssey"

Seconded. For those who've never seen it this is a terrifically imaginative low budget time travel flick that uses big ideas to overcome a small budget.

Great recommendation. :thumbsup:

I can't STAND that dweeb Ashton Kutcher, but I have to admit, I liked "Butterfly Effect."

I liked "Time after Time" but then I'm a sucker for Mary Steenburgen. Malcom McDowell cleaned up pretty good in it too.

I liked "Time after Time" but then I'm a sucker for Mary Steenburgen. Malcom McDowell cleaned up pretty good in it too.

David Warner was an Outstanding Jack the Ripper. Great soundtrack by Mikloz Rozsa. Directed by Nick Meyer of ST II and VI fame.

time travel is an easy gimmick.

time travel is an easy gimmick.

So are FTL, transporters, sentient computers/robots and everything else SF.

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Christopher Reeves' "Somewhere in Time."

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Christopher Reeves' "Somewhere in Time."

I thought about it, but it's very "chick flick-ish" and I didn't know if it would go down very well. It's one of my favorite films from the early 80's though.

Bryan

Primer was interesting. (http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/primer/) Made on a shoestring, it's about 4 geeks that invent a time machine by accident. Effective and disturbing. It didn't use time travel so much as it was about time travel. Interesting use of time paradoxes throughout.

It's a netflix view instantly selection or I probably never would have seen it...

David Warner was an Outstanding Jack the Ripper. Great soundtrack by Mikloz Rozsa. Directed by Nick Meyer of ST II and VI fame.

Couldn't agree more. Really wicked.

Although it was skewered on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and is generally regarded as one of the worst sci-fi films ever made, Time Chasers, made on a $150,000 budget in 1990 by then 20-year-old director David Giancola (but not released until 1994), actually deals with time-travel paradoxes in some interesting ways. (In case anyone vaguely remembers seeing the picture, it's the one with the guy who has a time machine based on a Commodore computer -- in his Cessna single-engine plane!) At any rate, it's probably the best time-travel movie filmed entirely in Vermont.

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Christopher Reeves' "Somewhere in Time."

Time Traveling Pennies. Who would have believed it?

If it were so easy, everyone would be doing it trying to outdo their enemies. It would be non stop time traveling until no one existed. Klingons go back in time and get a president elected on Earth who is weak on defense and is hell bound to tax everything and then own all the businesses and corporations. Wait.......ah.......hummmmmm.

I have to differ with you on that one. The original George Pal "Time Machine" movie, from 1960, is one of my favorite movies. :thumbsup:

According to Kip Thorne, Cal Tech Physicist and authority on General Relativity, Time travel forward could be possible if you could travel at the speed of light. Backward time travel imight only be possible if you can find a worm-hole and make yourself very thin to be able to pass through it.

I like time travel stories if they're told well no matter how screwed up the logic may be.

I don't like the reliance on it for hackneyed ol' plot lines or one Star Trek movie after another. It can get old very quickly.

I certainly do not understand the current scientific theories or reasons how or why time travel can 'really' exist.

Time travel to the future is so easy we don't even realize we are doing so continuously already. Physical change seems to me to be the identifier of time passing, nothing else.

Please don't try to explain it to me, I would just get a headache, not understand, and keep my original opinion anyway.

It just seems to me that, if one could time travel to the past by even one second, then every single sub-atomic particle and all energy in the universe would be in the same physical condition and relationship to all other bits and pieces of the universe that it was one second ago. So to go backward in time, even all the bits that make up you yourself would have to be in the same physical condition they were one second ago, meaning you would not remember that you had triggered the time-travel trip. There would not be two of you, because that means you have added duplicates of previously-existing matter and energy into a closed system.

Travel to alternate universes of some sort which resemble our own but from a different time period than our current one, maybe. But not time travel backwards in our own universe. It just doesn't seem possible.

And faster-than-normal time travel to the future seems equally impossible for a closely related reason.

I'm not sure I'm explaining this as clearly as it seems in my mind.

But I do love an interesting time-travel story, even with some (minor to me) plot problems.

. . . And faster-than-normal time travel to the future seems equally impossible for a closely related reason.It seems simple enough to me. You can't travel into the future faster than the normal flow of time because the future DOESN'T EXIST YET. And by the time it does exist, it's the present. Time travel into the future presupposes some sort of predestination, that a blueprint or scenario of future events already exists in the present. That's philosophy or theology, not science.

Of course, that doesn't stop it from being fun to write and read about.

It seems simple enough to me. You can't travel into the future faster than the normal flow of time because the future DOESN'T EXIST YET. And by the time it does exist, it's the present. Time travel into the future presupposes some sort of predestination, that a blueprint or scenario of future events already exists in the present. That's philosophy or theology, not science.

Of course, that doesn't stop it from being fun to write and read about.

If you were capable of travelling at the speed of light in a space ship, time would slow down in your frame of reference relative to a stationary frame of reference like the earth. After travelling for a while and returning to earth, you would get to the future in less time than if you had stayed on earth.

It's still science fiction because space ships can't travel at or near the speed of light, at least, not yet.

I've got a couple that people haven't mentioned that are pretty good as far as I'm concerned. One is a film that more than a few of you are familiar with, it's based on a Michael Crichton book called Timeline. I enjoyed the book much more than the film, but I find the film very enjoyable to watch. It doesn't dwell on the time travel stuff too much, but some of the "conections" between the present and the past were interesting to say the least. It's worth a look if you haven't seen it.

Another film is one of my "chick flick" films..... Francis Ford Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married. The lead role of Peggy Sue is played by Kathleen Turner is a divorced mother of two with her own business and is going to attend her high school reunion. During the reunion, Peggy Sue collapses, but when she recovers, she finds herself back in her high school days. She's dismayed at first about the shift in time, but then decides to use the opportunity to change her past so her future will be different from the one she was handed by fate. Peggy Sue's frustration comes from the fact that no matter how hard she tries to change the events of her past, it becomes obvious that things must be what they were. While it's not the most brilliant in terms of time travel, the film is an excellent, but nostalgic look at the late 50's and a terrific character drama.

Bryan

What about the cinematic brilliance of the Bill & Ted movies? Only one word describes them - Excellent! :thumbsup:

I know everyone seems to hate Voyager, but the two "Year of Hell" episodes dealt with the problem of trying to change history and all of the complexities involved. I must admit, having finally seen the episode after That 70's Show it's a little hard to buy into Red Foreman the Timelord, but I still thought it was nice to see Trek writers admit that time travel is messier than their scripts usually let on.