Earlier this month I posted an article about the Philosophy of Time that denied the reality of the future and defined the past as the record of realization. One of the implications of my theory of time is that there is no possibility of time travel. Since we are always ever in the present, we cannot jump to the future because it does not yet exist at all. Neither can we revisit the past, as the record of realization is only accessible as a record in the present. Although we cannot time travel in reality, we can do it vicariously through movies. This is Realizing Resonance’s Top 10 Reasons to Time Travel as Demonstrated by Movies.
#10: Time After Time (1979)
…in order to thwart the murderous appetite of Jack the Ripper who has travelled to the future to wreak havoc in the very Time Machine you built.
”What… have… I… done? I’ve turned that bloody maniac loose upon Utopia!”
”Every age is the same. It’s only love that makes any of them bearable.”
#9: Army of Darkness (1992)
…in order to save the dark ages from the demonic forces of the Necronomicon.
”My name is Ash and I am a slave. As far as I can figure, the year is Thirteen Hundred A.D and I’m being dragged to my death. It wasn’t always like this. I had a real life once. A job.”
”Alright you primitive screw heads, listen up! You see this? This… is my boomstick! The twelve-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart’s top of the line. You can find this in the sporting goods department.”
#8: Time Bandits (1981)
…in order to run away with a band of thieving dwarves in search of treasure to steal from historical characters.
”And you’re a robber too. How long have you been a robber?”
”Four foot one.”
”Good lord! Jolly good. Four foot one? Well that-that-that is-is- a long time, isn’t it?”
#7: Idiocracy (2006)
…in order to wake up in the future and discover that your home time was the apex of human intelligence and you are now the smartest person alive by far.
”As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.”
#6: Back to the Future (1985)
…in order to live the rockstar dream in high school by performing someone else’s hit song before it is released.
”Wait a minute, Doc. Ah… Are you telling me that you built a time machine… out of a DeLorean?”
”Last night, Darth Vader came down from planet Vulcan and told me that if I didn’t take Lorraine out that he’d melt my brain. ”
#5: Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
…in order to save the future from a nuclear holocaust brought on by a robot apocalypse with, the help of a cyborg from the future you seek to prevent.
”35 years from now you reprogrammed me to be your protector here - in this time.”
”The unknown future rolls toward us. I face it, for the first time, with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.”
#4: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
…in order to get Vulcan neck-pinched by a time travelling Spock for refusing to turn the volume down…or in order to save the whales.
”Well that’s simply the way they talk here. Nobody pays any attention to you unless you swear every other word.”
”Mr. Spock, have you accounted for the variable mass of whales and water in your time re-entry program?”
#3: 12 Monkeys (1995)
…in order to find out that an impressionable moment from your youth was actually caused by the future you when you travel back in time to cause it.
”Then, they took everything about me and put it into a computer where they created this model of my mind. Yes! Using that model they managed to generate every thought I could possibly have in the next, say, 10 years. Which they then filtered through a probability matrix of some kind to - to determine everything I was gonna do in that period. So you see, she knew I was gonna lead the Army of the Twelve Monkeys into the pages of history before it ever even occurred to me. She knows everything I’m ever gonna do before I know it myself. How’s that?”
#2: Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)
…in order to lead a group of famous historical figures through a modern shopping mall so as to watch their reaction to all of the new stuff.
”So-crates – ‘The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing’.”
”That’s us dude!”
#1: Donnie Darko (2001)
…in order to reset time in such a way that a different future course is possible.
”What if you could go back in time, and take all those hours of pain and darkness and replace them with something better?”
”Well, you’re contradicting yourself Donnie. If we were able to see out destines manifest themselves visually, then we would be given a choice to betray our chosen destinies. And the mere fact that this choice exists would make all pre-formed destiny umm… come to an end.”
