Time Travel in Science Fiction Films
Time travel is a common theme and plot device in science fiction films. Below are examples of science fiction films that incorporate time travel.
| Year | Title | Director | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1949 | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court | Tay Garnett | Based on Mark Twain's classic in which a mechanic (Bing Crosby) is knocked out and wakes up in the land of King Arthur. |
| 1960 | The Time Machine | George Pal | Loose adaption of H. G. Wells's classic in which a time traveler enters a future where the world is broken up into two classes, the peaceful Eloi and the malevolent masters of the world, the Morlocks. |
| 1962 | La jetée | Chris Marker | The hero is haunted by a memory from his childhood, which turns out to be himself as an adult. (La jetée inspired the full-length feature 12 Monkeys.) |
| 1964 | The Time Travelers | Ib Melchior | A time travel experiment that was supposed to produce a window into different times is actually a portal. |
| 1965 | Dr. Who and the Daleks | Gordon Flemyng | Based on the BBC TV series. In this, the Doctor is an inventor not an alien. His TARDIS device takes the Doctor and companions to the future of an alien world. |
| 1966 | Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. | Gordon Flemyng | Based on the BBC TV series. In this the Doctor is an inventor not an alien. His TARDIS device takes the Doctor and companions to a future London devastated by war. |
| 1968 | Planet of the Apes | Franklin J. Schaffner | George Taylor (played by Charlton Heston) travels to a future Earth inhabited by intelligent talking apes. |
| 1970 | Beneath the Planet of the Apes | Ted Post | Another astronaut, Brent, travels to the future Earth ruled by apes. His search for Taylor leads to an underground city of nuclear mutants. |
| 1971 | Escape from the Planet of the Apes | Don Taylor | Three apes escape Earth's destruction by salvaging and repairing the astronaut Taylor's spaceship and piloting it through a time warp back to 1973. |
| 1972 | Slaughterhouse-Five | George Roy Hill | A man travels to various times and places from his life in addition to another planet. |
| 1973 | Idaho Transfer | Peter Fonda | Due to an impending disaster that threatens to destroy mankind, a time machine is built by a group of young scientists to transport themselves into the future to rebuild civilization. |
| 1973 | Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future | Leonid Gaidai | Engineer Shurik has invented a time machine in his apartment. By accident, he sends two people back into the time of Ivan IV while the real Ivan IV is sent by the same machine into Shurik's apartment. |
| 1978 | Superman | Richard Donner | Superman circles the Earth at tremendous speeds allowing him to travel back in time to just before an earthquake created by Lex Luthor. |
| 1979 | Time After Time | Nicholas Meyer | Using a time machine, Jack the Ripper and H. G. Wells travel from 1893 London to 1979 San Francisco. |
| 1980 | The Final Countdown | Don Taylor | A storm at sea transports a nuclear warship back in time from the 1980s to the 1940s. |
| 1980 | Somewhere in Time | Jeannot Szwarc | A young man sees an old photograph of a woman, and through hypnosis travels back in time from 1980 to 1912 to meet her. Based on Matheson's 1975 novel "Bid Time Return" |
| 1981 | Time Bandits | Terry Gilliam | A young boy unwittingly joins a band of dwarves as they travel through time hunting treasure. |
| 1982 | Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann | William Dear | The hero travels by means of "time cannons". |
| 1983 | Twilight Zone: The Movie | John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante and George Miller | Big-screen adaptations of three classic episodes from the popular 1950s and 1960s Rod Serling television series, plus a new segment featuring a bigot who is transported into the lives of past victims of racism. |
| 1984 | The Terminator | James Cameron | A cyborg (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent back in time from 2029 to 1984 to destroy humanity by killing the future mother of its future savior. |
| 1984 | The Philadelphia Experiment | Stewart Raffill | In 1943, an anti-radar experiment accidentally sends two sailors forward in time to 1984. Nancy Allen and Michael Pare star in this film. |
| 1984 | Non ci resta che piangere | Roberto Benigni and Massimo Troisi | The school janitor Mario (Massimo Troisi) and the teacher Saverio (Roberto Benigni) have an automobile breakdown, decide to spend the night in an inn, and the next morning they awake in the Florence of the 16th century. |
| 1985 | Back to the Future | Robert Zemeckis | Time travel is achieved by means of a flux capacitor installed in a DeLorean DMC12 sports car. Marty McFly intervenes in his parents' first meeting, preventing them from falling in love, and placing his own existence in danger. |
| 1985 | Trancers | Charles Band | Jack Deth is a kind of cop/bounty hunter in a future dystopic Los Angeles. |
| 1985 | My Science Project | Jonathan R. Betuel | Michael and Ellie break into a military junkyard to find a science project. They find an orb that dangerously bends time and have to stop it to save the world. |
| 1986 | Peggy Sue Got Married | Francis Ford Coppola | Peggy Sue Bodell faints at her high school reunion. When she wakes up, she finds herself in her own past, just before she finished school. |
| 1986 | Biggles: Adventures in Time | John Hough | Unassuming catering salesman Jim Ferguson falls through a time hole to 1917 where he saves the life of dashing Royal Flying Corps pilot James "Biggles" Bigglesworth after his photo recon mission is shot down. Before he can work out what has happened, Jim is zapped back to the 1980s. |
| 1986 | Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home | Leonard Nimoy | To save Earth, Admiral James T. Kirk and his crew travel back in time to retrieve the beings who can communicate with an alien probe (humpback whales). |
| 1986 | Outlaws | Nicholas Corea | Five cowboys of the 1880s are sent forward through time 100 years and fight crime. |
| 1986 | Flight of the Navigator | Randal Kleiser | In 1978, a boy winds up 8 years into the future, and discovers an alien spaceship brought him there. |
| 1986 | Kin-dza-dza | Georgi Daneliya | A Russian dystopian comedy. Uncle Vova asks a person from the planet Alpha to move him and Fiddler back in time to save two aliens who got imprisoned because of the main hero's actions. |
| 1987 | Masters of the Universe | David Odell | The villain uses a camcorder-like gadget that shows the past, and an inventor opens up wormholes to other timestreams allowing the heroine (a young Courteney Cox) to save her parents from dying. |
| 1987 | Timestalkers | Michael Schulz | A professor who's lost his family finds evidence of a time traveller in Old West memorabilia. |
| 1989 | Field of Dreams | Phil Alden Robinson | Major league baseball players from the early 20th century time travel to the present year of 1989. When Ray Kinsella is in Minnesota searching for former major-leaguer "Moonlight" Graham, he is mysteriously transported from 1989 to 1972 where he encounters Graham as an elderly doctor. |
| 1989 | Back to the Future Part II | Robert Zemeckis | Sequel to Back to the Future, Part II follows Marty McFly and Doc Brown as they go to the year 2015 to prevent Marty's kids from ruining the McFly family's reputation. Along the way, an old Biff Tannen steals the DeLorean so he can give a sports almanac to himself in the past, and win millions of dollars gambling. This creates a hellish alternate 1985 that it's up to Marty and the Doc to correct. |
| 1989 | Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure | Stephen Herek | Two teenagers (Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves) will not graduate from high school unless they pull on A on their history project. A time traveler (George Carlin) visits them to help because their success on this report is vital as it ensures they will stay together to create a Utopian future. As Bill and Ted travel through time, they encounter historical figures including Socrates, Joan of Arc, and Billy the Kid. |
| 1989 | Millennium | Michael Anderson | Time travelers from the far future steal people already destined to die, such as in plane crashes, in order to restock humankind in their own desolate future. Based on the 1983 John Varley novel. |
| 1989 | Warlock | Steve Miner | A warlock in the 17th century who has been sentenced to death for witch craft is transported to the 20th century, followed by a witch hunter who must stop the warlock finding the Grand Grimoire. |
| 1990 | Frankenstein Unbound | Roger Corman | A scientist creates a weapon that causes your enemy to disappear but has a side effect of causing shifts in time. The scientist is transported back in time to 1817 and he meets Doctor Frankenstein and his monster as well as Mary Shelley who in this film wrote her novel based on true events. |
| 1990 | Back to the Future Part III | Robert Zemeckis | Sequel to Back to the Future Part II. In the final installment of the trilogy, Marty McFly goes back to 1885 to stop an outlaw from killing Doc Brown in a duel, and bring him back home to 1985. |
| 1991 | Terminator 2: Judgment Day | James Cameron | Sequel to The Terminator. |
| 1992 | Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey | Peter Hewitt | Sequel to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Two evil robot versions of Bill and Ted are sent back in time to kill them. |
| 1992 | Army of Darkness | Sam Raimi | Central character Ash (Bruce Campbell), a supermarket employee, is sent back in time by a specific book to the 14th century. |
| 1992 | Freejack | Geoff Murphy | The rich in a future where time travel has been invented snatch people from history a moment before their death in order to use the bodies as hosts for their own minds after death. |
| 1992 | Timescape (or: Grand Tour: Disaster in Time) | David Twohy | Ben Wilson and daughter Hillary are visited by a strange group of travelers looking for lodging. The travelers are from the future, intending to witness an impending catastrophe. |
| 1993 | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III | Stuart Gillard | The turtles go back in time to feudal Japan to retrieve a kidnapped April. |
| 1993 | Les Visiteurs | Jean-Marie Poire | A 12th-century knight and his servant travel in time to the end of the 20th century and find themselves adrift in modern society. |
| 1993 | 12:01 | Jack Sholder | Barry Thomas is the average office worker. He becomes attracted to Lisa Fredericks who works in the same company. After work, Barry witnesses the murder of Lisa and goes to a bar to get drunk. Later that night, there is a storm and Barry gets a shock from a lamp's faulty power wire at exactly 12:01 am. The next morning, he realizes that everything is happening exactly as it did the previous day. The next morning the day is repeated again. It is now Barry's job—being the only person alive who is aware of this time loop—to stop the murder of Lisa, and stop the time loop or be caught in time forever. |
| 1993 | Groundhog Day | Harold Ramis | Weatherman Phil Connors is trapped in 2 February in the town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania when he finds the same day repeating over and over. |
| 1994 | Time Chasers | David Giancola | An amateur inventor goes through time with an airplane to stop a villain from changing history for profit. |
| 1994 | Star Trek Generations | David Carson | USS Enterprise Captains James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard meet through the effects of an energy ribbon. |
| 1994 | Timecop | Peter Hyams | Includes a prohibition against changing the past. The Time Enforcement Commission (TEC) is created to prevent alterations to the past. This causes a dilemma for the hero, Max Walker, who has to prevent time-travelers from altering time, but is tempted to do so to prevent his wife's death. |
| 1995 | 12 Monkeys | Terry Gilliam | James Cole tries to change the past but fails. It therefore runs on the principle of a fixed timeline (the Novikov self-consistency principle). |
| 1996 | Doctor Who | Geoffrey Sax | This film involves the Doctor in his eighth incarnation and has a showdown with the Master. |
| 1996 | Star Trek: First Contact | Jonathan Frakes | The USS Enterprise follows the Borg back in time to stop them from altering history and preventing Earth's first warp flight and first contact with the Vulcans. |
| 1999 | Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me | Jay Roach | Dr. Evil is back and has invented a time machine that allows him to go back to the 1960s so he can steal Austin Powers' mojo. |
| 1999 | The Time Shifters | Mario Azzopardi | A reporter, learning of time travelers visiting 20th century disasters, tries to change the history they know by averting upcoming disasters. |
| 1999 (UK) 2000 (USA) | S Club 7: Back to the 50's | Andrew Margetson | A music group finds a time portal while on their way to Los Angeles and find themselves in a desert town in the year 1959 under the control of a gang with a corrupted sheriff as an ally. The group learns about the fate of a local chef at a diner and tries to prevent certain disaster despite threats against them from both the sheriff and the gang. |
| 2000 | Frequency | Gregory Hoblit | An accidental cross-time radio link connects father and son across 30 years. The son tries to save his father's life, but then must fix the consequences. |
| 2000 | Ditto | Kim Jeong-gwon | Two people separated in time are somehow able to talk to each other using an amateur radio. The people in question are two students in the same school, one in 1979, the other in 2000. |
| 2000 | Disney's The Kid | Jon Turteltaub | A 40-year old image consultant (Bruce Willis) finds himself being visited by his 10-year old self. |
| 2000 | Il Mare | Lee Hyun-seung | The two protagonists both live in a lake house two years apart in time, but are able to communicate through a mysterious post box. This movie inspired the 2006 American film The Lake House. |
| 2001 | Donnie Darko | Richard Kelly | A teenager travels through time using wormholes, a man in a bunny suit, and the modern ritual of sleeping on golf courses. |
| 2001 | Just Visiting | Jean Marie-Poire | A medieval knight and his serf travel to 21st century Chicago, meeting the knight's descendant. But they must travel back to their time to ensure her birth. |
| 2001 | Kate & Leopold | James Mangold | A Duke time travels from 1876 to the present and falls in love with a career woman in New York. |
| 2001 | Pokémon 4Ever | Kunihiko Yuyama Jim Malone | The film focuses on Celebi who travels to the future and returns with a boy named Sam when being chased by a hunter. |
| 2002 | Returner | Takashi Yamazaki | The human race is on the edge of annihilation after decades of war with an alien force. In an outpost in Tibet, mankind’s last hope of survival is a time travel device. |
| 2002 | The Time Machine | Simon Wells | Remake of 1960s version of the film, directed by H.G. Wells' great-grandson, has little in common with H. G. Wells’s original novel. |
| 2002 | Time Changer | Rich Christiano | A Bible professor from 1890 comes forward in time to the present via a time machine and cannot believe the things that he sees. |
| 2002 | Austin Powers in Goldmember | Jay Roach | Upon learning that his father has been kidnapped, Austin Powers must travel to 1975 and defeat the villain Goldmember – who is working with Dr. Evil. |
| 2002 | Das Jesus Video | Sebastian Niemann | In Israel, a student in archaeology is seeking a video camera hidden 2000 years ago by a mysterious time traveler. |
| 2003 | Bottom Live 2003: Weapons Grade Y-Fronts Tour | Rick Mayall | Eddie Hitler builds a time traveling toilet which he calls the TURDIS |
| 2003 | Timeline | Richard Donner | Film adaptation of the book by Michael Crichton. |
| 2003 | Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines | Jonathan Mostow | Sequel to The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. |
| 2004 | Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban | Alfonso Cuarón | Hermione Granger receives a Time-Turner from Professor McGonagall, so she can attend more classes than time would normally allow. She and Harry later use the Time-Turner to save Sirius Black and Buckbeak. |
| 2004 | Primer | Shane Carruth | Time travelers can only use the time machine to travel to when the machine was first turned on. But you can bring a second running time machine back with you and after leaving the first machine, climb in the second. |
| 2004 | The Butterfly Effect | Eric Bess & J. Mackye Gruber | A college psychology student (Ashton Kutcher) learns he can temporarily travel to his past and change it. The time traveling in this film involves a process initiated by reading childhood journals. |
| 2004 | 13 Going on 30 | Gary Winick | A 13-year old girl makes a birthday wish and wakes up as a 30-year old woman. |
| 2005 | Fetching Cody | David Ray | Distraught over his drug-addicted girlfriend, Cody (Sarah Lind), who's overdosed and fallen into a coma, small-time dope peddler Art (Jay Baruchel) uses a time machine to journey into the past in a desperate gamble to change her future. |
| 2005 | The Jacket | John Maybury | A amnesiac Persian Gulf War veteran (Adrien Brody) is subjected to an experimental treatment which moves him forward 15 years. |
| 2005 | A Sound of Thunder | Peter Hyams | For an extraordinary price, Time Safaris, Inc. will take clients through a wormhole to a time in pre-history to hunt dinosaur game. Based loosely on the 1952 short story by Ray Bradbury, with the Butterfly Effect portrayed as much more pronounced. |
| 2005 | Summer Time Machine Blues | Katsuyuki Motohiro | Five college boys in a sci-fi club break their air-conditioner's remote control. In the sweltering clubhouse, a time machine appears and they go back in time to retrieve a functioning controller, but this causes complications. |
| 2006 | The Lake House | Alejandro Agresti | Time travel romance where two people living in the same house at a lake at different times are able to exchange letters through its mailbox and fall in love. |
| 2006 | Click | Frank Coraci | Adam Sandler is given a remote that lets him fast forward, pause, and rewind his life. |
| 2006 | The Girl Who Leapt Through Time | Mamoru Hosoda | A teenage girl discovers that she can leap through time. |
| 2006 | Déjà Vu | Tony Scott | Denzel Washington is an ATF agent investigating a terrorist act who is invited to assist in a government time travel surveillance project. |
| 2007 | Bender's Big Score | Dwayne Carey-Hill | Alien scammers discover the code for time travel tattooed on Philip J. Fry's buttocks, and use it to send Bender back in time to steal priceless artifacts. |
| 2007 | Disney's Meet the Robinsons | Steve Anderson | Young Lewis is taken to the year 2037 by his future son Wilbur to stop a "Bowler Hat Guy" who has stolen Lewis' memory scanning machine. |
| 2007 | Premonition | Mennan Yapo | House wife (Sandra Bullock) learns that her husband died in a car crash the previous day, but, wakes up next morning to find him well and alive, and awakens the next day to a time when it has been a few weeks since he had died. |
| 2008 | Timecrimes | Nacho Vigalondo | A man who accidentally travels back to the past and meets himself there. |
| 2008 | Minutemen | Lev L. Spiro | Three high-school outcasts use a time machine that one invented to save their classmates from embarrassing moments. Their time-travel creates a black hole, which could destroy the world. |
| 2008 | Stargate: Continuum | Martin Wood | Ba'al changes the timeline so that SG-1 or the Stargate program never existed. Three people were unaffected by the change but are unable to do anything until Ba'al and the system lords arrive. |
| 2009 | Star Trek | J. J. Abrams | Spock's attempt to prevent a supernova fails, resulting in the destruction of the Romulan homeworld. The captain of a Romulan mining ship blames Spock, and both the Romulans and Spock fall through a black hole to the past, creating an alternate reality. |
| 2009 | Mr. Nobody | Jaco Van Dormael | A romantic drama about Nemo Nobody (Jared Leto), a 118-year-old man and the last mortal on Earth, who can predict the future and tells of alternate life paths, often changing course with the flick of a decision. |
| 2009 | The Time Traveler's Wife | Robert Schwentke | A romantic drama about a Chicago librarian (Eric Bana) with a gene that causes him to involuntarily time travel, and the complications it creates for his marriage. Based on the Audrey Niffenegger novel. |
| 2009 | Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel | Gareth Carrivick | Two geeks and a cynic attempt to navigate a time-travel conundrum in the middle of a British pub. Faris plays a girl from the Future who sets the adventure in motion. |
| 2009 | Disney's A Christmas Carol | Robert Zemeckis | Miserly moneylender Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, in order to change his ways. |
| 2009 | Land of the Lost | Brad Silberling | |
| 2010 | The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya | Tatsuya Ishihara | Kyon is the only one who knows two of his classmates are missing and everything is different. To restore his life, he gathers several keys to power an alien device and travel back three years. |
| 2010 | Hot Tub Time Machine | Steve Pink | Four friends spend a crazy, drunken night in a hot tub at a ski resort only to travel back in time to 1986. They are each presented with an opportunity to alter their futures. The film stars John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, and Clark Duke. |
| 2010 | Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time | Mike Newell | Disney's adaption of the video game of the same name. A dagger is used to turn back the clock, it has a grip made of crystal through which a special "Sand of Time" has to flow in order to create the time transition effect. The Prince has to prevent someone from alternating history. |
| 2010 | Yu-Gi-Oh! 3D: Bonds Beyond Time | Kenichi Takeshita | Series protagonist Yusei Fudo encounters Turbo Duelist Paradox, who is from the future, and who believes the only way to prevent his future from happening is to stop Duel Monsters from existing. |
| 2011 | Ticking Clock | Ernie Barbarash | James is a guy from the year 2032 who comes back in time with a custom-made watch that is a time machine. He travels back in time to fix his life but fails. |
| 2011 | Source Code | Duncan Jones | Captain Colter Stevens died in a helicopter crash and has been inserted in a computer program called Source Code which transfers him to the body of a deceased person for the last eight minutes of his life. He can not change the past, since Source Code is not a time machine, but he can reassign time and change the future to avoid a terrorist attack. |
| 2011 | Midnight in Paris | Woody Allen | While visiting Paris with his fiancee, an American writer discovers a way to travel back to the 1920s, allowing him to mingle with and draw inspiration from historical greats such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. |
| 2012 | Safety Not Guaranteed | Colin Trevorrow | Comedy film inspired by a 1997 Backwoods Home Magazine classified ad by a person asking for someone to accompany him in time travel. |
| 2012 | Men In Black 3 | Barry Sonnenfield | Agent J travels back in time to MIB's early years in the 1960s in order to stop an alien from assassinating his friend Agent K and changing history. |
| 2012 | Looper | Rian Johnson | SciFi-action film. Criminal organizations abuse time travel to kill humans and avoid tracking of their bodies. |
| 2013 | The A.R.K. Report | Harry Moskoff | SciFi docudrama film. A young girl travels into the future in order to find the ancient Ark of the Covenant and prevent it from falling into the hands of an evil army. |
Read more about this topic: List Of Time Travel Science Fiction
Famous quotes containing the words time, travel, science, fiction and/or films:
“To be faced with what so-and-so’s mother lets him do, or what the teacher said in class today or what all the kids are wearing is to be required to reexamine some part of our belief structure. Each time we rethink our values we reaffirm them or begin to change them. Seen in this way, parenthood affords us an exceptional opportunity for growth.”
—Ruth Davidson Bell (20th century)
“There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,—why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,—that is to say, the Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom House.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“There is more religion in men’s science than there is science in their religion.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“Does art reflect life? In movies, yes. Because more than any other art form, films have been a mirror held up to society’s porous face.”
—Marjorie Rosen (b. 1942)