Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space, either sending objects (or in some cases just information) backwards in time to some moment before the present, or sending objects forward from the present to the future without the need to experience the intervening period (at least not at the normal rate). Although time travel has been a common plot device in fiction since the 19th century, and one-way travel into the future is arguably possible given the phenomenon of time dilation based on velocity in the theory of special relativity (exemplified by the twin paradox), as well as gravitational time dilation in the theory of general relativity, it is currently unknown whether the laws of physics would allow backwards time travel. Any technological device, whether fictional or hypothetical, that is used to achieve time travel is commonly known as a time machine.

Metromix Chicago recently presented their list of The best adventures through past, present and future. We think they missed a few: Here is their list and our additions. All summaries are provided by IMDb.

• Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) – In the small town of San Dimas, a few miles away from Los Angeles, there are two nearly brain dead teenage boys going by the names of Bill S, Preston ESQ. and Ted Theodore Logan, they have a dream together of starting their own rock and roll band called the “Wyld Stallions”. Unfortunately, they are still in high school and on the verge of failing out of their school as well, and if they do not pass their upcoming history report, they will be separated as a result of Ted’s father sending him to military school. But, what Bill and Ted do not know is that they must stay together to save the future. So, a man from the future named Rufus came to help them pass their report. So, both Bill and Ted decided to gather up historical figures which they need for their report.
• Time Bandits (1981) – Kevin, an imaginative child, goes on a time-traveling adventure with a bunch of treasure-hunting dwarves, who have “borrowed” a map to the Universe’s time holes from The Supreme Being.
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) – A space probe appears over 23rd century earth, emanating strange sounds towards the planet, and apparently waiting for something. As time goes on, the probe starts to cause major storms on earth and threaten its destruction. James T. Kirk and crew are called upon once again to save mankind. They discover the strange sound is actually the call of the humpback whale – which has been hunted to extinction. They have only one choice – to attempt to time travel back into the 20th century, locate a whale, and bring it back to 23rd century earth to reply to the probe.
• Primer (2004) – At night and on weekends, four men in a suburban garage have built a cottage industry of error-checking devices. But, they know that there is something more. There is some idea, some mechanism, some accidental side effect that is standing between them and a pure leap of innovation. And so, through trial and error they are building the device that is missing most. However, two of these men find the device and immediately realize that it is too valuable to market. The limit of their trust in each other is strained when they are faced with the question, If you always want what you can’t have, what do you want when you can have anything? Very confusing the first time you watch it, here is a timeline to help ease the confusion.
• Timecrimes/Los cronocrímenes (2007) – Hector is an ordinary man who’s moving to a new house with his wife. One evening, while he’s looking through his binoculars, he sees a naked girl in the woods. He decides to go there just to find that same girl laying on a rock. Suddenly, a man with a pink bandage covering his face, stabs Hector in his arm with scissors. Then a chase starts, leading Hector to a time machine that brings him back nearly an hour in the past. The man in charge of the time machine explains to Hector (Hector 2) that he must not interfere with the other Hector (Hector 1) so he can go into the time machine again.
• The Terminator (1984) – In the future, Skynet, a computer system fights a losing war against the humans who built it and who it nearly exterminated. Just before being destroyed, Skynet sends a Terminator back in time to kill Sarah, the mother to be of John Connor, the Leader of the human resistance. The terminator can pass for human, is nearly indestructible, and has only one mission, killing Sarah Connor. One soldier is sent back to protect her from the killing machine. He must find Sarah before the Terminator can carry out it’s mission.
• Back to the Future (1985) – Marty McFly helps out his friend Doc Brown, and ends up being taken back in time by Doc’s time-machine. Marty, a boy of the 80′s, has to come to grips with being in the 50′s and get his parents to fall in love to set straight the damage his presence has done to the events of the past. Also B2tF II and B2tF III
• Timecop (1994) – When the ability to travel through time is perfected, a new time of law enforcement agency is formed. It’s called Time Enforcement Commission or TEC. A cop Max Walker is assigned to the group. On the day he was chosen, some men attack him and kill his wife. Ten years later Max is still grieving but has become a good agent for the TEC. He tracks down a former co-worker who went into the past to make money. Max brings him back for sentencing but not after telling Max that Senator McComb the man in charge of TEC sent him. Max has his eye on McComb.
• The Butterfly Effect (2004) – Evan Treborn grows up in a small town with his single, working mother and his friends. He suffers from memory blackouts where he suddenly finds himself somewhere else, confused. Evan’s friends and mother hardly believe him, thinking he makes it up just to get out of trouble. As Evan grows up he has less of these blackouts until he seems to have recovered. Since the age of seven he has written a diary of his blackout moments so he can remember what happens.
• 12 Monkeys (1995) – An unknown and lethal virus has wiped out five billion people in 1996. Only 1% of the population has survived by the year 2035, and is forced to live underground. A convict (James Cole) reluctantly volunteers to be sent back in time to 1996 to gather information about the origin of the epidemic (who he’s told was spread by a mysterious “Army of the Twelve Monkeys”) and locate the virus before it mutates so that scientists can study it. Unfortunately Cole is mistakenly sent to 1990, six years earlier than expected, and is arrested and locked up in a mental institution, where he meets Dr. Kathryn Railly, a psychiatrist, and Jeffrey Goines, the insane son of a famous scientist and virus expert.

Additional time travel movies that Metromix overlooked:

Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel (2009) – Follows three social outcasts — two geeks and a cynic — as they attempt to navigate a time-travel conundrum in the middle of a British pub. Cassie is a girl from the future who sets the adventure in motion.

Groundhog Day (1993) – A weather man is reluctantly sent to cover a story about a weather forecasting “rat” (as he calls it). This is his fourth year on the story, and he makes no effort to hide his frustration. On awaking the ‘following’ day he discovers that it’s Groundhog Day again, and again, and again. First he uses this to his advantage, then comes the realisation that he is doomed to spend the rest of eternity in the same place, seeing the same people do the same thing EVERY day. Caveat: Some might argue that Groundhog Day is a time loop, not  time travel.

Donnie Darko (2001) – Troubled adolescent, Donnie Darko, receives a disturbing vision that the world will end in 28 days. With the help of various characters, including a 6 foot rabbit called Frank, he slowly discovers the mysterious physical and metaphysical laws that govern his life and that will lead up to the destruction of the universe.

The Time Machine (1960) – From the book by H.G. Wells, a scientist and tinkerer builds a time machine and uses it to explore the distant future where there are two races, a mild gentle race, and a cannibalistic one living underground. His machine is stolen by the underground race and he must risk being captured (and eaten) to return to his own time.

Black Knight (2001) – Jamal, a low-level worker at a shabby amusement park with a medieval theme, finds himself sent back to the year 1328 after he falls in the moat. Before he realizes what has happened, he finds himself mistaken for a messenger from Normandy, enlisted in a plot to kill the tyrant king, and preparing to open a chain of fast-food restaurants, not to mention falling in love with the leader of the assassination plan. “A minnow flapping about in a dirty puddle would make a better fish-out-of-water comedy than this. Lawrence is embarrassingly heavy-handed, shoving the word ‘ass’ into every second sentence then expecting us to collapse in hysterics.”

Millennium (1989) – An investigator seeking the cause of an airline disaster discovers the involvement of an organization of time travelers from a future Earth irreparably polluted who seek to rejuvenate the human race from those about to die in the past.

Time Traveler’s Wife (2009) – When Henry DeTamble meets Clare Abshire in a Chicago library they both understand that he is a time traveller, but she she knows much more than this about him as he has not yet been to the times and places where they have met before. He falls in love with her, as she has already with him, but his continuing unavoidable absences time travelling – and then returning with increasing knowledge of their future – makes things ever more difficult for Clare.

Time After Time (1979) – H.G. Wells has just invented a time machine but hasn’t tried it out yet. When he discovers that one of his friends is actually Jack the Ripper, Jack makes his escape using the time machine. Herbert follows Jack into the late 1970′s where he meets Amy, a bank clerk, who teaches Herbert about life in 70′s while they pursue Jack, who is enjoying the more violent society in which he continues his murderous activities.

Somewhere in Time (1980) – Young writer Richard Collier is met on the opening night of his first play by an old lady who begs him to “Come back to me”. Mystified, he tries to find out about her, and learns that she is a famous stage actress from the early 1900s, Elise McKenna. Becoming more and more obsessed with her, he manages, by self hypnosis, to travel back in time where he meets her. They fall in love, a matching that is not appreciated by her manager. Can their love outlast the immense problems caused by their “time” difference? And can Richard remain in a time that is not his?

Slaughterhouse Five (1972) – “Listen: Billie Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” The opening words of the famous novel are the quickest summary of this haunting, funny film. Director Hill faithfully renders for the screen Vonnegut’s obsessive story of Pilgrim, who survives the 1945 firebombing of Dresden, then lives simultaneously in his past as a young American POW, in the future as a well-cared-for resident of a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, and in the present as a middle-aged optometrist in Ilium, N.Y.

Biggles (1986) – One minute the New Yorker advertising expert Jim Ferguson is at a business party — the next he finds himself way back in 1917 in a plane fight during World War I. Mr. Raymond explains to him that he has a time-twin, to whom he’s relocated in space and time whenever one of them is in trouble. So he has to help his twin, biplane pilot Biggles, in his attempt to destroy a German super weapon, that could win their war. Of course it’s hard for Jim to explain his sudden disappearances to his fiance, Debbie.

Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann (1982) – Lyle, a motorcycle champion is traveling the Mexican desert, when he find himself in the action radius of a time machine. So he find himself one century back in the past between rapists, thiefs and murderers.

Army of Darkness (1992) – In this sequel to the Evil Dead films, a discount-store employee (“Name’s Ash. Housewares.”) is time-warped to a medieval castle beset by monstrous forces. Initially mistaken for an enemy, he is soon revealed as the prophecised savior who can quest for the Necronomicon, a book which can dispel the evil. Unfortunately, he screws up the magic words while collecting the tome, and releases an army of skeletons, led by his own Deadite counterpart. What follows is a thrilling, yet tongue-in-cheek battle between Ash’s 20th Century tactics and the minions of darkness.

Timeline (2003) – A group of archaeologists and combat experts led by Paul Walker and Frances O’Connor use a “3-D fax machine” to time-travel back to France in 1357, in hopes of retrieving Walker’s father and returning safely to the present. Fending for themselves against marauding hordes of medieval French warriors at war with the invading British, these semi-intrepid travelers find their body count rising, and the deadline for their return home is rapidly approaching.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time/Toki o Kakeru Shōjo (2006) – A teenage girl finds that she has the ability to leap through time. With her newfound power, she tries to use it to her advantage, but soon finds that tampering with time can lead to some rather discomforting results.

Summer Time Machine Blues/Samâ taimu mashin burûsu (2005) – 5 college boys, Takuma, Masaru, Shunsuke, Atsushi and Daigo all belong to sci-fi club, but they are not interested in science at all. They usually just hang around, play baseball or card, or take bath at the public bath. One day, they accidentally spill Coke on the remote controller of the air-conditioner. In the sweating bath-like clubroom, suddenly a time machine appears. Eventually, they decide to go back to “yesterday” to bring the remote-controller. The mission ought to be quite easy, however, gradually they come to be worried.

Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) – Four guy friends, all of them bored with their adult lives, travel back to their respective 80s heydays thanks to a time-bending hot tub.

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