Yardbarker

  • My Quiz Activity
  • Newsletters
  • Sports Betting
  • MY FAVORITES
  • Add Sports/Teams
  • Arizona Cardinals
  • Atlanta Falcons
  • Baltimore Ravens
  • Buffalo Bills
  • Carolina Panthers
  • Chicago Bears
  • Cincinnati Bengals
  • Cleveland Browns
  • Dallas Cowboys
  • Denver Broncos
  • Detroit Lions
  • Green Bay Packers
  • Houston Texans
  • Indianapolis Colts
  • Jacksonville Jaguars
  • Kansas City Chiefs
  • Las Vegas Raiders
  • Los Angeles Chargers
  • Los Angeles Rams
  • Miami Dolphins
  • Minnesota Vikings
  • New England Patriots
  • New Orleans Saints
  • New York Jets
  • New York Giants
  • Philadelphia Eagles
  • Pittsburgh Steelers
  • San Francisco 49ers
  • Seattle Seahawks
  • Tampa Bay Buccaneers
  • Tennessee Titans
  • Washington Commanders
  • Arizona Diamondbacks
  • Atlanta Braves
  • Baltimore Orioles
  • Boston Red Sox
  • Chicago White Sox
  • Chicago Cubs
  • Cincinnati Reds
  • Cleveland Guardians
  • Colorado Rockies
  • Detroit Tigers
  • Houston Astros
  • Kansas City Royals
  • Los Angeles Angels
  • Los Angeles Dodgers
  • Miami Marlins
  • Milwaukee Brewers
  • Minnesota Twins
  • New York Yankees
  • New York Mets
  • Oakland Athletics
  • Philadelphia Phillies
  • Pittsburgh Pirates
  • San Diego Padres
  • San Francisco Giants
  • Seattle Mariners
  • St. Louis Cardinals
  • Tampa Bay Rays
  • Texas Rangers
  • Toronto Blue Jays
  • Washington Nationals
  • Atlanta Hawks
  • Boston Celtics
  • Brooklyn Nets
  • Charlotte Hornets
  • Chicago Bulls
  • Cleveland Cavaliers
  • Dallas Mavericks
  • Denver Nuggets
  • Detroit Pistons
  • Golden State Warriors
  • Houston Rockets
  • Indiana Pacers
  • Los Angeles Clippers
  • Los Angeles Lakers
  • Memphis Grizzlies
  • Milwaukee Bucks
  • Minnesota Timberwolves
  • New Orleans Pelicans
  • New York Knicks
  • Oklahoma City Thunder
  • Orlando Magic
  • Philadelphia 76ers
  • Phoenix Suns
  • Portland Trail Blazers
  • Sacramento Kings
  • San Antonio Spurs
  • Toronto Raptors
  • Washington Wizards
  • Anaheim Ducks
  • Arizona Coyotes
  • Boston Bruins
  • Buffalo Sabres
  • Calgary Flames
  • Carolina Hurricanes
  • Chicago Blackhawks
  • Colorado Avalanche
  • Columbus Blue Jackets
  • Dallas Stars
  • Detroit Red Wings
  • Edmonton Oilers
  • Florida Panthers
  • Los Angeles Kings
  • Minnesota Wild
  • Montreal Canadiens
  • Nashville Predators
  • New Jersey Devils
  • New York Islanders
  • New York Rangers
  • Ottawa Senators
  • Philadelphia Flyers
  • Pittsburgh Penguins
  • San Jose Sharks
  • Seattle Kraken
  • St. Louis Blues
  • Tampa Bay Lightning
  • Toronto Maple Leafs
  • Vancouver Canucks
  • Vegas Golden Knights
  • Washington Capitals
  • Winnipeg Jets
  • Entertainment Home
  • Lifestyle Home
  • More Sports
  • YB on Facebook
  • YB on Twitter
  • YB on Flipboard
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  • College Basketball
  • College Football
  • Entertainment
  • Formula One
  • Horse Racing
  • Motor Sports
  • Premier League
  • Sports Business
  • Track and Field
  • More Sports ▸

movie about ship time travel

Entertainment News

Facebook

The most memorable time travel movies

There are fun travel movies, often involving road trips. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby did it over and over. Sometimes, though, the travel isn’t across the globe, or even across space. They are across time. Time travel has been an oft-used trope of science fiction and other fantastical genres for years. Some of the biggest movies of all time involve time travel, but they aren’t the only memorable ones. These are the most memorable time travel films. If you don’t have time to read them now, well, maybe you need a time machine of your own.

'Back to the Future' (1985)

The quintessential time travel movie. One of the biggest hits of all time. The progenitor of two very good sequels. (Yes, we like the third movie.) Marty McFly goes back in time in a DeLorean thanks to his friend Doc Brown and ends up intertwined in the life of his eventual parents back in 1955. Plus, all that Huey Lewis!

'Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure' (1989)

Another film that spawned a trilogy. This comedy is on the sillier side. Bill and Ted are dimwitted high school students who use their time machine to collect important historical figures so they can avoid failing. One of the breakthrough roles for Keanu Reeves, it’s indeed most excellent.

'Terminator 2: Judgment Day' (1991)

This time around, we had to go with a sequel in a series. The Terminator is a good movie, but a bleak horror film. Terminator 2 got a bigger budget and a much larger scope. It’s an epic ‘90s action film, the one that really made this a franchise with legs. It also helped take Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career to the next level.

'12 Monkeys' (1995)

Based on a French short film, Terry Gilliam made time travel trippy and grim. In the future, humanity has almost entirely been wiped out by a disease. Bruce Willis is sent back in time in order to figure out the cause of the disease, but he’s sent to the wrong time and ends up in a mental hospital. That just makes his quest that much harder.

'Army of Darkness' (1992)

After spending two movies dealing with evil spirits in a cabin in the woods, Ash finds himself traveled back to medieval times, but that doesn’t give him a break from all the ghouls that torment him. Army of Darkness is a slapstick horror comedy from Sam Raimi and star Bruce Campbell, but that works better than you might think. Hail to the king, baby.

'Interstellar' (2014)

Christopher Nolan loves to mess with time and create notable imagery. Interstellar was daunting even to people who watched Inception , as much for its lengthy run time as its heady plot. That being said, it delved headlong into a scientific notion of time travel, and the cast is also quite impressive. Time has been kind to the reputation of  Interstellar .

'Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me' (1999)

In a way, Austin Powers travels through time in the first film, but that’s more due to cryogenic freezing. In the sequel, he actually travels through time. The Spy Who Shagged Me was a massive hit, and while a lot of it feels like rehashes of the first film, there was enough fresh stuff to keep the movie fun.

'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court' (1949)

Mark Twain’s novel has been adapted several times, something loosely. This 1949 version is fairly faithful, and it also has quite the cast, led by Bing Crosby. With Crosby involved, they turned the film into a musical naturally.

'The Final Girls' (2015)

If you like horror comedies, this under-the-radar film is one worth seeking out. A group of friends find themselves transported into a 1986 slasher film called Camp Bloodbath . The star of that film happened to be one of the character’s mother, who happened to die a few years earlier. As such, they are technically traveling through time and into a film.

'Last Night in Soho' (2021)

Edgar Wright has done horror-movie pastiches in the past, but they were often loving comedic takes on the genre. This time, he made a straight-up horror film. A young woman in modern London travels back in time when she sleeps, but then she quickly realizes the past that she romanticized was far from ideal.

'Kate & Leopold' (2001)

A fish-out-of-water romantic comedy, this time that fish isn’t just some fancy city folk in the country. No, he’s a duke from the 1800s, and he’s played by Hugh Jackman. You’d think that would be detrimental to Meg Ryan falling in love with him, but you’d be wrong.

'Hot Tub Time Machine' (2010)

Hey, the ‘80s, right? Hot Tub Time Machine is a raunchy comedy that is mostly a series of jokes about how the ‘80s were different. It’s not going to win any Oscars. However, it is called Hot Tub Time Machine , and it did spawn a sequel. It’s not a great movie, but it has a good cast and some memorable jokes.

'Avengers: Endgame' (2019)

Well, Avengers: Endgame is one of the highest-grossing movies ever, and the culmination of over a decade of films in the biggest movie series in the world. We’d call that fairly memorable. It’s hard to spoil a film that a ton of people have seen, so we’re OK with mentioning the fact that the surviving Avengers decide to use time travel to try and defeat Thanos after failing to do so initially.

'Looper' (2012)

What if time travel was verboten and also kind of banal? That’s the world of Looper . Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a hitman who kills people sent back from the future by the future mob. However, someday he will have to “close his loop,” which is to say kill the future version of himself. Then, when his future self shows up — played by Bruce Willis — he manages to escape, and that really complicates things.

'Source Code' (2011)

Source Code kind of ratchets up 12 Monkeys to a whole new level. A train has been exploded by a bomb, and Jake Gyllenhaal is sent into a digital recreation of the event to try and identify the perpetrator. He has to go into the same eight-minute stretch over and over, with things bending and shaping over time.

'Star Trek' (2009)

When they decided to reboot  Star Trek , they also decided to add some time travel into the mix. This made for a time-and-space hopping story, for starters. However, it also allowed them to have Leonard Nimoy show up to play older Spock, giving this movie two different Spocks!

'Men in Black 3' (2012)

Men in Black was really good, but Men in Black II was lackluster. In order to add some spice back into the proceedings, time travel was added into the mix. Will Smith’s Agent J has to go back in time to try and save K from death. Then, he runs into young K, played by Josh Brolin doing a great Tommy Lee Jones impression.

'Time Bandits' (1981)

Another Terry Gilliam film for the list. This is a lighter film than 12 Monkeys , though more a fantasy adventure than a comedy. It’s a story about a boy who joins up with, well, time pirates essentially. The crew of a ship travel through spacetime to steal treasures throughout the ages.

'Timecop' (1994)

Hey, it may not be all that good, but Timecop delivers what it promises. It’s a silly Jean-Claude Van Damme action movie involving time travel. Basically, it’s what you expect from a movie called Timecop . It was a big hit, though, and it also featured a memorable end to Ron Silver’s character.

'Tenet' (2020)

Nolan saw people’s reaction to Interstellar and thought, “Ah, clearly I made that film too straightforward.”  Tenet is trippy and basically everybody is going to have trouble following it at least in fits and starts. It involves people experiencing time forwards and backwards simultaneously. John David Washington fights a backwards version of himself. Tenet is bonkers, but it’s also a ton of fun. Sometimes you just want to go along for the ride.

'Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny' (2023)

After all these years, we got one last Indiana Jones movie. Harrison Ford has often come across like playing even, say, Han Solo, is akin to pulling teeth for him. However, he always seemed to genuinely love playing Indy. In the past he was present as the Ark of the Covenant melted Nazis, and he met a centuries-old knight and found the Holy Grail. In "Dial of Destiny," he also finally time travels. The film is merely fine, but it is nice that Ford got to bid adieu to the character.

Chris Morgan is a sports and pop culture writer and the author of the books  The Comic Galaxy of Mystery Science Theater 3000  and  The Ash Heap of History . You can follow him on Twitter @ChrisXMorgan .

More must-reads:

  • 25 heartwarming movies that celebrate moms
  • The 25 best movies set in Chicago

Trending in Entertainment

Customize your newsletter.

movie about ship time travel

Get the latest news and rumors, customized to your favorite sports and teams. Emailed daily. Always free!

Yardbarker

Things you buy through our links may earn  Vox Media  a commission.

The 25 Greatest Time-Travel Movies Ever Made

movie about ship time travel

It must say something, surely, about humans, how often time-travel movies are about returning to the past rather than jumping to the future. As Mark Duplass’s forlorn character says in Safety Not Guaranteed , “The mission has to do with regret.” With all the potential to explore the unknown world of the future, so often when our minds conspire to bend the rules of time it’s instead to rehash the old. It’s compelling to watch a character in a movie do what we cannot — right past wrongs or uncover the reason for or meaning behind the events in their lives, whether they be emotionally catastrophic or merely geopolitically motivated.

So absent is the future from the canon, in fact, that when it is involved, typically future dwellers are leaving their own time to come back to the present. Back to the Future Part II aside, it seems as if there’s something about going forward in time that just doesn’t track for humans. (Of course, you could argue that this is because the present-day concept of bidirectional time travel would infinitely multiply or change beyond recognition any future that may occur, but that’s a knot for another article.)

In any case, the time-travel stories deemed worthy of Hollywood budgets aren’t always straightforward in their mechanics. Some films on this list barely qualify as time-travel movies at all; others could hardly qualify as anything else. There are movies about trips through time but also ones about the bending and fracturing and muddying thereof; then there are those about, as Andy Samberg aptly puts it in Palm Springs , “one of those infinite time-loop situations you might have heard about.” There’s even a movie in which we get only 13 seconds’ worth of time travel, when it functions more like a joke whose punch line hits at the film’s climax.

What these films all do have in common is a fascination with changing the way time works. That being said, the list leaves out movies in larger, more extended franchises in which time meddling is a one-off dalliance thrown into a sequel with little by way of foreshadowing: think Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban , Avengers: Endgame , and Men in Black III . (It also leaves off perhaps the Ur-time-travel movie, Primer , and the quite good Midnight in Paris because their directors don’t deserve the column inches.) We’re looking at self-contained stories using time mechanics from the start, with preference given to those that involve themselves more intently with the ins and outs of time travel; that ask questions about time, aging, memory and so forth; and that try to succeed at it in new and interesting ways. So let’s get to it.

25. Galaxy Quest (1999)

Does Galaxy Quest really count as a time-travel movie? Some compelling reasons argue that it doesn’t: Time travel isn’t a major factor in the plot, and the time traveling that does occur is, yes, only a 13-second jump. But its use of time travel is meaningful insofar as the movie itself is a loving spoof of Star Trek , which makes use of time travel in three films ( one of which made this list ), not to mention dozens of episodes across its various TV iterations. Tacking on time travel as a deus ex machina for the actors in a Star Trek– like show pressed into service as an actual space crew by an endangered alien race is the exact right amount of ribbing in a movie that’s as on point as it is hilarious.

Galaxy Quest is available to rent on Amazon .

24. Happy Death Day (2017)

Pick away at the surface of a time-loop movie and you find a horror movie. Most of the entries on this list are covered in enough feel-good spin to land as comedies, but Happy Death Day stares the horror of the time-loop phenomenon right in the face. (It’s also quite funny.) Reliving the same day over and over is an unimaginably potent form of psychological torture, and adding murder to the equation does little to dull that edge. The film follows a college-age protagonist struggling to escape from a masked slasher hell-bent on killing her again and again while she tries to solve the mystery of how she got stuck in a time loop.

Happy Death Day is available to rent on Amazon .

23. Back to the Future Part II (1989)

Seriously, this may be the only good movie in which the film’s whole focus is using a time machine to travel into the future. The fact that it’s a sequel is telling — the characters already traveled into the past in the first movie , and the filmmakers decided to save “traveling even further into the past“ for the third film in the trilogy. Still, Back to the Future Part II is a fun time that makes great use of sight gags and references, recasting scenes from the first film in the distant future year of 2015 with all its hoverboards and self-lacing Nikes.

Back to the Future Part II is available to rent on Amazon .

22. See You Yesterday (2019)

It’s a dirty little secret of time-travel movies that they tend to be, well, pretty white. Tenet ’s Protagonist aside, if Hollywood’s sending someone through time, they’re almost certainly not a Black person, and for obvious reasons: Most of post-contact North American history is deeply unfriendly to people of color, and the problems a person running around out of time and place is going to encounter are deeply compounded if they’ll likely be the target of racist abuse or violence — which makes See You Yesterday all the more compelling. Produced by Spike Lee and featuring one of filmdom’s most famous time travelers in a cameo role, it follows a Black teenage science prodigy who uses a time machine to try to save her brother from being killed by a police officer.

See You Yesterday is streaming on Netflix .

21. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

No offense to the Back to the Future franchise, but time travel never looks more fun on film than it does in the first Bill & Ted movie. It’s a concept that feels distinctly of a different era, so pure is its zaniness, that it’s hard to imagine anyone concocting it today. The titular duo, Californian high-school students in the ’80s, travel through the past looking for historical figures in order to ace a history project, then bring them all back to the present. High jinks ensue! We get Genghis Khan in a sporting-goods store and Mozart on an electric keyboard. What more could you want?

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is streaming on HBO Max .

20. Source Code (2011)

Time-travel-film aficionados know this won’t be Jake Gyllenhaal’s only stop on this list, but no matter. Source Code finds him repeating the same eight minutes over and over as he struggles to find the culprit in a train bombing — with each replay ending in his own death by explosion. For some reason, a romantic subplot is shoehorned into this, along with a bunch of frankly unnecessary technical mumbo-jumbo, but the core idea is a compelling mix of the time-loop movie and the train whodunit that Gyllenhaal is a perfect fit for.

Source Code is available to rent on Amazon .

19. 12 Monkeys (1995)

Some sort of law of nature dictates that every genuinely good idea and/or piece of true art has to at some point be turned into a Hollywood movie. Thank God La Jetée was adapted into something that can stand on its own feet artistically. 12 Monkeys may not retain its source material’s black-and-white look or stripped-down, static-image presentation, but it is a rollicking good time nonetheless. That’s in no small part due to director Terry Gilliam getting the best out of Bruce Willis and a young Brad Pitt, and recasting World War III as a planet-decimating virus. Which, like at least one other movie on this list , “speaks to the present moment,” or whatever.

12 Monkeys is available to rent on Amazon .

18. Run Lola Run (1998)

Unlike almost all of the other films on this list, the terms time travel and time machine don’t show up anywhere in Run Lola Run . Rather, it’s a sort of de facto time-loop scenario in which the protagonist tries repeatedly to pay a ransom to save her boyfriend’s life. In fact, if not for a few key details, it could easily be characterized (and often has been) as an alternate-endings movie rather than a time-travel film. But the fact that Lola seems to be learning from her past attempts with each successive one suggests that she is, indeed, using knowledge gained from previous loops to bring a satisfactory end to this situation.

Run Lola Run is available to rent on Amazon .

17. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

One of the most striking things about Groundhog Day is the mutability and replicability of its core conceit. Perhaps the best case in point is Edge of Tomorrow , sometimes known as Live. Die. Repeat. after its original tagline. It’s the kind of physically grueling movie only an actor as genuinely unhinged as Tom Cruise could pull off. A noncombatant thrust into a war against invading aliens, Cruise’s character finds himself reliving day one of combat over and over, slowly but surely refining his techniques in order to survive the extraterrestrial onslaught. Like the central twosome in the much less violent Palm Springs , he winds up with a partner in (war) crime, teaming up with the similarly time-trapped Emily Blunt, and the explanation for the replay glitch here is actually pretty satisfying.

Edge of Tomorrow is streaming on Fubo TV .

16. Star Trek (2009)

If you could create some sort of an advanced stat to measure controversy generated per unit of interesting filmmaking decisions, J.J. Abrams would have to be near the top in terms of his ability to rig up movie drama from almost nothing. This is a guy whose filmography is like Godzilla rip-off, Spielberg homage, safe reboot of cherished IP, repeat. Star Trek may be his best film, though, a sure-footed reinvention of a dorky sci-fi franchise that made it, well, cool. Somehow, the beauty of Spock and Kirk’s bromance being woven through chance encounters with future selves kind of … works?

Star Trek is available to rent on Amazon .

15. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)

There’s a relative dearth of time travel in animated film, which perhaps is a function simply of the fact that it’s less impressive to stage in a world that’s already unreal. If you can Looney Tunes your way through physics, what’s so special about grabbing the flow of time and tying it into a bow? Still, the original Girl Who Leapt Through Time deserves mention here. It’s a beautiful story that interlaces the complexity of time leaping with the intensity of teenage emotion and the thorny process of growing up where the opportunity to redo things leads, over time, to growth — a less shitty Groundhog Day , in a way.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is available to rent on Amazon .

14. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

She may not be the most famous, decorated, or emulated actress of her generation, but Aubrey Plaza is someone whose personality spoke to the irony-soaked 2010s in a way that simply could not be denied. Her character on Parks and Recreation , April Ludgate, was, by all accounts, created specifically to channel Plaza’s real-life personality to the screen, and she plays essentially the same character in Safety Not Guaranteed . Here, she’s a sarcastic intern at a magazine working on a story about a would-be time traveler and using her feminine wiles to slowly gain his trust. The chemistry between Plaza and Mark Duplass is probably the film’s high point; the subplot about the FBI feels like it was clipped out of a bad X-Files episode.

Safety Not Guaranteed is streaming on Tubi .

13. La Jetée (1962)

At only a 28-minute run time, La Jetée is arguably too short to merit inclusion on this list. However, what it lacks in content (and in, well, moving images; it’s almost exclusively a collection of static black-and-white shots set to voice-over), it more than makes up for in inventiveness and influence, and it would be a travesty to leave it out in favor of more recent by-the-book fare. Tracing the tale of a man held prisoner in post-WWIII Paris being used in time-travel experiments as his captors seek to remedy the postapocalyptic state of the world, he’s sent into both the future and the past and ends up unraveling a lifelong personal mystery while he’s at it.

La Jetée is streaming on the Criterion Channel .

12. Planet of the Apes (1968)

Unlike the worse but more straightforwardly time-traveling Tim Burton remake, the relationship between the original Planet of the Apes and time travel is inexact — technically, the astronaut crew that lands on the titular planet does travel forward 2,000 years, but it’s not done via a time machine. The travel isn’t instantaneous: It literally does take them 2,000 years to get there; they’re just unconscious and on life support. Still, the way the film’s ending handles the iconic reveal is exactly in line with the best of the time-travel canon, the telescoping, mise en abyme feeling of the world shifting in front of your very eyes without your moving an inch.

Planet of the Apes is available to rent on Amazon .

11. Groundhog Day (1993)

The famous Bill Murray vehicle essentially invented the infinite-time-loop genre (and it’s hardly a movie that succeeds on the strength of its concept alone), but the idea at its core is so steeped in the casual misogyny of late-’80s and early-’90s cinema that it’s hard to watch today without cringing. Murray’s character employing what amounts to PUA-style techniques over and over and over in a desperate bid to fuck his hapless co-worker just doesn’t hit the way it did back then. If the story arc didn’t present a guy detoxifying himself of the worst aspects of masculinity in order to be worthy of a woman’s love as the primary way for a 20th-century white man to achieve full personhood, this would be much higher on the list.

Groundhog Day is streaming on Starz .

10. Predestination (2014)

This is probably the most complicated film on the list. Following a “temporal agent” (played by Ethan Hawke) who’s trying to prevent a bombing in 1970s New York, it’s based on a Robert A. Heinlein short story and features Shiv Roy herself, Sarah Snook, in a star-making turn as someone with a complicated backstory and a secret. Like the best sci-fi, the film’s premise raises all kinds of fascinating questions about the titular concept and throws in some interesting musings on sex, gender, and the self in the process.

Predestination is streaming on Tubi .

9. Looper (2012)

Wes Anderson gets a lot of flak for his overwrought twee visuals, but Rian Johnson has a knack for making movies that feel and function like dioramas even if they don’t look it. Narratively speaking, everything here is constructed just so — and there’s a certain beauty in that — but who ever had a profound experience of art by looking at a diorama? Looper was probably Johnson’s least precious pre– Star Wars film, which is nice because the temptation to drastically overmaneuver the mechanics of a time-travel story can lead to disaster. The tech used to Bruce Willis–ify Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s face is distracting, and the third act’s retreat from the postapocalyptic city of the future to the postapocalyptic corn farm of the future is a brave choice that the film struggles to land. Still, Johnson’s vision of a future in which organized crime runs time travel is compelling and well worth a watch.

Looper is streaming on Netflix .

8. Donnie Darko (2001)

Donnie Darko is a bit of a genre mash-up. Part high-school movie, part sci-fi flick, part bleak meditation on the soullessness of late-’80s America, it’s nevertheless a weirdly successful piece of filmmaking that makes fantastic use of a young Jake Gyllenhaal, a great supporting cast (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, Jena Malone, and Patrick Swayze among others), and an absolutely iconic haunting cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” Watching high schoolers navigate parallel universes, wormholes, and time travel is a dicey proposition, but director Richard Kelly makes it work, somehow.

Donnie Darko is streaming on HBO Max .

7. Back to the Future (1984)

While it’s clearly superior to the sequel (and leagues ahead of the final film in the trilogy), the original Back to the Future is a bit of a mess (John Mulaney was right , to be honest). Its racial and gender politics are cringey, and the incest subplot is weird (“It’s your cousin Marvin. Marvin Pornhub . You know that new plot element you’ve been looking for?”), but there’s a clear interest in time travel beyond its shimmering surface: the very real addressing of the “grandfather problem” in time travel via the slow disappearance of Marty from his family photo, the accidental invention of rock music, and a genuine curiosity about the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of time machines. Ahh, what the hell. It’s a romp.

Back to the Future is available to rent on Amazon .

6. Palm Springs (2020)

No offense to Gen-Xers and boomers, but the best time-loop movie of all time is Palm Springs . The film isn’t without its missteps, but it’s much more curious about life than Groundhog Day was through the eyes of Murray’s misanthrope. Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg‘s characters, stuck in the loop together, are a perfect comedic match, and their shared humanity makes for a beautiful arc. The film raises questions about what’s worth doing in life when nothing lasts and how to stay sane when every day is the same. Of course, as a sort of polar opposite of Tenet , it benefited from coming out during the pandemic by speaking, as it does, to the experience of lockdown.

Palm Springs is streaming on Hulu .

5. Tenet (2020)

Interstellar wasn’t enough for Chris Nolan, apparently. Tenet ’s legacy may end up being little more than that of the COVID action movie no one saw — a bloated thriller that Nolan fought to get into theaters and bar from home viewing reportedly to swell the size of his own pockets. It really did suffer from bad timing, though, because this is genuinely a quintessential big-screen popcorn movie whose absurdity is all the more palatable when it’s given the audiovisual bombast it deserves. Ambitious in scope as it traces a war on the past by the future (yes, you read that right), Tenet is as enamored of action tropes as it is in bucking them, and its investment in rendering visible the brain-bendingly knotty mechanics of moving through time is laudable, even when the movie itself remains opaque — as impenetrable as the future, as hazy as the past.

Tenet is streaming on HBO Max .

4. The Terminator (1984)

A partner to Blade Runner in the mid-’80s invention of sci-fi noir, The Terminator is a stunning film in many ways, despite the third act’s now-iffy visual effects. While it’s not James Cameron’s debut, and it would go on to be bested by its sequel , it functions as an incredible showcase for an emerging young director who would exclusively make big stories for the rest of his career. Arnold Schwarzenegger is perfectly cast as the relentless, unemotional killer cyborg sent back from the future to terminate the mother of the eventual resistance leader, and the film’s romantic subplot has just the perfect amount of time-travel-induced cheesiness for it to work.

The Terminator is streaming on Amazon Prime Video .

3. Interstellar (2014)

It’s not inaccurate to say Christopher Nolan is a director who’s more interested in scale and scope than in expressing the minutiae of the human experience in its purest form. But in Interstellar, a Nolan movie in its titular ambitions, there’s a core element of time travel wrought not as sci-fi fireworks but as a paean to the sheer force and will of the power of love. It both does and doesn’t work, depending on your capacity for cheese in space, but even besides that, Nolan’s use of time as story arc — the way Miller’s planet functions, in particular — is conceptually masterful in the best kind of time-travel-movie way.

Interstellar is streaming on Paramount+ .

2. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Whereas the franchise’s first movie spends more time on the question of time travel, in the second it takes a bit of a back seat to the action itself. It’s hard to fault director James Cameron for this decision; T2 remains one of the best action movies of the ’90s and — along with Jurassic Park and The Matrix — one of the decade’s best when for special effects. The groundbreaking T-1000 would honestly be enough to get this movie on the list; a tween John Connor grappling with questions of predestination and the fact that he is vicariously responsible for his own conception feel almost like icing on the time-travel cake. Much as in 12 Monkeys , time travel here is mistaken for delusion, as valiant Sarah Connor, in a Cassandra-esque nightmare, has to battle against the future only she knows is coming. Of course, Cassandra never had access to any firepower stored in underground desert arsenals.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is streaming on Netflix .

1. Arrival (2016)

It’s fair to wonder whether Arrival really is, in fact, a time-travel movie. The Ted Chiang short story it’s based on isn’t about time travel per se; rather, it’s an exploration of alternate forms of temporal understanding. The linguist protagonist, played by Amy Adams, doesn’t travel through time so much as come to experience it differently. Still, the plot ends up hinging on foreknowledge that she is granted not via visions but by actually experiencing her future simultaneously with her present and past. For our purposes, though, that’s time fuckery enough to merit inclusion, and boy howdy does the film deliver in overall quality. Partly, that’s simply a question of the source material. Chiang is arguably the most talented (and possibly the most decorated) American sci-fi writer of his generation. But the source story is not especially Hollywood friendly, and director Denis Villeneuve has adopted it lovingly, borrowing a plot device from another of Chiang’s stories, the more straightforwardly time-travel-based “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” in order to add some third-act blockbuster flavor. The result is a beautiful meditation on love, choice, and courage that packs art-film ethos into a genuine sci-fi blockbuster.

Arrival is streaming on Hulu and Paramount+ .

  • vulture homepage lede
  • timey-wimey
  • vulture lists
  • time travel
  • vulture picks

Most Viewed Stories

  • Irish Wish Is a Crypto-Fascist, AI-Generated Harbinger of Doom
  • Cinematrix No. 15: March 15, 2024
  • 51 Things ‘American Riviera Orchard’ Isn’t
  • Grey’s Anatomy Season-Premiere Recap: No One at the Wheel
  • Love Is Blind Alumni Trade the Pods for the Beach
  • Summer House Recap: Car Talk, Vol. 2
  • Shōgun Recap: Baby Earthquakes

Editor’s Picks

movie about ship time travel

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

  • Lower case letters (a-z)
  • Upper case letters (A-Z)
  • Numbers (0-9)
  • Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 1991.

The 20 best time-travel movies – ranked!

As Adam Driver accidentally winds up 65m years ago , facing not just dinosaurs but an asteroid, we count down the best films about going backwards, or forwards, through the ages

20. Timecop (1994)

Regardless of what anyone says, I believe in my heart that Timecop was greenlit because someone showed a studio executive a picture of Jean-Claude Van Damme and said the word “Timecop” out loud, at which point they had to throw a script together as quickly as possible. Nothing about Timecop makes sense. It is the most 90s film ever made.

19. Tenet (2020)

I have to be careful here, because Tenet might not be a time-travel movie. Certainly time passes in it and some of the people are going backwards in time in it. But I’ve seen this movie twice now, and it mainly just seems to be about people mumbling everything, except for Kenneth Branagh, who gets to shout very loudly three times. Anyway, here it is.

18. Cavegirl (1985)

Finally, a film that uses time-travel for the correct reason; to allow a horny 1980s high school student to go back to prehistory so that he can convince a smoking hot, bikini-wearing cavegirl to have it off with him. You will note I’ve ranked this above Tenet.

17. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)

Heather Graham and Mike Myers in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.

Weird to think that Austin Powers was originally a fish-out-of-water comedy, in which the promiscuous titular character had to navigate the (then) uptight world of the 1990s. That all fell apart for the sequel, where Powers was sent back to the 60s to shout his catchphrases at people who actually appreciated them. That makes it a time-travel movie, right?

16. The Butterfly Effect (2004)

God, this film. In summary: Ashton Kutcher plays a man who experiences blackouts, only to learn some years later that he can travel back in time and inhabit his younger self’s mind during the blackouts. But in doing so, he unleashes a world of unintended consequences. He becomes a murderer and loses limbs. Seek out the director’s cut if you can, because it ends with Kutcher’s character deliberately strangling himself in the womb with his umbilical cord. No, really.

15. The Tomorrow War (2021)

Wherein Chris Pratt is drafted into a war that takes place 26 years later, because the invading aliens have already killed all the soldiers who were alive at the time. It’s a great premise for a film – we all pay the price for the actions of other generations – let down by a truly confusing ending. Admit it, you forgot this film even existed, even though it cost $200m to make and only came out 18 months ago.

14. The Time Travelers (1964)

A 1964 movie made on the cheap with genuinely terrible effects, The Time Travelers is about a group of scientists who travel to the future, fight some mutants and then return. What sets it apart, though, is its crazed ending. The film ends with the scientists venturing into the distant future, whereupon the film plays through again, faster and faster and faster until it cuts away to a still of the galaxy. Are they trapped in a loop? Is free will an illusion? Did the producers just run out of money? We may never know.

13. The Adam Project (2022)

A buddy movie where the buddies are the same person … Walker Scobell and Ryan Reynolds in The Adam Project.

In which a young boy’s life is turned upside down when he is visited by an older version of himself from the future. The good news? He grows up to be a fighter pilot. The bad news? He also grows up to have all the cadences and surface-level snarky patter of Ryan Reynolds. What follows is a buddy movie where the two buddies are the same person.

12. Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

So seminal that it was namechecked in Avengers: Endgame. A flat-out comedy that primarily exists to allow a bunch of middle-aged men to act like teenagers, Hot Tub Time Machine is a film about an enchanted Jacuzzi that sends people back to the mid-1980s. Possibly a bit too bawdy for its own good, there’s a hint of a message about the unreliability of nostalgia here.

11. Flight of the Navigator (1986)

This family film involves a young boy who goes missing in a Fort Lauderdale ravine, only to show up eight years later having not aged. There are UFOs and rubbery little creatures and whatnot, but there’s a real emotional wallop to the moment when the boy realises that the world has moved on without him, right down to the scene (that plays out like a horror movie) where the boy realises that his parents have become unrecognisably ancient, even though they are probably only in their early 40s.

10. Primer (2004)

Some see Shane Carruth’s Primer as the gold standard of what a time-travel film should be. It’s the sort of movie that seems unnervingly realistic, from the down-at-heel engineers to the unshowy nature of time travel itself, where people in effect just get in and out of some boxes. Almost entirely unwilling to explain itself, for years Primer fans have come to rely on a series of graphs and charts to figure out what the film actually is.

9. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

A time-travel movie that may or may not have any actual time-travel in it, Colin Trevorrow’s Safety Not Guaranteed is a delicate wonder of a thing. A man places an ad in a magazine asking for a time-travel companion – “Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before” – and the respondents slowly come to realise that all is not quite as it seems.

8. Planet of the Apes (1968)

Maurice Evans and Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes.

If you haven’t seen Planet of the Apes, then the fact that I’ve put it on a list of time-travel movies is probably quite a heavy spoiler, and for that I’m sorry. But what a reveal this is – what seems at first like a silly movie about Charlton Heston being persecuted by some monkeys quickly becomes something darker and much more sinister. That new Adam Driver movie probably could have achieved something similar, if it hadn’t blabbed its big secret in the trailer.

7. Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Endgame is a lot, so much so that it is effectively a time-travel movie bookended by two entirely separate movies. And, yes, it takes a lot of liberties with time-travel, from Tony Stark’s “Huh, I did it” invention to the lazy referencing of other time-travel movies as a shorthand for what the characters can do. Nevertheless, when they get to it, the film nails it. The Battle of New York is the obvious highlight, with Captain America fighting Captain America and the Hulk embarrassed by his unreconstructed former self, but the heart of the film really comes when Tony meets his father as a man and learns to let go of the past.

6. Interstellar (2014)

Interstellar is also a lot. But at its core is a simple ethical quandary: would you try to save the world if it meant missing your children’s entire lives? Matthew McConaughey has to touch down on a planet during a space trip. The problem is that every hour he spends there is equal to seven years on Earth. Is the trip important enough for him to miss seeing the wonder of his children grow into adults? Technically, if you want to be fussy about this, Interstellar is a time dilation movie rather than a time-travel movie. But it gets a pass, largely because McConaughey sells the agony of the moment so beautifully.

5. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

A hilarious example of predestination … George Carlin, Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

There are times when Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure feels like it was written by a toddler off his face on pop. But that’s a deliberate ploy, a way to camouflage all the careful rigour that underpins the script. The lead characters are initially reluctant to embark on their time-travel adventure, until they’re visited by versions of themselves from the near future who compel them to do it; a beautiful and hilarious example of predestination in action. Extra points are awarded thanks to the film’s total lack of interest in consequences. Swiping Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon from their respective eras has no bearing on world history whatsoever, which is probably quite lucky.

4. Looper (2012)

One problem with time-travel movies is that the rules always need to be explained upfront. In lesser hands, this can lead to all manner of clunky, stilted exposition. But when Rian Johnson dabbled in the genre with Looper, he gave us a masterclass in “show, don’t tell”. The sequence where poor Paul Dano’s character is tortured at two different points in time simultaneously, with the older version following instructions carved into the younger version’s arm, is arguably one of the most inventive uses of time-travel in the entire history of cinema. All that plus this is Bruce Willis’s last truly great performance.

Bruce Willis as Joe in Looper.

3. The Terminator (1984)/Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

The lure of the first two Terminator movies were the killer robots running around murdering everyone. But they were very smartly built around a framework of pure time-travel. We only see the future in brief flashes, but what’s important is the present. It is very, very important that Kyle Reese (a guy from the future) has sex with Sarah Connor (a woman from the present), because only that will save humanity as we know it. It’s a hell of a pickup line, but the device also elevates what could have simply been a shonky B-movie into the realm of the classics.

2. Idiocracy (2006)

The smartest time-travel movies use the device as a mirror, telling us more about the times we live in now than the times the characters visit. Enter Idiocracy, Mike Judge’s stinging satire about modern times. An average person is cryogenically frozen and wakes up in the future, shocked to discover that the global IQ has fallen off a cliff in the intervening years. Surrounded by aggressive stupidity, he single-handedly saves the US from famine by suggesting that they use water – and not an electrolyte drink – to grow crops. We are conservatively 15 years from this happening in real life.

1. Back to the Future (1985)/Back to the Future Part II (1989)

Prescient … Michael J Fox and the Hoverboard Girls in Back to the Future Part II.

The only conceivable first choice. The first two Back to the Future films (the third, which is basically just a western, is far less imaginative) have come to define time-travel as a genre. They deliver a complex set of hard sci-fi rules about what can and cannot happen during time-travel and – miraculously – manage to do it in a way that kids can understand. Good music, cool clothes, a million catchphrases and, in the case of the second film, an unnervingly prescient prediction of how Donald Trump would turn out. Just perfect.

  • Science fiction and fantasy films
  • Back To The Future
  • Avengers: Endgame
  • Interstellar

Most viewed

  • Entertainment
  • 11 Time-Travel Movies to Watch After Netflix’s <i>The Adam Project</i>

11 Time-Travel Movies to Watch After Netflix’s The Adam Project

I n Netflix’s The Adam Project , Ryan Reynolds plays Adam Reed, a fighter pilot from 2050 who heads back in time to stop the development of time travel. His mission only gets harder after he crash-lands in his childhood backyard in the year 2022 and is forced to team up with his video game-loving 12-year-old self (portrayed by Walker Scobell).

This isn’t Back to the Future : There are no DeLoreans or high-flux capacitors in sight. (Though Mark Ruffalo , as Adam’s inventor dad, does make for a worthy Doc Brown surrogate.) Instead, Adam hops into a wormhole and traverses the space-time continuum to let his preteen self know that the ability to time-hop is a privilege, not a right. It’s a rather heady concept for a family film, but most time-travel movies are about more than just joyriding through history. Whether it’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing a time-jumping hitman in Looper or Jennifer Garner aging 17 years with help from magic fairy dust in 13 Going on 30 , movies featuring transtemporal travel often show why we should err on the side of caution when spanning time and space.

If you’re craving more time travel, here’s a list of 11 movies to watch after The Adam Project . A couple quick notes: Since Back to the Future is undeniably the greatest time-travel movie of all time , it’s omitted from this list to make room for lesser-known choices. The prototypical time-loop film Groundhog’s Day was also passed over in lieu of a more recent selection.

You won’t need a science degree to enjoy any of the movies included here. But you might walk away from your viewing experience feeling as if the future is coming sooner than you think.

13 Going on 30 (2004)

Jennifer Garner gives Tom Hanks a run for his money in this Big -esque coming-of-age dramedy about a girl who wakes up from her traumatic 13th birthday party to find she’s 30, flirty, and thriving. She quickly learns growing up is hard to do, especially when you do it overnight.

Rent it on Amazon Prime Video

Donnie Darko (2001)

After Jake Gyllenhaal ’s titular sad boy narrowly survives a freak accident, he’s left with disturbing visions of a 6-foot-tall rabbit named Frank, who tells him the world is going to end in 28 days. If you don’t totally understand this time-bending film, don’t worry: its stars don’t either . Donnie Darko ’s perplexing final moments are part of its charm.

Watch it on HBO Max

Looper (2012)

Rian Johnson ’s sci-fi action thriller takes place in a not-so-distant future where mobsters punish those they don’t like by sending them back in time to be killed by a futuristic assassin known as a “looper.” When one of those hired guns (a prosthetic nose-wearing Joseph Gordon-Levitt) comes face-to-face with his older self ( Bruce Willis ), he ends up on a wild goose chase to save his future without unraveling his past.

Watch it on Netflix

About Time (2013)

When Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) learns he has the power to travel back in time, he can’t resist making a few tiny tweaks to his past. He soon discovers that even the smallest changes have big consequences in this weepy Brit rom-com directed by Love Actually helmer Richard Curtis .

Happy Death Day (2017)

In this slasher film, often described as “ Groundhog’s Day meets Scream ,” a college student, played by Jessica Rothe, must solve her own murder if she wants to live to see the next day.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted ( Keanu Reeves ) hurtle through time and space in a cosmic phone booth, meeting historical dudes who can help them ace their high school history paper. The best part is that when you’re done with this one, you can keep the adventure going with its sequels: 1991’s Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey and 2020’s Bill & Ted Face the Music . Pretty excellent, right?

Run Lola Run (1998)

Lola (Franka Potente) —who stands out with fire engine-red hair—only has 20 minutes to secure enough money to save her boyfriend from a Berlin crime boss. This German experimental thriller isn’t your typical time-loop film, but Lola’s ability to learn from her past mistakes to save her love will make you happy that she’s running a marathon, not a sprint.

See You Yesterday (2019)

In this Spike Lee -produced film, high schooler C.J. Walker (Eden Duncan-Smith) uses a backpack time machine to save her brother from being killed by a police officer. But altering the events of the past have consequences that not even a science prodigy can anticipate.

Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

This sweet sci-fi rom-com starts with a classified ad from Kenneth (Mark Duplass), a grocery-store worker looking for a partner to travel back in time with. “Safety not guaranteed,” he warns. While some write him off as crazy or paranoid, disillusioned college grad-turned-alt weekly intern Darius ( Aubrey Plaza ) might be willing to risk it all for a chance to roam the universe with him.

Arrival (2016)

Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi drama , which stars Amy Adams as a celebrated linguist trying to communicate with an intelligent alien race, plays with time in ways we won’t dare spoil here. Suffice to say that the film’s twist ending will make you rethink the entire movie.

Watch it on Hulu

Palm Springs (2020)

Nyles (Andy Samberg) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti) found love in a hopeless place: a Palm Springs wedding that they’ve been forced to relive over and over again after getting stuck in a time loop. Both darkly hilarious and sweetly nihilistic, Palm Springs is a unique rom-com for those who don’t want to admit they like rom-coms.

More Must-Reads From TIME

  • Why We're Spending So Much Money Now
  • The Fight to Free Evan Gershkovich
  • Meet the 2024 Women of the Year
  • John Kerry's Next Move
  • The Quiet Work Trees Do for the Planet
  • Breaker Sunny Choi Is Heading to Paris
  • Column: The Internet Made Romantic Betrayal Even More Devastating
  • Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

You May Also Like

  • Cover Letters
  • Jobs I've Applied To
  • Saved Searches
  • Subscriptions
  • Marine Corps
  • Coast Guard
  • Space Force
  • Military Podcasts
  • Benefits Home
  • Military Pay and Money
  • Veteran Health Care
  • VA eBenefits
  • Veteran Job Search
  • Military Skills Translator
  • Upload Your Resume
  • Veteran Employment Project
  • Vet Friendly Employers
  • Career Advice
  • Military Life Home
  • Military Trivia Game
  • Veterans Day
  • Spouse & Family
  • Military History
  • Discounts Home
  • Featured Discounts
  • Veterans Day Restaurant Discounts
  • Electronics
  • Join the Military Home
  • Contact a Recruiter
  • Military Fitness

How the Navy Stole the Show In a Movie About the USS Nimitz Going Back in Time to 1941

movie about ship time travel

Ever wonder how history might have been different if the U.S. Navy had a modern supercarrier when the Japanese were attacking Pearl Harbor? You (apparently) aren’t alone. The 1980 film “The Final Countdown” (almost) shows us how it might have gone down.

Today, the USS Nimitz is the oldest-serving aircraft carrier in the world, first being launched in 1972. Even today, it is one of the largest warships afloat. In 1979, when “The Final Countdown” was filmed, it was something the Navy was excited to show off, so it agreed to fully support the movie.

The plot of “The Final Countdown” is pretty simple, especially for a movie about time travel. While on a routine cruise, the carrier and its F-14 Tomcats experience an electrical storm and somehow find themselves transported back to Dec. 6, 1941, but aren’t immediately aware of that fact.

The ship loses radio contact with its command at Pearl Harbor, and Capt. Matthew Yelland (Kirk Douglas) is led to believe that the installation was destroyed by a nuclear first strike from the Soviet Union -- because whose first thought would be that they accidentally went back in time?

Yelland starts to suspect when aerial reconnaissance images come back showing the U.S. Navy’s Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor. The suspicion intensifies when two F-14 Tomcats are dispatched to intercept a surface contact and instead watch a civilian yacht get strafed by Japanese Zeros.

The Zeros make their way toward the Nimitz, and we finally get to see the anachronistic Hollywood portrayal of F-14s taking down 1940s-era Japanese fighter aircraft. Sadly, this is as close as we get to watching the Nimitz litter the ocean floor with the Japanese fleet. Spoiler alert: Yelland decides to attack, but the time-travel storm returns and sends the ship back to 1980.

movie about ship time travel

Not only is there a lot of sexy shots of the Nimitz in this movie, but other Navy aircraft, especially the F-14 Tomcat, get shown off as well. Admittedly, the F-14 sequences are more inspirational than anything you’ll see in “Top Gun” (fight me). It was practically the Navy’s movie, highlighting everything that is Forged by the Sea.

Sailors from the carrier (some sporting totally legal 1979-era beards) were used as extras and received acting credits. Apart from the F-14, nine other aircraft were used or featured in the film in some way.

But the filming wasn’t completely free from incidents. At least one film crew was tossed down the Nimitz runway by the sheer power of being too close to a Tomcat takeoff. The Zeros used in the film were replicas whose lives were nearly cut short when the propeller planes got caught in the wake of an F-14’s jet wash.

The movie didn’t get great reviews, but the Navy sure did. Even famed film critic Roger Ebert noticed that “the biggest element of interest is the aircraft carrier itself” and liked the depiction of Navy life aboard the Nimitz more than the story itself.

After the reel-life production of “The Final Countdown,” the USS Nimitz had to get back to real life, cruising to the Persian Gulf. Its next assignment was an attempt to rescue the staff of the U.S. embassy in Tehran during the Iran Hostage Crisis.

-- Blake Stilwell can be reached at [email protected] . He can also be found on Twitter @blakestilwell or on Facebook .

Want to Learn More About Military Life?

Whether you're thinking of joining the military, looking for post-military careers or keeping up with military life and benefits, Military.com has you covered. Subscribe to Military.com to have military news, updates and resources delivered directly to your inbox.

Blake Stilwell

Blake Stilwell, Military.com

You May Also Like

movie about ship time travel

The American Battlefield Trust Book Prize for History is like March Madness for the best books on military history.

The palatial yacht &quot;Nourmahal,&quot; owned by New York financier and real estate magnate Vincent Astor, is pictured upon its arrival at Miami Beach

Vincent Astor's yacht, the Nourmahal, was among the largest private boats on the seas.

Marines exercise aboard the guided-missile submarine USS Ohio

The commanding officer of the USS Ohio sub's gold crew -- Capt. Kurt Balagna -- was relieved by Rear Adm. Nicholas Tilbrook...

Navy sailor bench presses weights

The change stems from the desire to help sailors who were working outside of regular hours, such as those on night shifts...

  • Entertainment
  • Military Equipment
  • Outdoor Guide

Select Service

  • National Guard

Entertainment News

  • The 11 Finalists for the First-Ever American Battlefield Trust Book Prize for History
  • Survival Game Pacific Drive Steers You into an Eerie, Hostile Pacific Northwest
  • Rapper Shaggy Got His Distinctive Voice from Making Fun of His Marine Corps Drill Instructors
  • Harvey Keitel Stars in a New Adaptation of the Best-Selling Book 'Tattooist of Auschwitz'
  • If You Like Working Out with Weights While Deployed Overseas, You Can Thank Arnold Schwarzenegger

Latest Military Videos

movie about ship time travel

Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the U.S. is working to establish a maritime corridor that will be used...

movie about ship time travel

Explosions were seen in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday as Israel continues its offensive against Hamas in the territory...

movie about ship time travel

An Army soldier has been arrested on accusations of selling sensitive information related to U.S. military capabilities, Justice Department...

White House Pushing for Gaza Cease-Fire as Israel Says an Israeli-American Hostage Has Died

The White House is focused on pursing a cease-fire agreement in Gaza, even as the deadline to achieve a...

movie about ship time travel

The White House says the Pentagon will rush about $300 million in weapons to Ukraine after finding some cost...

The 35 Best Time Travel Movies

Ready for 1.21 gigawatts of sci-fi greatness?

military person, soldier, ballistic vest, wrinkle, air gun, armour, video game software, action film, machine gun, brass instrument,

These are the 35 best sci-fi films that explore the fluidity of time.

🤯 You love mind-bending science. So do we. Let’s nerd out over it together.

35. Timecop

jean claude van damme in timecop

Jean-Claude Van Damme is a cop who polices time. Don’t need to say more, but I guess I will. In 1994, time travel becomes a favorite pastime of criminals, and timecops like Van Damme must catch any chronal abusers and bring them to justice. As is often the case, Van Damme’s own time-muckery with the past creates different and divergent timelines that not even Doc Brown’s chalkboard could work out. But Timecop isn’t exactly a film that’s going for narrative clarity here.

34. The Final Countdown / The Philadelphia Experiment

sky, blue, atmosphere, darkness, space, geological phenomenon, cloud, night, sea, vehicle,

Although most people would file this film under “flop,” The Final Countdown contains such an amazing premise it has to be recognized. The crew of the U.S.S. Nimitz enters a storm vortex and is transported to Pearl Harbor in 1941, turning a favorite imaginary war-game scenario into real life. Although the actual film elements aren’t necessarily memorable, it does give us an incredibly good look at the Nimitz (the film was shot on the actual carrier).

We tossed in The Philadelphia Experiment at the same spot, since it’s essentially the reverse of The Final Countdown .

33. Men in Black 3

By the time director Barry Sonnenfeld directed Men in Black 3 in 2012, the franchise was 15 years removed from its fun and campy original, and Men in Black 2 had sucked out much of the charm. That’s why MiB 3 , despite its faults, is still a surprising underdog of a film.

Agent J (Will Smith) goes back in time to stop an alien from mucking up the past and killing Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones/Josh Brolin). The film recaptures much of the original’s fun, and Josh Brolin’s portrayal of a young Tommy Lee Jones playing Agent K is simply awe-inspiring. Honestly, that acting work alone earns this spot for MiB 3.

32. Flight of the Navigator

Sort of like E.T. , but with time travel. What Flight of the Navigator lacks in a substantial plot, it more than makes up for in charm.

David Scott Freeman falls into a ravine and is knocked unconscious—for eight years. Although he doesn’t age, everyone he knows does, and he soon finds he’s part of something much larger. It’s a fun film that will never outshine any Spielberg classics, but its campiness is too genuine to ignore.

31. Time After Time

H.G. Wells, Jack the Ripper, and time travel ... that’s it . Just click the arrow.

30. Timecrimes

A film with perhaps the lowest budget on this list, Timecrimes is a Spanish-language movie that follows a typical time travel trope (many copies of one person causing major problems) but creates 92 minutes of truly enjoyable cinema. The fun moments of Timecrimes are the reveal after reveal after reveal, which snowballs into a fascinating plot.

29. Source Code

Source Code is like Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow with a twist. Instead of going back in time as himself, Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) enters the body of someone else as he tries to stop a mass murder attempt. What the film lacks in depth, it more than makes up for in pulse-pumping action, and the premise itself is a refreshing take on the usual time travel idea.

It will likely never be considered an example of high science fiction, but as far as time travel goes, it gets good grades.

28. Donnie Darko

Perfect amounts creepy and perplexing, Donnie Darko is another strange example of time travel, which is why it belongs on this list all the more. Darko (Gyllenhaal again) is a high school kid with a less-than-sunny disposition. But when he begins seeing frightening hallucinations of a deranged and grotesque rabbit, things slowly begin to unravel, going from bad to weird pretty quickly.

For such a small-budget film (that was almost released straight to home video!) it’s made an outsized impact on science fiction and indie filmmaking. It’s a great movie, but also a polarizing one.

27. Safety Not Guaranteed

Director Colin Trevorrow’s debut film Safety Not Guaranteed follows three journalists—well, one journalist and two interns—on a road trip to meet the eccentric Kenneth (Mark Duplass), who placed an ad in a local newspaper looking for a time-travel companion. Although at its heart a romantic comedy, the film explores human perception of time and the indelible regrets, traumas, and even fantasies that fill our memories. Although the idea of actual time travel plays a significant role in the film, it’s used mostly as a symbol to analyze the importance of being present and always looking with hope toward the future.

26. X-Men: Days of Future Past

Smashing together the old X-Men guard with the new is what makes X-Men: Days of Future Past one of the more successful cinematic outings for the mutant team.

In the film, Kitty Pryde sends Wolverine back through time to stop apocalyptic events from unfolding. Maybe that’s not the most original plot, but it’s one that’s too fun to resist (if only for the Quicksilver scene alone ).

25. Predestination

Based on Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi short story “All You Zombies,” Predestination is a head trip, like any proper time travel film should be. With a strong performance from Ethan Hawke and a script that will keep you guessing, the film is one of the more solid time travel entries in recent years and is a film that garners a rewatch so you can catch every detail.

24. Star Trek: First Contact

The Next Generation ’s big screen outings are a mixed bag, to put it nicely, but the best film by far is the time-bending Star Trek: First Contact . Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise-E travel to the past to prevent the cybernetic Borg from mucking with Earth’s history. It’s a good film all by itself, but even more excellent if you’re an invested Star Trek fan. We get to see huge, never-before-seen moments in the Star Trek universe, like humanity’s first encounter with the Vulcans, and the Borg are just an excellent adversary.

23. Army of Darkness

“Shop Smart. Shop, S-Mart.”

Depending on who you ask, Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness is either the best sequel to any film ever, or the worst—there isn’t much room in between. The chainsaw-toting Ashley “Ash” Williams is tossed back to medieval times where he must fight off a horde of undead monstrosities with only his ingenuity and his “boom stick.”

Even though it’s slapstick comedy with wonderfully B-movie action sequences, it remains an absolute joy to watch.

22. Doctor Strange

In this Marvel sleeper hit , Stephen Strange (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) becomes the Sorcerer Supreme, and in typical Marvel fashion, is tasked with saving the world. Although the visuals alone are worthing giving this movie a shot, its manipulation of time as a superpower rather than a world-altering plot device is what sets it apart from the rest.

21. Sleeper

Although not technically time travel (long stretches of cryo-sleep instead), Sleeper is Woody Allen’s sci-fi comedy that’s absurd, hilarious, and strangely poignant. Miles Monroe is a jazz musician and health-food-store owner who wakes up in the 22nd century after a botched gall bladder operation. The world is, as you’d expect, quite different, and Monroe is a hilarious character to explore it with.

Tenet is an “A for effort” addition to this list. The film has all the trappings of a Christopher Nolan flick—stunning cinematography, a star-studded cast, head-scratching plot points, etc., etc. And Tenet does take time travel movies one step further with the introduction of time inversion, the idea that objects and people can travel into the past at the same temporal pace that they can travel into the future. Although a fascinating concept, it’s also a confusing one, which is why Nolan spends much of the film’s 150-minute runtime explaining what’s going on. Tenet is a fascinating time travel story though ultimately one a bit lost in its own exposition.

19. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

This 2006 award-winning anime is a coming-of-age time travel story that even rivals Back to the Future . After schoolgirl Mokoto Konno discovers a time travel device that gives her the power to leap through time, she uses her new gifts for mundane high school stuff, passing tests, avoiding awkward conversations, and to address her chronic lateness.

When she learns what her time traveling does to others around her, and as the seriousness of her time jumping becomes more apparent, the film blossoms into an important story about loss and friendship.

Crime noir meets science fiction in Rian Johnson’s Looper , and the match is magical. In a future where time travel is invented and immediately made illegal, crime syndicates use the technology for time-hopping assassinations. But to tie off some temporal inconsistencies, the assassin must eventually become the target—and that’s where things get interesting. This isn’t flawless sci-fi, but it’s certainly inventive.

17. Run Lola Run

On its surface, the German film Run Lola Run is about a blazingly red-headed woman running through the streets of Berlin in an attempt to save her boyfriend’s life. However, the twist is that once Lola reaches a dead-end (sometimes literally) in one of her runs, the film starts over from the beginning and Lola runs through Berlin once again, only this time small changes in her path create largely divergent outcomes by the film’s end. Although time is more of a thematic device than a strictly plot-driven one in Run Lola Run, its ruminations on time and the exploration of the Butterfly Effect , the idea that small incidents can have lasting repercussions, makes Run Lola Run one of the most unique films on this list.

16. Avengers: Endgame

What happens when the big purple monster man annihilates half the population? Time travel, baby. Tony Stark and gang concoct a convoluted plan that’ll save the universe from being cleaved in two, including some very inventive scenes that play with time travel. Like most time travel plots, Endgame creates more questions than it answers, but it’s best to just sit back and enjoy.

Headshot of Darren Orf

Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough. 

.css-cuqpxl:before{padding-right:0.3125rem;content:'//';display:inline;} Movie Reviews .css-xtujxj:before{padding-left:0.3125rem;content:'//';display:inline;}

Collage, Games, Poster, Font, Art, Comics, Photography, Advertising, Movie, Fictional character,

The Best Documentaries to Stream on Netflix

Music,

The 25 Best Sci-Fi Movies on Netflix Right Now

Movie, Games, Fictional character,

All the Sci-Fi Movies You Need to See in 2019

Blue, Water, Photography, Fictional character, Space, Illustration, Graphics,

The 40 Best Sci-Fi Scenes

Jungle, Vegetation, Nature, Natural environment, Green, Forest, Rainforest, Biome, Terrestrial plant, Tree,

'Annihilation' Is a Sci-Fi Slog That's Worth It

Blue, Purple, Performance, Electric blue, Fun, Magenta, Event, Stage,

'Mute,' Netflix, and the Future of SciFi Streaming

Wetsuit, Standing, Arm, Human, Sky, Personal protective equipment, Muscle, Photography, Surfing, Fictional character,

'Black Panther' Is a Marvel Film Unlike Any Other

Costume, Cosplay, Suit actor, Anime, Black hair, Fan convention, Games, Fictional character,

'Valerian' Stumbles Into an Amazing Sci-Fi World

this image is not available

'Mad Max: Fury Road' Is Pure, Ridiculous Mutant Car Fun

A 9-Year-Old Reviews 'Avengers: Age of Ultron'

The Fast and the Furious, Cuban Style

Screen Rant

10 best movies & shows about time travel, ranked.

Time travel has been a part of fiction for a long time now and is a popular theme in cinema and TV. Here are the best time travel movies and TV shows.

Time travel is a topic popularized by works of fiction and is used as a plot device for exploring the impermanence of life, the impossibility of second chances, and the inevitability of events. It's also used to increase the stakes in a story and as a way of expanding the field on which characters may adventure.

RELATED: The One Problem Sci-Fi Time Travel Movies NEVER Resolve

There are a few different kinds of time travel that have been portrayed in movies and television, with varying levels of agency given to the characters. In some stories, events in the past can be changed, but not in others. Here is a list of 10 of the best movies about time travel.

About Time (2013)

Domhnall Gleeson plays a young man who discovers that he has the ability to travel back in time. He is a hopeless romantic and uses his ability to attempt to improve his love life.

When he meets the woman he will marry, he finds from this point on that time travel can be a blessing and a curse. It's a sweet, touching movie about living in the present with the ones that you love.

Edge Of Tomorrow (2014)

The Edge of Tomorrow   plays out like  Groundhog Day   in a futuristic war zone. Tom Cruise plays a man who keeps reliving the same day, which results in his death and resurrection that restarts the loop over and over.

It's an exciting sci-fi, action-adventure movie that manages to make a relatively dated trope feel fresh again.

X-Men: Days Of Future Past (2014)

This entry in the  X-Men   franchise begins in a future where mutants are being hunted down by robots. Logan (Hugh Jackman) is sent back in time to prevent the invention of these killing machines.

The film jumps back and forth between Logan's mission and the present, where the older mutants desperately try to survive until the damage can be undone. Logan succeeds in his quest and wakes up back in a better future.

The Terminator (1984)

The Terminator   is not only one of the most iconic time travel movies of all time, but widely considered to be one of the most influential films ever made. The Terminator is sent back in time to kill Sarah Connor before she can give birth to the future leader of the fight against the robots.

RELATED: 10 Best Arnold Schwarzenegger Movies According to IMDb

Another man is sent back to protect Sarah from the Terminator, and the two fall in love. It turns out that this man, Kyle, is the father of Sarah's son. It's an interesting twist on the genre, in that audiences first believe that changing the past is possible, until the end shows that these events always had to happen.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)

Here is an example of a sequel that just might be better than the original. The audience returns to characters they're familiar with, but nothing is as it seems at first.

The Terminator returns, but has been reprogrammed to protect John, and Sarah Connor is being held in a mental hospital, even though the audience knows she is telling the truth about the cyborgs trying to kill her son. The Terminator successfully completes his mission to protect John, before terminating himself. It's a surprisingly sweet return to a violent, action-packed story.

Back To The Future (1985)

Back to the Future   tells the story of a kid coming to appreciate his parents through time travel. Marty McFly travels back in time to when his parents were his age, and struggles not to change the future irrevocably.

He struggles to return to the future, only to quickly embark on his next time-traveling adventure, to be seen in the next installment of the franchise.

Looper (2012)

Rian Johnson possesses the extraordinary gift of elevating whatever genre he chooses to work in.  Looper takes place in a universe where contracted killers murder people sent back in time. Their contract is complete when they have "closed the loop" by killing their future selves.

Time travel is used as a means of changing the past in order to change the future, and the protagonist, Joe, of fights to find and kill his future self, who has returned with the intention of killing a young boy who will grow up to be responsible for the death of his wife. Joe meets and becomes close to the young boy and his mother, and makes a powerful decision that changes the future for everyone.

Arrival (2016)

Arrival   is a powerful sci-fi drama about love and grief. The film explores the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, with the protagonist having strange dreams while learning an alien language that turns out to be memories of her future.

It's beautifully written, scored, and acted and it leaves the audience with heartbreaking and thought-provoking questions that stay with everyone long after viewing.

Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban (2004)

The third installment in the  Harry Potter   film series marked a tonal shift from the previous two entries. Though still children, Harry, Hermione, and Ron had been through enough traumatizing experiences that a sense of danger and sadness hung over their heads, even as the story remained one of adventure and friendship.

The Prisoner of Azkaban   is not overtly a story about time travel, but time travel is woven intricately and inextricably into the tale in a way that pays off wonderfully in the last act.

Dark (2017 - 2020)

Dark 's three-season run is an excellent example of a concisely told story in an episodic format. It all begins with the disappearance of a young boy in the German town of Winden.

As characters search for answers, more questions are raised and the nature of time travel becomes more and more complicated and intricate. This makes for a truly masterful series finale that closes every loop and unravels every thread the show has introduced.

NEXT: Our 10 Favorite Time Travel Movies

The 15 Best Time Travel Movies Ever Made

Turn back the clock

movie about ship time travel

In Netflix’s “The Adam Project,” a fighter pilot from the future named Adam (Ryan Reynolds) accidentally crash lands in 2022, and has to team up with his 12-year-old former self (Walker Scobell) in order to have a chance at a future victory. But while Adam physically journeys to his own past, other time travel movies have seen objects, communication, and even consciousness skip back and forth along the timeline to affect their stories.

Below, we look at 15 of the very best movies centered around time travel, each putting its own unique spin on the concept of characters who, in some way, manage to traverse time. 

the-adam-project-ryan-reynolds-walter-scobell

“Time After Time” (1979)

time-after-time

While none of the cinematic adaptations of the prolific works of 19th century science-fiction writer HG Wells are on this list, the writer himself is (or at least a fictionalized version of him) in the time hopping murder mystery “Time After Time.” Malcolm McDowell plays Wells, who takes to his newly invented time machine after realizing that notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper (David Warner) is not only someone he considered a friend, but has also used his machine to travel to the future. Feeling partially responsible for the harm Jack will inflict, Wells follows him to the late 1970s, where both men set their sights on bank teller Amy Robbins (Mary Steenburgen, who also appears later on this list in “Back to the Future III”), although for very different reasons. While viewers may come to “Time After Time” for the time-hopping cat and mouse chase, as Wells races to stop Jack from killing again, they’ll stay for the sweet romance that blooms between Wells and Amy along the way. 

“Terminator” and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1984, 1991)

terminator-2-linda-hamilton

After the second (and arguably superior) film, the “Terminator” franchise gets a bit uneven, but James Cameron’s first two installments still hold up, with one of the coolest premises in the time travel genre. In a war-torn future where humans are locked in a battle with intelligent machines, a cyborg assassin called a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the woman fated to give birth to the eventual hero of mankind. Meanwhile, humans also send back one of their own to protect her. The result is a tense and action-packed adventure that capitalizes on its paradoxical premise by delivering some truly jaw-dropping twists. The sequel, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” sees Sarah’s son, now a teenager, still in danger from time-traveling machines, but this time protected by a reprogrammed Terminator sent back to save him.

“Back to the Future” trilogy (1985, 1989, 1990)

back to the future

Still the gold standard for time travel movies nearly four decades later, the “Back to the Future” trilogy has been the entry point to concepts like temporal paradoxes, causal loops, and the space-time continuum for multiple generations of viewers. While the first movie is commonly considered the best, all three are a ton of fun, due in large part to knockout comedic performances from Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox as Doc, the man who invents time travel, and Marty, the high school student who accidentally uses it to break his own timeline, respectively. “Back to the Future II” sees Marty catastrophically changing his own present by getting greedy to the future, while “Back to the Future III” finds Doc and Marty stranded in the Old West and pressed to figure out a way to escape before Doc’s time runs out. 

“Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” (1986)

star-trek-4-the-voyage-home

The Star Trek franchise is no stranger to time travel stories, and there are numerous Star Trek films that would make solid additions to this list. But for our money, “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” is the best of them. After an alien probe starts vacuuming up all of Earth’s oceans in 2286 in an attempt to make contact with a then-extinct species, it’s up to Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and the crew of the starship Enterprise to travel back in time to retrieve a pair of humpback whales from 1986 and save the future. Is the premise a little silly when you spell it out? Yes. But it’s also a ton of fun, giving the original Star Trek cast a chance to stretch their comedic muscles after a few much more dramatic outings, while still delivering the type of earnest, optimistic storytelling that has always defined Star Trek at its best. “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” also stars Catherine Hicks as the 20th century scientist who aids Kirk on his mission, who you may also remember from the other big time travel film of 1986, “Peggy Sue Got Married.” 

“Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (1989)

bill-and-teds-excellent-adventure

There are some time travel movies that challenge everything you thought you knew about reality, and then there are movies like “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” We’ll never pretend that this ridiculous romp through history to save the GPAs of a couple high school goofballs (Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter) destined to write a song that will save the world is exactly what you’d call smart. Its premise alone would be bound to give Doc Brown a migraine. But there’s something undeniably joyous about watching these two kindhearted and enthusiastic doofuses get to interact with some of the most notable figures from history. Just don’t think too hard about it (Bill and Ted certainly don’t) and enjoy the ride. 

“Groundhog Day” (1993)

groundhog-day-bill-murray-andi-macdowell

One of the most fascinating sub genres of time travel is the time loop story , in which a character gets stuck repeating the same stretch of time over and over. But while many movies have come along to play with this idea, the reigning champion continues to be “Groundhog Day,” which sees Bill Murray as a cantankerous weatherman destined to cover the same Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania Groundhog Day festival every day ad infinitum, unless he can figure out a way to stop it. “Groundhog Day” hilariously takes every approach imaginable to the idea of repeating the same day for all eternity, from the macabre to the benevolent and everything in between. It’s a romcom, it’s a drama, it’s a fantasy, and it’s some of Bill Murray‘s best work that will leave you and stitches no matter how many times you watch it.

“12 Monkeys” (1995) 

12-monkeys-brad-pitt

Sometimes time travel movies have a bit of a wacky idea of what the future might look like, which is definitely the case with “12 Monkeys,” which sees humanity driven underground in the wake of a civilization-ending virus. Bruce Willis plays a low level criminal named James Cole who is presented with the opportunity to wipe his record clean in exchange for traveling to the past and gathering information about the virus. But of course, you can’t just show up in the mid-’90s ranting about being from the future without consequences, and Cole quickly finds himself committed to a mental institution, where he crosses paths with a good-natured psychiatrist (Madeleine Stow) and a fellow patient (Brad Pitt), who finds Cole’s ideas of the future very intriguing. The tone of “12 Monkeys” starts off feeling a little bizarre and off kilter (thanks to director Terry Gilliam), which only increases as the film progresses, helping put the viewer in Cole’s shoes as he begins to question his sense of reality. Like several others on this list, “12 Monkeys” enjoys challenging our perceptions of linear cause-and-effect, having a lot of fun as it tosses Bruce Willis back and forth between a bizarre future and a doomed past, daring us to guess where it’s going.

“Donnie Darko” (2001)

donnie-darko

“Do you believe in time travel?“ That’s asked early on in brooding high school drama “Donnie Darko,” although it takes a while for viewers to fully understand why that question is so central to the story. The film follows Donnie, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, a moody high schooler who begins seeing visions of a man in a nightmarish bunny costume with warnings about the imminent end of the world. Soon, Donnie starts experiencing premonitions that he uses to guide his actions, kicking off a series of events that invites questions of predetermination, free will, and inevitability. “Donnie Darko” doesn’t feel like a typical time travel film, forgoing the typical tropes of the genre in lieu of an unconventional coming-of-age tale focused far more on teen angst, mental health, and social dynamics than questions of temporal causality and metaphysics. Still, the film is predicated on fascinating ideas about the malleability of time, and although it doesn’t provide all the answers, the questions alone are worth it. 

john carter

“Primer” (2004)

primer

No film has ever been less interested in interpreting its scientific jargon for lay people than Shane Carruth’s “Primer,” a film which focuses on a pair of engineers who accidentally invent a time machine in their garage. After initially being overjoyed with their groundbreaking discovery, the pair finds themselves at odds over implications of their invention. Unlike many films about scientific innovation, “Primer” makes zero effort to translate the technical and scientific vernacular used by its characters for the audience; Unless you have PhDs in mechanical engineering and theoretical physics, you’ll just just have to pay attention to context clues and hope for the best. (And if you have to watch the film more than once to figure out what’s going on, that’s okay, too. Most people do.) But whether or not you can fully follow the intricate mechanics of the film’s time travel, the intriguing conflict between the two central characters — one of whom sees time travel as a shortcut to prosperity, while the other views it as a Pandora’s box of potentially disastrous consequences — should be more than enough to keep you invested.

“About Time” (2013)

about-time-domhnall-gleeson-rachel-mcadams

While many time travel movies tend to deal with world-threatening stakes or adrenaline-fueling adventures, “About Time” is a quieter entry into the genre that simply asks what you might do if you had the ability to revisit any moment in your life. Domhnall Gleeson plays Tim, who finds out on his 21st birthday that the men in his family have the ability to travel back to points in their own past. From then on, Tim uses his ability to undo embarrassing moments, relive fond memories, and find true love with Mary (Rachel McAdams). Although Tim experiences his fair share of thrilling moments in his non-linear life, his journeys through time are much more about learning what gives life meaning, what moments matter, and accepting that there are some types of pain that even time travel can’t circumvent. Bring tissues for this tear-jerker from Richard Curtis, the filmmaker behind “Love, Actually” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

“Edge of Tomorrow” (2014)

edge-of-tomorrow

While “Groundhog Day” trapped Bill Murray in a humdrum small town holiday, “Edge of Tomorrow” finds Tom Cruise stuck in a far more precarious loop when an alien infection gives him the ability to reset back to 24 hours before that infection every time he dies. And he dies a lot, since unfortunately he got infected in the midst of a doomed battle with massive insect-like aliens invading London. Fortunately, along for the ride is Emily Blunt, whose character Rita Vrataski has experienced the same ability, and has some ideas about what to do with it. Featuring awesome creature design, impressive visual effects, and an action-packed storyline that makes great use of its premise, “Edge of Tomorrow” delivers a thrilling blend of sci-fi action and time bending twistyness that, despite having seen the same day dozens of times by the time the movie ends, leaves us yearning for more.

“Interstellar” (2014)

interstellar-matthew-mcconaughey-anne-hathaway

It takes a while before Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” truly reveals itself as a time travel movie, but the pieces are there from the beginning. After learning that the Earth is dying, former pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) gets recruited on a mission to travel to another star system in the hopes of finding a planet to which humanity can flee. The journey takes Cooper and his crew to uncharted regions of space and fascinating new worlds, and along the way, the astronauts are faced with questions of relativity, our perception of time, and faith in the unknown. But it’s not until the final act of the film that it fully addresses the idea of sending something through time, although the seed of that idea is planted much earlier. The film’s approach to time travel is more philosophical than scientific, asking what sorts of things transcend the limits of time, and what they might give us the power to do.

“Predestination” (2014)

predestination-ethan-hawke

If the age old question of the chicken in the egg were a time travel movie, it would be “Predestination, a mind-scrambling exploration of cause-and-effect that will make your brain feel like it just ran a marathon. Sometime in the future, a time agent played by Ethan Hawke is on the hunt for a temporal terrorist responsible for killing hundreds of people throughout the timeline. His investigation leads him to cross paths with a person with their own interesting story to tell, and the way their story intersects with Hawke’s will leave your head spinning. It’s impossible to say much more about “Predestination” without spoiling some of the film’s many surprising twists, but suffice it to say that if you like your time travel challenging and accompanied by a hefty helping of existential wrestling, this is the film for you.

“Your Name” (2016)

your-name

Many animated films have delved into the world of time travel, but the Japanese film “Your Name” is perhaps one of the most impressive of the bunch. The story follows a rural teen girl named Mitsuha, who lives in a remote village and yearns for a more exciting life in the city, and Taki, a teenage boy from Tokyo, after the two inexplicably begin waking up some mornings in each other’s bodies. For the first half of the film, the two teens work to navigate their bizarre situation so that their daily lives are disrupted as little as possible, before it eventually becomes clear that not only are they swapping bodies; they’re also swapping times. From there, it becomes a race against the clock as they hurtle towards a cataclysmic event that is in the past for one, and the future for the other. Yet despite the compelling time travel element, it’s Mitsuha’s and Taki’s unlikely relationship with each other that gives the film its heart, and lingers with viewers afterwards. 

“Avengers: Endgame” (2019) 

avengers-endgame

After the snap heard round the universe at the end of “Avengers: Infinity War,” there was really no place for Earth’s Mightiest Heroes to go other than back in time. Once the Avengers figure out that the only way to save the day is to retrieve the all-powerful Infinity Stones from various points in their past, “Avengers: Endgame” becomes a delightful tour through the Marvel Cinematic Universe, revisiting plots and places from over a decade’s worth of films in a way that pays off years of careful and expansive world building. It’s a plot that could only work within a long-running franchise, but in addition to being an excellent capper for the first three phases of the MCU, it’s also a satisfying time travel adventure in its own right, nodding to the many time travel films that have come before while also presenting its own unique spin on the genre.

movie about ship time travel

‘The Greatest Hits’ Tells the Most Original Time Travel Story in Years

Premiering at SXSW before its Hulu debut April 12, the time travel-centric love story combines great music with genuine romance—and reinvigorates a stale genre.

Coleman Spilde

Coleman Spilde

Entertainment Critic

Justin H. Min and Lucy Boynton in THE GREATEST HITS

Merie Weismiller Wallace

At this point, time travel movies are about as commonplace as reality dating shows. They’re everywhere, and that ubiquity has almost entirely diluted their initial novelty. How can you make something truly different than what another person made before when the concept has been milked dry? The answer: You can’t. The only remaining option is to construct it with more integrity than most do. Only then can you make something that doesn’t feel like a carbon copy, yanked from an assembly line.

Writer-director Ned Benson’s latest film, The Greatest Hits —which premiered at SXSW on March 14 and will be released in a limited theatrical window on April 5 before landing on Hulu on April 12—is the rare time travel movie that doesn’t feel like it’s arrived fresh from the factory. It barely feels like part of that genre at all, which is largely why Benson’s first film since 2014 avoids most of the snares that have debilitated other, superficially similar works. Looping through spacetime is merely a supplementary plot point to a story that’s really about how easily grief can be triggered, and why it can sometimes feel so good to sit in that cloud of painful sorrow for just a little longer. Benson’s film is a crafty yet subtle inversion of a stale genre. It moves the viewer and gets out while it’s ahead, aiming for maximum emotional impact over any flashy, absurd striving.

While The Greatest Hits is certainly not at the level of something like, say, Arrival when it comes to the ingeniousness of its plotting, it has a stirring scope that feels similar to Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 masterpiece. Think of this film as Arrival for the caffeine-dependent Coachella crowd; if that doesn’t pique your interest, I’m not sure what will. The movie finds Harriet (Lucy Boynton), a young music producer-turned-librarian, fiddling through her rows of vinyl records, looking for the next one to throw onto her turntable. Some are marked with slips that say “TESTED,” while a timeline of dates sits drawn on her wall, with sticky notes of scrawled-out messages taped up below each year.

Harriet is looking for Max (David Corenswet), or, more specifically, she’s looking for the song that was playing just before Max died. It's been a much trickier endeavor than she imagined, but since Harriet has already found the track that was on the radio when she and Max were hit by a car almost two years prior, it’s worth a shot. If she could discover the right one, maybe she could change their fate, and Max would still be alive and next to her, thumbing through their extensive wax collection on a Sunday afternoon.

Yes, listening to the right music can transport Harriet back in time, to a moment in her life with Max when a song was playing. Her trips only last for the duration of the track, making her mission even more difficult. What’s more, Harriet suffers debilitating neurological episodes every time she hears one of these songs while not in the safety of her own home. She falls to the ground and passes out, until her past self either shuts the music off or rides out the tune to its conclusion. It’s a good thing that wearing noise-canceling, over-ear headphones is a common practice for commuters in 2024—but just in case, Harriet has taken extra precautions to ensure that she won’t be triggered in an inconvenient space. If only triggers were subject to our whim, and not we to theirs.

Benson is fully aware that The Greatest Hits can’t dance around its preposterous concept, so he wisely leans into it, suggesting that Harriet’s experiences may just be the result of the brief coma she fell into after the crash with Max. Strangely, melding neurological anomalies with the ability to travel through time makes his film feel more realistic, which is further aided by Benson’s delicate, empathetic character writing. Harriet is a woman who wants to save her boyfriend, yes, but sometimes she just wants to see him again. Even a minute or two reunited with the love of your life can be enough to go on, and Benson understands that, as humans, we’re all a little masochistic. We willingly listen to songs that remind us of someone, or watch movies that will make us cry. We choose to consume art in a way that hurts us, because that pain is what makes the art so beautiful. Nothing can evoke a tapestry of emotions like the opening notes of a song that means something to you.

Boynton is as game for this irrational premise as Benson is, developing Harriet and the way she handles loss into a character that feels utterly familiar. Her emotions aren’t outsized, but they are pervasive. The grief is always there, and some days are better than others. It’s why she regularly attends a local support group led by a licensed psychiatrist (Retta, in a lovely, small performance), even if she doesn’t participate. It’s there where Harriet meets David (Justin H. Min), a sweet and similarly grief-stricken man who also has a penchant for vinyl. Their quick connection is organic, even when it needs to happen fast in a 96-minute movie. It’s almost as if they’ve met before.

As skilled as Benson’s compassionate script is his choice of needle drops to accompany the film, and the work of its music supervisor to make those audio cues happen. The Greatest Hits earns its title, unassumingly throwing out cuts from Beach House, Peggy Lee, Jamie XX, and more. Even using a leaked Lana Del Rey song that went so viral on TikTok that she properly released it on streaming somehow doesn’t feel cringey. Speaking of streaming, it’s best not to think about that aspect too hard. Why doesn’t Harriet just stream songs to speed up her journey to save Max, you ask? Uh, ever heard of being a romantic ? She’s a music producer with a pretty normal level of arrogance; of course, the warmth of vinyl will be the only thing that can push her into the past. As hard as the good folks at Dolby try, even Apple Music Spatial Audio hasn’t been able to bend the space-time continuum.

The idea of using musical triggers to recall grief and send someone back to a moment in time is a clever one, luminously executed in Benson’s film. Watching the film and feeling a true connection to this genre for the first time in a long time makes it all the more surprising that someone else hasn’t already done this story. But other filmmakers are trying too hard to find new ways into this rote concept, and often make a mess of themselves in the attempt. The Greatest Hits weaves us through Harriet’s experiences gradually, ensuring that its viewers won’t need a deeper scientific explanation if the emotional impact of the film’s story is compelling enough.

Benson’s confident script and enchanting, modest direction ensure that The Greatest Hits doesn’t bite off more than it can chew. It’s a movie with scope and ambition but not ego. Its humble nature keeps Benson’s characters from feeling pretentious in their love for deep-cut music and rare vinyl. The film celebrates these types of adoration without exalting them, and the diffident types of audiophiles who move about Harriet’s universe charm their way into a viewer’s heart. That resonance is so supremely critical to a time travel film. This genre hinges on forging an emotional connection to its audience. That relationship is what makes trekking through space and time a necessary experimentation with fate, and not an exhausting record that’s stuck on repeat.

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast  here .

READ THIS LIST

'The Adam Project' & 9 Best Time Travel Movies on Netflix

For more mind-bending time travel adventures.

Read update

No matter the time period, time travel movies have always been popular. Whether it is the latest Ryan Reynolds and Netflix collaboration The Adam Project or the sci-fi action masterpiece The Terminator , time travel fans are spoiled for choice. Netflix in particular has plenty of great movies in the genre worth visiting, and some of the best time travel movies on Netflix will have you watching them over and over again.

In Netflix time travel movie The Adam Project , Ryan Reynolds plays a fighter pilot from the future, who crash lands in the present and meets his 12-year-old self. Together they must save the world in a journey that harkens back to Amblin classics from the 1980s while featuring some great needle drops.

Time travel stories have always been a popular narrative choice, with the highest-grossing film of all time, Avengers: Endgame , fitting in the genre. Videogames such as Mortal Kombat 11 also use time travel to great effect. But with The Adam Project being a Netflix original, there are more time travel movies on Netflix to watch after seeing Reynolds quip his way through another memorable performance.

Updated on May 28, 2023, by Ty Weinert:

10 'naked' (2017).

Rob ( Marlon Wayans ) is about to marry the girl of his dreams, Megan ( Regina Hall ). But after a night out with his best friend results in Rob waking up naked in an elevator, he must race to the altar to make it in time. Failing that, Rob wakes up again in the elevator, realizing he is trapped in a time loop and must relive the hour over and over again.

Working like a mix of The Hangover and Groundhog Day , Naked will appeal to anyone who enjoyed those screwball comedies. While it is not one of the best time loop movies , it still offers some laughs and is a good enough way to kill an afternoon on the couch.

Watch on Netflix

9 'Captain Nova' (2021)

Like The Adam Project , Captain Nova follows a fighter pilot who is sent back in time to stop a catastrophe. Nova ( Kika Van De Vijver ) finds herself transformed into her younger self due to her journey through time, however, making it hard for adults to take her seriously as she warns them of the dangers to come.

Hailing from the Netherlands, Captain Nova makes for a nice change from the American movies that dominate the time travel genre on Netflix. Due to its protagonist's youthful transformation, Captain Nova is a kid-friendly take on the formula and can be enjoyed by the whole family.

8 'See You Yesterday' (2019)

Produced by legendary director Spike Lee , See You Yesterday follows two teenage scientists, who are attempting to create a time machine. After one of their older brothers is killed in a police shooting, the pair activate their machine to travel to the past and save him.

While still following the conventions of time travel movies, See You Yesterday stands out with a plot that focuses on relevant social issues. By bringing light to matters that are still plaguing society four years after release, the film is a unique choice within the time travel Netflix catalog.

7 'In the Shadow of the Moon' (2019)

Beginning in 1988, In the Shadow of the Moon follows Thomas Lockhart ( Boyd Holbrook ), a police officer determined to become a detective. When his city is plagued by a serial killer, Lockhart begins investigating, eventually discovering the killer comes back every nine years. As the case deepens, time travel eventually becomes a factor.

In the Shadow of the Moon feels like a callback to the detective thrillers of the '90s, like Se7en . While it does tend to lose focus as more outrageous plot points are introduced, In the Shadow of the Moon remains a solid choice for anyone looking to discover their next crime obsession.

6 'Synchronic' (2019)

Another quality entry in acclaimed duo Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson 's trippy shared universe , Synchronic stars Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan as paramedics and lifelong friends. After a new drug sweeps their city, resulting in the deaths of its users, the pair investigates after Dornan's daughter goes missing.

The film delves into time travel in ways that will not be spoiled here, but needless to say Synchronic is a trippy film with a central mystery that unravels over time. Both leads excel in their roles and share great chemistry, with Mackie, in particular, delivering a fantastic performance that shows what he can offer when given more meaty roles outside the MCU.

5 'ARQ' (2016)

Waking up to intruders breaking into his home, an engineer ( Robbie Amell ) finds himself trapped within a time loop. With each death sending him back to the start of the invasion, he works to defeat his pursuers and escape with his lover ( Rachael Taylor ).

ARQ works as a sci-fi spin on films such as Happy Death Day , with the audience learning new information alongside the protagonist with each subsequent loop and eventual death. While not as charming as Happy Death Day , ARQ still offers an enjoyable take on the genre.

4 'When We First Met' (2018)

When We First Met follows Adam DeVine , of Workaholics fame, as he repeatedly goes back in time to try and win over the girl of his dreams ( Alexandra Daddario ). Being a romantic comedy, the film stands apart from other time travel movies that focus on more serious consequences.

While We First Met does not offer much new to the genre, though DeVine gives an admirable performance to help carry the film. Fans of his stand-up or the aforementioned Workaholics should have a good time watching his numerous attempts to escape the hellish nightmare called "the friend zone."

3 'Long Story Short' (2021)

Waking up the morning after his wedding to discover that his life is jumping forward in time every few minutes, Teddy ( Rafe Spall ) is forced to use his dwindling time to stay with the woman he loves. With every jump causing them to drift further apart, time is running out for the bumbling lead.

Like When We First Met , Long Story Short uses time travel in a romantic comedy , albeit in a more urgent way. The Australian film was directed by Josh Lawson , known to audiences as Kano, the best part of the recent Mortal Kombat film.

2 'The Adam Project' (2022)

When fighter pilot Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds) travels from 2050 to 2012, he is forced to work together with his 12-year-old self in order to get back home and save his deceased wife Laura ( Zoe Saldana ). The two Adams end up going on a journey full of heart and humor as they travel through time.

The latest in the long line of big-budget blockbusters on Netflix, The Adam Project is one of the best free movies you can access on the service. Reynolds is always a charming lead, and along with Saldana, they are supported by a winning cast that includes Mark Ruffalo , Jennifer Garner , and Catherine Keener .

1 'Mirage' (2018)

When Vera ( Adriana Ugarte ) and her family move into a new home, they discover that a boy died there thirty years ago. Finding a way to communicate with the boy in the past, Vera warns him of his death and saves his life, only to change the flow of time in the process.

As the best time travel movie Netflix has to offer, Mirage is a compelling mystery thriller from Spain. As more circumstances of the boy's death emerge, greater narrative threads are pulled into this time-bending journey, with Ugarte delivering a great performance as the central character.

NEXT: The Best Time Travel Movies Ever Made, Ranked

Esquire

We Ranked the 35 Best Time Travel Movies Ever

Posted: September 2, 2023 | Last updated: September 2, 2023

<p>Time travel movies often make for the most mind-numbing <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/g19609370/best-moments-sci-fi-movies/">sci-fi films</a> with paradoxes aplenty. But it’s those confusing temporal gymnastics that make them so fun. We’ve rounded up our favorites, from classic films like <em><a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a33458961/time-travel-methods-quantum-mechanics/">Back to the Future</a></em> and <em>Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure</em> to more recent flicks like <em>Arrival </em>and <em><a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a13386/this-is-why-interstellar-had-to-be-shot-in-imax-17415171/">Interstellar</a>,</em> which left our minds tangled in knots. </p><p>These are the 35 best sci-fi films that explore the fluidity of time.</p><p><strong> 🤯 You love mind-bending science. So do we. <a href="https://join.popularmechanics.com/pubs/HR/POP/POP1_Plans.jsp?cds_page_id=250088&cds_mag_code=POP&cds_tracking_code=edit-best-time-travel-movies">Let’s nerd out over it together.</a></strong></p>

Time travel movies often make for the most mind-numbing sci-fi films with paradoxes aplenty. But it’s those confusing temporal gymnastics that make them so fun. We’ve rounded up our favorites, from classic films like Back to the Future and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure to more recent flicks like Arrival and Interstellar , which left our minds tangled in knots.

These are the 35 best sci-fi films that explore the fluidity of time.

<p>Jean-Claude Van Damme is a cop who polices time. Don’t need to say more, but I guess I will. In 1994, time travel becomes a favorite pastime of criminals, and timecops like Van Damme must catch any chronal abusers and bring them to justice. As is often the case, Van Damme’s own time-muckery with the past creates different and divergent timelines that not even Doc Brown’s chalkboard could work out. But <em>Timecop</em> isn’t exactly a film that’s going for narrative clarity here.</p>

35. Timecop

Jean-Claude Van Damme is a cop who polices time. Don’t need to say more, but I guess I will. In 1994, time travel becomes a favorite pastime of criminals, and timecops like Van Damme must catch any chronal abusers and bring them to justice. As is often the case, Van Damme’s own time-muckery with the past creates different and divergent timelines that not even Doc Brown’s chalkboard could work out. But Timecop isn’t exactly a film that’s going for narrative clarity here.

<p>Although most people would file this film under "flop," <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Final-Countdown-Kirk-Douglas/dp/B0072V6MIO/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">The Final Countdown</a></em> contains such an amazing premise it has to be recognized. The crew of the <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a14456936/that-time-the-us-navy-had-a-close-encounter-with-a-ufo/">U.S.S. <em>Nimitz</em></a> enters a storm vortex and is transported to <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a24181/after-75-years-pearl-harbor-still-holds-a-few-mysteries/">Pearl Harbor</a> in 1941, turning a favorite imaginary wargame scenario into real life. Although the actual film elements aren't necessarily memorable, it does give us an incredibly <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a22690208/us-navy-dismantling-uss-enterprise-nuclear-disposal/">good look at the <em>Nimitz</em></a> (the film was shot on the actual carrier).</p><p>We tossed in <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Philadelphia-Experiment-Michael-Pare/dp/B018ADIX3Y?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">The Philadelphia Experiment</a></em> at the same spot, since it's essentially the reverse of <em>The Final Countdown</em>.</p>

34. The Final Countdown / The Philadelphia Experiment

Although most people would file this film under “flop,” The Final Countdown contains such an amazing premise it has to be recognized. The crew of the U.S.S. Nimitz enters a storm vortex and is transported to Pearl Harbor in 1941, turning a favorite imaginary war-game scenario into real life. Although the actual film elements aren’t necessarily memorable, it does give us an incredibly good look at the Nimitz (the film was shot on the actual carrier).

We tossed in The Philadelphia Experiment at the same spot, since it’s essentially the reverse of The Final Countdown .

<p>By the time director Barry Sonnenfeld directed <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Men-Black-3-Will-Smith/dp/B009HEJXFS?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Men in Black 3</a></em> in 2012, the franchise was 15 years removed from its fun and campy original, and <em>Men in Black 2</em> had sucked out much of the charm. That's why <em>MiB 3</em>, despite its faults, is still a surprising underdog of a film.</p><p>Agent J (Will Smith) goes back in time to <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/g1767/how-sci-fi-movies-can-save-us-from-aliens/">stop an alien from mucking in the past</a> and killing Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones/Josh Brolin). The film recaptures much of the original's fun, and Josh Brolin's portrayal of a young Tommy Lee Jones playing Agent K is simply awe-inspiring. Honestly, that acting work alone earns this spot for <em>MiB 3.</em></p>

33. Men in Black 3

By the time director Barry Sonnenfeld directed Men in Black 3 in 2012, the franchise was 15 years removed from its fun and campy original, and Men in Black 2 had sucked out much of the charm. That’s why MiB 3 , despite its faults, is still a surprising underdog of a film.

Agent J (Will Smith) goes back in time to stop an alien from mucking up the past and killing Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones/Josh Brolin). The film recaptures much of the original’s fun, and Josh Brolin’s portrayal of a young Tommy Lee Jones playing Agent K is simply awe-inspiring. Honestly, that acting work alone earns this spot for MiB 3.

<p>Sort of like <em><a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a23414/alien-life-red-dwarfs/">E.T.</a></em>, but with time travel. What <em>Flight of the Navigator </em>lacks in a substantial plot, it more than makes up for in charm. </p><p>David Scott Freeman falls into a ravine and is knocked unconscious—for 8 years. Although he doesn't age, everyone he knows does, and he soon finds he's part of something much larger. It's a fun film that will never outshine any Spielberg classics, but its campiness is too genuine to ignore.</p>

32. Flight of the Navigator

Sort of like E.T. , but with time travel. What Flight of the Navigator lacks in a substantial plot, it more than makes up for in charm.

David Scott Freeman falls into a ravine and is knocked unconscious—for eight years. Although he doesn’t age, everyone he knows does, and he soon finds he’s part of something much larger. It’s a fun film that will never outshine any Spielberg classics, but its campiness is too genuine to ignore.

<p>H.G. Wells, Jack the Ripper, and time travel... <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Time-After-Malcolm-McDowell/dp/B001BLM15O/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">that's it</a>. Just click the arrow.</p>

31. Time After Time

H.G. Wells, Jack the Ripper, and time travel... that’s it . Just click the arrow.

<p>A film with perhaps the lowest budget on this list, <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Timecrimes-Karra-Elejalde/dp/B0023M0GW0/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Timecrimes</a> </em>is a Spanish-language movie that follows a typical time travel trope (many copies of one person causing major problems) but creates 92 minutes of truly enjoyable cinema. The fun moments of <em>Timecrimes</em> are the reveal after reveal after reveal, which snowballs into a fascinating plot.</p>

30. Timecrimes

A film with perhaps the lowest budget on this list, Timecrimes is a Spanish-language movie that follows a typical time travel trope (many copies of one person causing major problems) but creates 92 minutes of truly enjoyable cinema. The fun moments of Timecrimes are the reveal after reveal after reveal, which snowballs into a fascinating plot.

<p><em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Source-Code-Jake-Gyllenhaal/dp/B0053F042G/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Source Code</a> </em>is like <em><a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a2565/4247410/">Groundhog Day</a> </em>and <em><a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/g1822/the-real-military-tech-behind-edge-of-tomorrows-guns-and-gadgets/">Edge of Tomorrow</a> </em>with a twist. Instead of going back in time as himself, Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) enters the body of someone else as he tries to stop a mass murder attempt. What the film lacks in depth, it more than makes up for in pulse-pumping action, and the premise itself is a refreshing take on the usual time travel idea.</p><p>It will likely never be considered an example of high science fiction, but as far as time travel goes, it gets good grades.</p>

29. Source Code

Source Code is like Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow with a twist. Instead of going back in time as himself, Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) enters the body of someone else as he tries to stop a mass murder attempt. What the film lacks in depth, it more than makes up for in pulse-pumping action, and the premise itself is a refreshing take on the usual time travel idea.

It will likely never be considered an example of high science fiction, but as far as time travel goes, it gets good grades.

<p>Perfect amounts creepy and perplexing, <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Donnie-Darko-Jake-Gyllenhaal/dp/B002MGGM9I/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Donnie Darko</a></em> is another strange example of time travel, which is why it belongs on this list all the more. Darko (Gyllenhaal again) is a high school kid with a less-than-sunny disposition. But when he begins seeing frightening hallucinations of a deranged and grotesque rabbit, things slowly begin to unravel, going from bad to weird pretty quickly.</p><p>For such a small-budget film (that was almost released straight to home video!) it's made <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/g869/10-classic-drive-ins-that-are-here-to-stay/">an outsized impact</a> on science fiction and indie filmmaking. It's a great movie, but also a polarizing one.</p>

28. Donnie Darko

Perfect amounts creepy and perplexing, Donnie Darko is another strange example of time travel, which is why it belongs on this list all the more. Darko (Gyllenhaal again) is a high school kid with a less-than-sunny disposition. But when he begins seeing frightening hallucinations of a deranged and grotesque rabbit, things slowly begin to unravel, going from bad to weird pretty quickly.

For such a small-budget film (that was almost released straight to home video!) it’s made an outsized impact on science fiction and indie filmmaking. It’s a great movie, but also a polarizing one.

<p>Director Colin Trevorrow’s debut film <em>Safety Not Guaranteed</em> follows three journalists—well, one journalist and two interns—on a road trip to meet the eccentric Kenneth (Mark Duplass), who placed an ad in a local newspaper looking for a time-travel companion. Although at its heart a romantic comedy, the film explores human perception of time and the indelible regrets, traumas, and even fantasies that fill our memories. Although the idea of actual time travel plays a significant role in the film, it’s used mostly as a symbol to analyze the importance of being present and always looking with hope toward the future.</p>

27. Safety Not Guaranteed

Director Colin Trevorrow’s debut film Safety Not Guaranteed follows three journalists—well, one journalist and two interns—on a road trip to meet the eccentric Kenneth (Mark Duplass), who placed an ad in a local newspaper looking for a time-travel companion. Although at its heart a romantic comedy, the film explores human perception of time and the indelible regrets, traumas, and even fantasies that fill our memories. Although the idea of actual time travel plays a significant role in the film, it’s used mostly as a symbol to analyze the importance of being present and always looking with hope toward the future.

<p>Smashing together the old X-Men guard with the new is what makes <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/X-Men-Days-Future-James-McAvoy/dp/B00KIGRRRU/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">X-Men: Days of Future Past</a> </em>one of the more <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a10581/x-men-days-of-future-past-we-will-already-loved-this-movie-16822782/">successful cinematic outings</a> for the mutant team.</p><p>In the film, Kitty Pryde sends Wolverine back through time to stop apocalyptic events from unfolding. Maybe that's not the most original plot, but it's one that's too fun to resist (if only for the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NnyVc8r2SM">Quicksilver scene alone</a>).</p>

26. X-Men: Days of Future Past

Smashing together the old X-Men guard with the new is what makes X-Men: Days of Future Past one of the more successful cinematic outings for the mutant team.

In the film, Kitty Pryde sends Wolverine back through time to stop apocalyptic events from unfolding. Maybe that’s not the most original plot, but it’s one that’s too fun to resist (if only for the Quicksilver scene alone ).

<p>Based on Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi short story All You Zombies, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Predestination-Ethan-Hawke/dp/B00QGKXTGU?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Predestination</a> is a head trip, like any proper time travel film should be. With a strong performance from Ethan Hawke and a script that will keep you guessing, the film is one of the more solid time travel entries in recent years and is a film that garners a rewatch so you can catch every detail.</p>

25. Predestination

Based on Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi short story “All You Zombies,” Predestination is a head trip, like any proper time travel film should be. With a strong performance from Ethan Hawke and a script that will keep you guessing, the film is one of the more solid time travel entries in recent years and is a film that garners a rewatch so you can catch every detail.

<p><em><a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/g1035/5-ways-star-trek-tng-would-be-different-if-they-made-it-now/">The Next Generation</a>'s</em> big screen outings are a mixed bag, to put it nicely, but the best film by far is the time-bending <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-VIII-First-Contact/dp/B001XULSG6/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Star Trek: First Contact</a></em>. Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise-E travel to the past to prevent the cybernetic Borg from mucking with Earth's history. It's a good film all by itself, but even more excellent if you're an invested <em>Star Trek</em> fan. We get to see huge, never-before-seen moments in the <em>Star Trek</em> universe, like humanity's first encounter with the Vulcans, and the Borg are just an excellent adversary.</p>

24. Star Trek: First Contact

The Next Generation ’s big screen outings are a mixed bag, to put it nicely, but the best film by far is the time-bending Star Trek: First Contact . Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise-E travel to the past to prevent the cybernetic Borg from mucking with Earth’s history. It’s a good film all by itself, but even more excellent if you’re an invested Star Trek fan. We get to see huge, never-before-seen moments in the Star Trek universe, like humanity’s first encounter with the Vulcans, and the Borg are just an excellent adversary.

<p>"Shop Smart. Shop, S-Mart."</p><p>Depending on who you ask, Sam Raimi's <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Army-Darkness-Bruce-Campbell/dp/B002KC8BSO/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Army of Darkness</a></em> is either the best sequel to any film ever, or the worst—there isn't much room in between. The chainsaw-toting Ashley "Ash" Williams is tossed back to medieval times where he must fight off a horde of <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/g30714252/best-zombie-movies/">undead monstrosities</a> with only his ingenuity and his "boom stick."</p><p>Even though it's slapstick comedy with wonderfully B-movie action sequences, it remains an absolute joy to watch.</p>

23. Army of Darkness

“Shop Smart. Shop, S-Mart.”

Depending on who you ask, Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness is either the best sequel to any film ever, or the worst—there isn’t much room in between. The chainsaw-toting Ashley “Ash” Williams is tossed back to medieval times where he must fight off a horde of undead monstrosities with only his ingenuity and his “boom stick.”

Even though it’s slapstick comedy with wonderfully B-movie action sequences, it remains an absolute joy to watch.

<p>In this <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Marvel-Studios-Doctor-Strange-UHD/dp/B07YF3B4JJ?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Marvel sleeper hit</a>, Stephen Strange (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) becomes the Sorcerer Supreme, and in typical Marvel fashion, is tasked with saving the world. Although the visuals alone are worthing giving this movie a shot, its manipulation of time as a superpower rather than a world-altering plot device is what sets it apart from the rest.</p>

22. Doctor Strange

In this Marvel sleeper hit , Stephen Strange (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) becomes the Sorcerer Supreme, and in typical Marvel fashion, is tasked with saving the world. Although the visuals alone are worthing giving this movie a shot, its manipulation of time as a superpower rather than a world-altering plot device is what sets it apart from the rest.

<p>Although not technically time travel (long stretches of cryo-sleep instead), <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Sleeper-Woody-Allen/dp/B00950WLDK?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Sleeper </a></em>is Woody Allen’s sci-fi comedy that’s absurd, hilarious, and strangely poignant. Miles Monroe is a jazz musician and health-food-store owner who wakes up in the 22nd century after a botched gall bladder operation. The world is, as you’d expect, quite different, and Monroe is a hilarious character to explore it with.</p>

21. Sleeper

Although not technically time travel (long stretches of cryo-sleep instead), Sleeper is Woody Allen’s sci-fi comedy that’s absurd, hilarious, and strangely poignant. Miles Monroe is a jazz musician and health-food-store owner who wakes up in the 22nd century after a botched gall bladder operation. The world is, as you’d expect, quite different, and Monroe is a hilarious character to explore it with.

<p>Tenet is an “A for effort” addition to this list. The film has all the trappings of a Christopher Nolan flick—stunning cinematography, a star-studded cast, head-scratching plot points, etc., etc. And Tenet does take time travel movies one step further with the introduction of time inversion, the idea that objects and people can travel into the past at the same temporal pace that they can travel into the future. Although a fascinating concept, it’s also a confusing one, which is why Nolan spends much of the film’s 150-minute runtime explaining what’s going on. Tenet is a fascinating time travel story though ultimately one a bit lost in its own exposition.</p>

Tenet is an “A for effort” addition to this list. The film has all the trappings of a Christopher Nolan flick—stunning cinematography, a star-studded cast, head-scratching plot points, etc., etc. And Tenet does take time travel movies one step further with the introduction of time inversion, the idea that objects and people can travel into the past at the same temporal pace that they can travel into the future. Although a fascinating concept, it’s also a confusing one, which is why Nolan spends much of the film’s 150-minute runtime explaining what’s going on. Tenet is a fascinating time travel story though ultimately one a bit lost in its own exposition.

<p>This 2006 <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Who-Leapt-Through-Time/dp/B01GJ9EBSW?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">award-winning anime</a> is a coming-of-age time travel story that even rivals <em>Back to the Future</em>. After schoolgirl Mokoto Konno discovers a time travel device that gives her the power to leap through time, she uses her new gifts for mundane high school stuff, passing tests, avoiding awkward conversations, and to address her chronic lateness.</p><p>When she learns what her time traveling does to others around her, and as the seriousness of her time jumping becomes more apparent, the film blossoms into an important story about loss and friendship.</p>

19. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

This 2006 award-winning anime is a coming-of-age time travel story that even rivals Back to the Future . After schoolgirl Mokoto Konno discovers a time travel device that gives her the power to leap through time, she uses her new gifts for mundane high school stuff, passing tests, avoiding awkward conversations, and to address her chronic lateness.

When she learns what her time traveling does to others around her, and as the seriousness of her time jumping becomes more apparent, the film blossoms into an important story about loss and friendship.

<p>Crime noir meets science fiction in Rian Johnson's <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Looper-Joseph-Gordon-Levitt/dp/B00A9X9TIW/ref=sr_1_1?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1494859475&sr=1-1&keywords=looper&tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Looper</a></em>, and the match is magical. In a future where time travel is invented and immediately made illegal, crime syndicates use the technology for time-hopping assassinations. But to tie off some temporal inconsistencies, the assassin must eventually become the target—and that's where things get interesting. This isn't flawless sci-fi, but it's certainly inventive. </p>

Crime noir meets science fiction in Rian Johnson’s Looper , and the match is magical. In a future where time travel is invented and immediately made illegal, crime syndicates use the technology for time-hopping assassinations. But to tie off some temporal inconsistencies, the assassin must eventually become the target—and that’s where things get interesting. This isn’t flawless sci-fi, but it’s certainly inventive.

<p>On its surface, the German film <em>Run Lola Run</em> is about a blazingly red-headed woman running through the streets of Berlin in an attempt to save her boyfriend’s life. However, the twist is that once Lola reaches a dead-end (sometimes literally) in one of her runs, the film starts over from the beginning and Lola runs through Berlin once again, only this time small changes in her path create largely divergent outcomes by the film’s end. Although time is more of a thematic device than a strictly plot-driven one in Run Lola Run, its ruminations on time and the exploration of the <a href="https://www.americanscientist.org/article/understanding-the-butterfly-effect">Butterfly Effect</a>, the idea that small incidents can have lasting repercussions, makes <em>Run Lola Run</em> one of the most unique films on this list.</p>

17. Run Lola Run

On its surface, the German film Run Lola Run is about a blazingly red-headed woman running through the streets of Berlin in an attempt to save her boyfriend’s life. However, the twist is that once Lola reaches a dead-end (sometimes literally) in one of her runs, the film starts over from the beginning and Lola runs through Berlin once again, only this time small changes in her path create largely divergent outcomes by the film’s end. Although time is more of a thematic device than a strictly plot-driven one in Run Lola Run, its ruminations on time and the exploration of the Butterfly Effect , the idea that small incidents can have lasting repercussions, makes Run Lola Run one of the most unique films on this list.

<p>What happens when the big purple monster man annihilates half the population? Time travel, baby. Tony Stark and gang concoct a convoluted plan that’ll save the universe from being cleaved in two, including some very inventive scenes that play with time travel. Like most time travel plots, <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Marvel-Studios-Avengers-Robert-Downey/dp/B07R21NC3J?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C10060.g.3086%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Endgame</a> </em>creates more questions than it answers, but it’s best to just sit back and enjoy.</p>

16. Avengers: Endgame

What happens when the big purple monster man annihilates half the population? Time travel, baby. Tony Stark and gang concoct a convoluted plan that’ll save the universe from being cleaved in two, including some very inventive scenes that play with time travel. Like most time travel plots, Endgame creates more questions than it answers, but it’s best to just sit back and enjoy.

<p>Like iconic director Stanley Kubrick, Christopher Nolan loves to hop around genres. Whether a superhero flick, a magical period piece, or a psychological thriller, Nolan has demonstrated time and again that he knows how to make a movie. While <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Interstellar-Matthew-McConaughey/dp/B00TU9UO1W/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Interstellar</a></em> doesn't stand up to Kubrick's sci-fi opus <em>2001</em>, it's a fascinating look into faster-than-light travel and does due diligence to present the theories behind this kind of travel as accurately as possible.</p><p>In the film, Joseph Cooper leaves Earth in search of another habitable planet. After some troubling deep space encounters, Cooper must somehow send a message to his daughter back on Earth in order to save humanity. It's a fascinating idea and Nolan's treatment of the material makes for a great two-and-a-half hours of sci-fi.</p>

15. Interstellar

Like iconic director Stanley Kubrick, Christopher Nolan loves to hop around genres. Whether a superhero flick, a magical period piece, or a psychological thriller, Nolan has demonstrated time and again that he knows how to make a movie. While Interstellar doesn’t stand up to Kubrick’s sci-fi opus 2001 , it’s a fascinating look into faster-than-light travel and does due diligence to present the theories behind this kind of travel as accurately as possible.

In the film, Joseph Cooper leaves Earth in search of another habitable planet. After some troubling deep space encounters, Cooper must somehow send a message to his daughter back on Earth in order to save humanity. It’s a fascinating idea, and Nolan’s treatment of the material makes for a great two-and-a-half hours of sci-fi.

<p>When it comes to time travel fiction, nothing gets quite as iconic as <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Time-Machine-Rod-Taylor/dp/B000LJAVUO/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">The Time Machine</a></em>. Based on the novel by H.G. Wells, which coined the term "time machine," this 1960 film adaptation is a classic take on a classic story. H. George Wells travels through time and eventually to the year A.D. 802,701 where he meets the Eloi, Morlocks, and a world completely unlike his own.</p><p>The story itself might be old, but it never gets old.</p>

14. The Time Machine

When it comes to time travel fiction, nothing gets quite as iconic as The Time Machine . Based on the novel by H.G. Wells, which coined the term “time machine,” this 1960 film adaptation is a classic take on a classic story. H. George Wells travels through time and eventually to the year A.D. 802,701 where he meets the Eloi, Morlocks, and a world completely unlike his own.

The story itself might be old, but it never gets old.

<p>Based on the Japanese novel <em>All You Need Is Kill</em>, Doug Liman's <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Live-Die-Repeat-Edge-Tomorrow/dp/B00MUCX6AW/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Edge of Tomorrow</a></em> essentially takes the concept of <em>Groundhog Day </em>and applies it to a military fighting an overpowering alien race. Whereas Bill Murray's temporal nightmare is never quite explained, however, <em>Edge of Tomorrow</em> eventually reveals the reason why William Cage (<a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a32383118/tom-cruise-filming-movie-space-nasa-spacex/">Tom Cruise</a>) is stuck in a time loop. It's a film that is better than it has any right to be and another great example of time travel fiction done right.</p>

13. Edge of Tomorrow

Based on the Japanese novel All You Need Is Kill , Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow essentially takes the concept of Groundhog Day and applies it to a military fighting an overpowering alien race. Whereas Bill Murray’s temporal nightmare is never quite explained, however, Edge of Tomorrow eventually reveals the reason why William Cage ( Tom Cruise ) is stuck in a time loop. It’s a film that is better than it has any right to be and another great example of time-travel fiction done right.

<p>It's difficult to overstate the importance of <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Jetee-H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne-Chatelain-Davos-Hanich/dp/B00E7NDA5I?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">La Jetée</a></em> (French for <em>The Pier</em>) on the time travel genre. Described as a 28-minute-long "Photo Novel," the film focuses on man from an apocalyptic future who must find a past memory to save the future. This might sound familiar as Terry Gilliam expanded the idea in <em>The 12 Monkeys, </em>but has left an indelible mark on <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/g2/when-is-a-hit-not-a-hit-10-sci-fi-sleepers/">other sci-fi and time travel films</a> as well.</p>

12. La Jetée

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of La Jetée (French for The Pier ) on the time travel genre. Described as a 28-minute-long “Photo Novel,” the film focuses on man from an apocalyptic future who must find a past memory to save the future. This might sound familiar as Terry Gilliam expanded the idea in The 12 Monkeys, but has left an indelible mark on other sci-fi and time travel films as well.

<p>In <em>Groundhog Day</em>, disgruntled weatherman Phil Connors, played by the legendary Bill Murray, is forced to relive the same day over and over and <em>over</em>. Film experts have theorized Connors is trapped in the same day (the titular Groundhog Day) anywhere from <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/video/how-long-phil-connors-stuck-groundhog-day-093748930.html#:~:text=But%20for%20just%20how%20long,33%20years%20and%20350%20days.&text=WhatCulture.com%20worked%20out%20just,the%20same%20day%2012%2C395%20times.">33 years</a> to <a href="https://nationalpost.com/news/10000-years-heres-how-long-phil-connors-was-trapped-in-groundhog-day">tens of <em>thousands</em></a> of years. Although this time loop is never explained (it likely has more to do with the power of positivity than any sort of hard physics), the film nevertheless explores how such relentless temporal monotony—as well as listening to Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” on repeat—could possibly affect the human psyche.</p>

11. Groundhog Day

In Groundhog Day , disgruntled weatherman Phil Connors, played by the legendary Bill Murray, is forced to relive the same day over and over and over . Film experts have theorized Connors is trapped in the same day (the titular Groundhog Day) anywhere from 33 years to tens of thousands of years. Although this time loop is never explained (it likely has more to do with the power of positivity than any sort of hard physics), the film nevertheless explores how such relentless temporal monotony—as well as listening to Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” on repeat—could possibly affect the human psyche.

<p>We had more than a few arguments about whether <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a24998/director-blade-runner-dune/">Denis Villeneuve</a>'s <em>Arrival </em>should even have a place on this list. Its peculiar handling of time features no <em>physical</em> time traveling, but the idea of time's fluidity plays an increasingly larger role throughout the film and ultimately makes it one of the more memorable works of science fiction of the past decade. So here it is. </p>

10. Arrival

We had more than a few arguments about whether Denis Villeneuve ’s Arrival should even have a place on this list. Its peculiar handling of time features no physical time traveling, but the idea of time’s fluidity plays an increasingly larger role throughout the film and ultimately makes it one of the more memorable works of science fiction of the past decade. So here it is.

<p>This film is "most excellent." One of <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a19778/keanu-reaves-shooting-john-wick-two-practice/">Keanu Reeves</a>'s greatest achievements outside of <em>The Matrix</em>, 1989's <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Bill-Excellent-Adventure-Keanu-Reeves/dp/B002BREJXY/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure</a></em> is kind of stupid, and yet, scientifically impossible to hate. </p><p>Two less-than-studious high schoolers get their hands on a time machine and use it to make a stellar report for history class. Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Billy the Kid, Napoleon, Sigmund Freud, and Socrates are all brought into the future. I can't even imagine what kind of historical ramifications that would have, but it's best not to think about it.</p>

9. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

This film is “most excellent.” One of Keanu Reeves ’s greatest achievements outside of The Matrix , 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is kind of stupid, and yet, scientifically impossible to hate.

Two less-than-studious high schoolers get their hands on a time machine and use it to make a stellar report for history class. Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Billy the Kid, Napoleon, Sigmund Freud, and Socrates are all brought into the future. I can’t even imagine what kind of historical ramifications that would have, but it’s best not to think about it.

<p>Captain Kirk and crew <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-IV-Voyage-Home/dp/B001XUPGLY/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">must travel back 200 years</a> to 1986 to recover a humpback whale, which is extinct in the future, in order to stop an alien probe from annihilating Earth.</p><p>It's <em><a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/star-trek/">Star Trek</a></em>. It's time travel. It's whales. It's great.</p>

8. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Captain Kirk and crew must travel back 200 years to 1986 to recover a humpback whale, which is extinct in the future, in order to stop an alien probe from annihilating Earth.

It’s Star Trek . It’s time travel. It’s whales. It’s great.

<p>In the incredibly capable directing hands of <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a9602/free-floating-feel-how-gravity-simulates-zero-g-16016504/">Alfonso Cuarón</a>, the <em>Harry Potter </em>series went from a children's franchise to something much more with <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Potter-Prisoner-Azkaban-Daniel-Radcliffe/dp/B00271DNP4/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Prisoner of Azkaban</a></em>. With <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a1940/4219670/">time turner</a> in hand, Harry and Hermione's temporal adventure to save Hogwarts still stands as the absolute best film in the franchise.</p>

7. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

In the incredibly capable directing hands of Alfonso Cuarón , the Harry Potter series went from a children’s franchise to something much more with Prisoner of Azkaban . With time turner in hand, Harry and Hermione’s temporal adventure to save Hogwarts still stands as the absolute best film in the franchise.

<p>Most <em>Planet of the Apes</em> films (except for the <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/news/a26855/war-for-the-planet-of-the-apes-vfx/">recent prequel series</a>) are time travel films, but the first is the best. With a screenplay from sci-fi legend Rod Serling, 1968's <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Planet-Apes-Charlton-Heston/dp/B0053EZWZQ/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Planet of the Apes</a> </em>is just a monumental film in not only time travel fiction, but also science fiction in general. Charlton Heston plays George Taylor, who crash lands on a mysterious planet after traveling near light speeds. What unfolds is a story you likely know with an ending that's become enshrined in popular culture.</p>

6. Planet of the Apes

Most Planet of the Apes films (except for the recent prequel series ) are time travel films, but the first is the best. With a screenplay from sci-fi legend Rod Serling, 1968’s Planet of the Apes is just a monumental film in not only time travel fiction, but also science fiction in general. Charlton Heston plays George Taylor, who crash lands on a mysterious planet after traveling near light speeds. What unfolds is a story you likely know with an ending that’s become enshrined in popular culture.

<p>Inspired by the 1962 French short film <em>La Jetée</em>, <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/12-Monkeys-Joseph-Melito/dp/B000ICXQF6/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">12 Monkeys</a></em> is about a deadly virus and a last-ditch effort to save humanity. James Cole (Bruce Willis) is sent back in time to hopefully avoid his own nightmarish future. What follows is <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/g2691/movies-inspired-by-philip-k-dick/">two hours of sci-fi noir excellence</a> with incredibly deep artistic talent with Brad Pitt, Christopher Plummer, and Terry Gilliam behind the camera. The film remains one of the best examples of time travel fiction and is ubiquitously beloved by all sci-fi buffs.</p>

5. 12 Monkeys

Inspired by the 1962 French short film La Jetée , 12 Monkeys is about a deadly virus and a last-ditch effort to save humanity. James Cole (Bruce Willis) is sent back in time to hopefully avoid his own nightmarish future. What follows is two hours of sci-fi noir excellence with incredibly deep artistic talent, with Brad Pitt, Christopher Plummer, and Terry Gilliam behind the camera. The film remains one of the best examples of time travel fiction and is ubiquitously beloved by all sci-fi buffs.

<p>Considered part of Terry Gilliam's "trilogy of imagination" (which also includes the incredible sci-fi film <em>Brazil),</em> <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Time-Bandits-John-Cleese/dp/B0040J4MQK/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Time Bandits</a></em> is a cinematic oddity that's undeniably brilliant. The main character Kevin joins six dwarves who repair the fabric of time for the Supreme Being, and also pocket some treasure. This film hops all over the timeline and truly is an example of the nearly endless bounds of Gilliam's imagination.</p>

4. Time Bandits

Considered part of Terry Gilliam’s “trilogy of imagination” (which also includes the incredible sci-fi film Brazil), Time Bandits is a cinematic oddity that’s undeniably brilliant. The main character Kevin joins six dwarves who repair the fabric of time for the Supreme Being, and also pocket some treasure. This film hops all over the timeline and truly is an example of the nearly endless bounds of Gilliam’s imagination.

<p><em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Terminator-Arnold-Schwarzenegger/dp/B00153ZC8Q/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">The Terminator</a></em> and <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Terminator-2-Judgment-Arnold-Schwarzenegger/dp/B000JNN0SM/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Terminator 2: Judgement Day</a></em> are perfect pieces of science fiction. We all know the story. A future T-800 Model 101 Terminator, iconically played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is sent back to 1984 Los Angeles with orders to kill Sarah Connor, the future mother of <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a15454/nsa-skynet-program/">Skynet's most fearsome enemy</a>, John Connor. Although Schwarzenegger plays the villain in James Cameron's original masterpiece, he reprises the role in 1991's <em>T2—</em>this time as the hero.</p><p>Both films are great, but since they each use the same time travel schtick (naked person/robot + time bubble thingie), we're just going to put them at the same spot.</p>

3. The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day

The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day are perfect pieces of science fiction. We all know the story. A future T-800 Model 101 Terminator, iconically played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is sent back to 1984 Los Angeles with orders to kill Sarah Connor, the future mother of Skynet’s most fearsome enemy , John Connor. Although Schwarzenegger plays the villain in James Cameron’s original masterpiece, he reprises the role in 1991’s T2— this time as the hero.

Both films are great, but since they each use the same time travel schtick (naked person/robot + time bubble thingie), we’re just going to put them at the same spot.

<p>Although <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Primer-Shane-Carruth/dp/B00AR06KN4/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Primer</a></em> is the clear "art house" pick on this list, it's a film with so much ingenuity, it's hard not to watch in amazement. Directed by Shane Carruth, <em>Primer</em> is basically what it would be like if Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, instead of <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a4395/pm-remembers-steve-jobs-how-his-philosophy-changed-technology-6507117/">inventing Apple in their garage</a>, discovered time travel. </p><p>Two engineers, Aaron and Abe, build a machine that essential creates a time loop. But cumulative uses of the box soon creates problems as Aaron and Abe begin <a href="http://io9.gizmodo.com/5847205/the-definitive-graph-of-all-of-primers-intersecting-timelines">wreaking havoc on the timeline</a>, creating multiple versions of themselves.</p><p>It's not the most flashy or Hollywood-friendly film on this list, but it is so refreshingly different that it easily earns its place among the very best. </p>

Although Primer is the clear “art house” pick on this list, it’s a film with so much ingenuity, it’s hard not to watch in amazement. Directed by Shane Carruth, Primer is basically what it would be like if Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, instead of inventing Apple in their garage , discovered time travel.

Two engineers, Aaron and Abe, build a machine that essentially creates a time loop. But cumulative uses of the box soon creates problems as Aaron and Abe begin wreaking havoc on the timeline , creating multiple versions of themselves.

It’s not the most flashy or Hollywood-friendly film on this list, but it is so refreshingly different that it easily earns its place among the very best.

<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Back-Future-Michael-J-Fox/dp/B009KSPJGS/?tag=syndication-20&ascsubtag=%5Bartid%7C2089.g.35650609%5Bsrc%7Cmsn-us">Could there really be any other?</a></p><p>In 1985, Robert Zemeckis created a film and a subsequent franchise with so much heart and imagination that no other time travel film has ever matched it. Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox, escapes to 1955 and accidentally alters the timeline. He and scientist Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) have to team up to set things right again. Every role feels perfectly cast and every moment is as memorable as the next. It also happens to have <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a17862/back-to-the-future-time-machines-schematics/">one of the coolest time machines in sci-fi history</a>. One car company is even <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a25938392/inside-delorean-motor-company/">trying to resurrect the famous ride</a>.</p><p>Although the sequels would never quite reach to the original, they certainly didn't damage the trilogy, which remains one of the best in cinema. And sure, there are a lot of <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a33458961/time-travel-methods-quantum-mechanics/">plot points you could pick apart</a> ( "Wow, doesn't our son Marty look just like our good friend Marty from 1955?!"), but no time travel movie perfectly cements <a href="https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/g1269/10-anachronisms-in-great-sci-fi-movies/">all these narrative problems</a>. If anything, plot holes are an indispensable part of the genre.</p><p>Now if you don't mind, we're going to make like a tree, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDevd7O2fq8">get outta here</a>.</p>

1. Back to the Future

Could there really be any other?

In 1985, Robert Zemeckis created a film and a subsequent franchise with so much heart and imagination that no other time travel film has ever matched it. Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox, escapes to 1955 and accidentally alters the timeline. He and scientist Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) have to team up to set things right again. Every role feels perfectly cast and every moment is as memorable as the next. It also happens to have one of the coolest time machines in sci-fi history . One car company is even trying to resurrect the famous ride .

Although the sequels would never quite reach to the original, they certainly didn’t damage the trilogy, which remains one of the best in cinema. And sure, there are a lot of plot points you could pick apart (“Wow, doesn’t our son Marty look just like our good friend Marty from 1955?!”), but no time travel movie perfectly cements all these narrative problems . If anything, plot holes are an indispensable part of the genre.

Now if you don’t mind, we’re going to make like a tree, and get outta here .

More for You

Alan Dershowitz attends the Friars Club gala

Supreme Court To Disappoint Donald Trump, Former Attorney Says

Tapper calls out North Carolina Republican candidate over ‘disturbing’ tweet

Tapper calls out North Carolina Republican candidate over ‘disturbing’ tweet

Jeff Bezos just gave $100 million to actress Eva Longoria and the retired admiral who oversaw the capture of Osama bin Laden to use as they see fit

Jeff Bezos just gave $100 million to actress Eva Longoria and the retired admiral who oversaw the capture of Osama bin Laden to use as they see fit

Emma Flint smiling

I'm abrosexual - it took me 30 years to realise

Tyson Sends Mitts Flying In New Sparring Footage

Tyson Sends Mitts Flying In New Sparring Footage

News-Cola-2025

2025 Social Security COLA Estimate Rises

What we can VERIFY about the company that backed Trump’s $91.6M bond

What we can VERIFY about the company that backed Trump’s $91.6M bond

Joe Biden polling lead over Donald Trump

Joe Biden Takes Stunning Lead Over Donald Trump in Two Polls

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, left, and Amy Coney Barrett during a panel discussion at George Washington University on Tuesday.

The Supreme Court seems bitterly divided. Two justices say otherwise.

mcdonalds-drive-through_3

McDonald's menu adds new takes on Wendy's most popular offer

Records show that at most, around $550,000 in donations have been raised for Texas Gov. Abbott's migrant transportation program to date. - Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Texas governor predicted donations would pay for busing migrants out of state. He’s collected less than 1% of that cost

Secrets of ancient Herculaneum scroll deciphered by AI

Secrets of ancient Herculaneum scroll deciphered by AI

‘It’s every level of corruption’: Jared Kushner continues the Trump family grift overseas

‘It’s every level of corruption’: Jared Kushner continues the Trump family grift overseas

Can of Spam

9 False Facts About Spam We've All Believed

Supreme Court rules on government officials blocking constituents on social media

Supreme Court rules on government officials blocking constituents on social media

McDonald's sign

McDonald's Closes Amid Global IT Outage

House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) is among those leading the investigation into the Bidens.

The White House gives House Republicans a new reason to fight

A person's emotional reaction when waking up at night can affect sleep quality, according to neurologist Dr. Brandon Peters-Mathews of Virginia Mason Franciscan Health in Seattle. - Cavan Images/Getty Images/File

Why do I wake up at 3 a.m. every night?

Fears grow as residents at mouth of Amazon River face troublesome phenomenon: 'Nature is revolting'

Fears grow as residents at mouth of Amazon River face troublesome phenomenon: 'Nature is revolting'

Trump Campaign Ads Are Monetizing Pro-Nazi Content on Rumble

Trump Campaign Ads Are Monetizing Pro-Nazi Content on Rumble

Tim Travers and the Time Traveler's Paradox Review: Hilarious, Weird, and Witty Sci-Fi at Its Best

The time travel paradox is taken to its funniest extreme by a mad scientist who should not exist, and wants to find out why he still does.

  • Niche film tackles grandfather paradox with humor and heartwarming kick, expertly performed by veteran sci-fi comedy cast.
  • Low-budget sci-fi with elaborate explanation avoids plot holes, offers flair and witty humor in an entertaining and unique style.
  • Unique take on self-destruction delves into human condition, exploring personal growth and love within a mad scientist's time-travel quest.

Time travel is a premise in film that is notorious for confusing paradoxes and plot holes . It's an issue so common that many sci-fi fans simply accept it as inevitable, and most time-travel films don't even try to address it. Tim Travers and the Time Traveler's Paradox is an exception to this. Written and directed by Stimson Snead, this low-budget sci-fi film was a direct result of Snead's frustration with time travel movies and how they side-step the plot holes they create all too often.

Science geeks and sci-fi genre fans will especially love this niche film, which excels at what it set out to do. The specific paradox that Tim Travers and the Time Traveler's Paradox (try saying that five times fast) addresses is the "Grandfather Paradox," which asks: what if a time traveler went back in time and killed their grandfather? They would no longer exist, which means they would not be able to go back and kill their grandfather — thus, a paradox. Tim Travers is a reclusive mad scientist who, of course, makes a time machine. He goes back in time one minute and immediately kills his past self, kickstarting his own version of this paradox which Tim becomes determined to understand.

Small Budget, Big Ideas

Tim travers and the time traveler's paradox.

  • Hilarious and thoughtful approach to realistic time travel
  • A surprisingly heartwarming kick
  • Great performances from an expert sci-fi comedy cast
  • Occasionally gets bogged down in scientific logistics

​​​​Produced by North By Northwest, Tim Travers and the Time Traveler's Paradox is low-budget sci-fi in all its glory. It's surprisingly funny, decidedly irreverent, and even a bit gory. The film is based on a short made by Snead as a passion project, while he was waiting on another movie which fell through. Left with money, time, and an award-winning short in his hands, Snead decided to turn his script into a feature-length movie. Only 90 days later, shooting was wrapped. The overarching theme is best described by Snead in an interview with Washington Filmworks :

"This whole film is a comedy about self-destruction in which a guy is trying to find an explanation for something which has no explanation."

The movie relies heavily on Samuel Dunning, who plays Tim Travers — all 21 (or more) versions of him. Dunning portrays each one with passion and nuance that shows off his incredible acting skills. In many ways, this is an elaborate and well-executed one-man show reminiscent of Multiplicity , but with a time machine instead of cloning. With that said, the film also boasts an impressive supporting cast of veterans in both sci-fi and comedy: Felicia Day, Joel McHale, Keith David, and Danny Trejo.

A Sci-Fi Film That Addresses the Continuity Time Travel Paradox

While there are some time-travel films that actually make sense , even the best of them ( Primer , Timecrimes ) stumble over some plot holes. Tim Travers and the Time Traveler's Paradox does its best to avoid plot holes with an elaborate explanation involving continuity that is maintained by the observer, and therefore remains unbroken. While there might be one or two small questions left by the end, the film mostly pulls off its internal logic (as far as a non-physicist can tell). Most importantly, it does so with flair and witty humor.

Right away, the opening credits and music set the scene for a highly unique and stylized sci-fi film. As is only proper with sci-fi, the first scene shows us the time machine as Tim powers it up for the first time. The film then cuts between Tim's work on the machine and an interview he did with James Bunratty (Joel McHale), a conspiracy-minded radio host who is a parody of Alex Jones. He also meets Delilah, Bunratty's radio producer who is snarky, cynical, and played by Felicia Day in what may be the funniest and best role of her career so far.

5 Time Travel TV Shows That Were Easy to Follow (& 5 That Were Very Confusing)

Much like a mad scientist himself, director Stimson Snead was driven by his desire to see a time-travel movie that took its paradoxes to their most extreme — and hilarious — conclusion. Along with writing and producing the film, Snead co-stars as the frustrated assassin Helter, who questions his sanity after killing identical copies of Tim Travers multiple times.

Travers is hunted by this assassin because, in a humorous ode to Back to the Future , he stole plutonium from terrorists to power his machine. This is just a minor inconvenience to Travers, who cares only about understanding the paradox he created. He realizes that the speed of causality, which moves at the speed of light, cannot catch up to him where he currently is — one minute ahead of it (from his perspective).

Therefore, he must somehow adjust his time machine to create a door that will show him what the paradox looks like. Some of this gets a bit bogged down in jargon, (science nerds will be elated by Tim's theories and brainstorming), and most of it may go over the heads of audiences, but the attempt alone is impressive. Snead clearly cared about the "how" of time travel and set out to make a sci-fi movie that is (probably) scientifically accurate and finally satisfies questions about time travel that are usually glossed over.

A Hilarious and Weird Take on What It Means to Love Yourself

Snead introduces the story as a film that specifically does not use time travel as a way to explore the human condition... but he may be trying to fly under the radar here. After all, as interesting as a realistic time-travel story may be, it wouldn't be quite as memorable if Tim Travers wasn't also compelling, with a satisfying character arc that develops along with the plot.

Tim Travers is anti-social, to say the least. He thinks he doesn't need people, and his self-proclaimed mission statement in life is "to stand alone with God at the end of time, and tell the bastard off." Some part of Tim is clearly at war with his mad-scientist side though, because he gets the time machine working... and then goes on a date with Delilah.

The Best Time Travel Movies of the 2000s, Ranked

As Tim gathers 20 other versions of himself to try and adjust the time machine and witness the paradox, they each begin to change and grow apart. As the movie says, "A few hours can change a person." The version of Tim that follows up with Delilah later becomes more emotional and hopeful, even as his most aggressive version becomes more unhinged and cold.

Amid the side-splitting humor and in-depth science, the humanism of the plot sneaks up on viewers. Even at first, the idea of "loving oneself" is more literal — and weird and hilarious — than meaningful. But that doesn't stop the movie's hidden message from shining through: not only is it possible to learn to love yourself, it is also possible to love and forgive the deepest, darkest versions of you. Similar to how Everything, Everywhere, All At Once approached nihilism in the face of the multiverse and emerged as a story about family, love, and the meaning of life, Tim Travers and the Time Traveler's Paradox evolves into a story about loneliness, loving oneself, and hope — despite Stimson Snead's insistence that it is just about the time travel.

Audiences at the Cinequest Film Festival will be able to see Tim Travers and the Time Traveler's Paradox on Saturday, March 9 at 7:00 p.m. at the Hammer Theatre Center in San Jose, and Wednesday, March 13 at 2:20 p.m. at the same theater. You can find tickets and more information here .

  • Copy from this list
  • Report this list

Top 30 Favourite Ship/Boat Movies

  • Movies or TV
  • IMDb Rating
  • In Theaters
  • Release Year

1. The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

PG | 117 min | Action, Adventure, Drama

A group of passengers must embark on a harrowing struggle for survival after a rogue wave capsizes their cruise ship at sea.

Director: Ronald Neame | Stars: Gene Hackman , Ernest Borgnine , Shelley Winters , Red Buttons

Votes: 48,984 | Gross: $84.56M

2. A Night to Remember (1958)

Not Rated | 123 min | Drama, History

On her maiden voyage in April 1912, the supposedly unsinkable RMS Titanic strikes an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean.

Director: Roy Ward Baker | Stars: Kenneth More , Ronald Allen , Robert Ayres , Honor Blackman

Votes: 17,051

3. Ghost Ship (2002)

R | 91 min | Horror, Mystery, Thriller

A salvage crew discovers a long-lost 1962 passenger ship floating lifeless in a remote region of the Bering Sea, and soon notices that its long-dead inhabitants may still be on board.

Director: Steve Beck | Stars: Julianna Margulies , Gabriel Byrne , Ron Eldard , Desmond Harrington

Votes: 108,615 | Gross: $30.11M

4. Greyhound (2020)

PG-13 | 91 min | Action, Drama, History

Several months after the U.S. entry into World War II, an inexperienced U.S. Navy commander must lead an Allied convoy being stalked by a German submarine wolf pack.

Director: Aaron Schneider | Stars: Tom Hanks , Elisabeth Shue , Stephen Graham , Matt Helm

Votes: 113,610

5. Titanic (1997)

PG-13 | 194 min | Drama, Romance

A seventeen-year-old aristocrat falls in love with a kind but poor artist aboard the luxurious, ill-fated R.M.S. Titanic.

Director: James Cameron | Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio , Kate Winslet , Billy Zane , Kathy Bates

Votes: 1,273,436 | Gross: $659.33M

6. In the Heart of the Sea (2015)

PG-13 | 122 min | Action, Adventure, Biography

A recounting of a New England whaling ship's sinking by a giant whale in 1820, an experience that later inspired the great novel Moby-Dick.

Director: Ron Howard | Stars: Chris Hemsworth , Cillian Murphy , Brendan Gleeson , Ben Whishaw

Votes: 148,196 | Gross: $25.02M

7. Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)

Not Rated | 178 min | Adventure, Drama, History

In 1787, British ship Bounty leaves Portsmouth to bring a cargo of bread-fruit from Tahiti but the savage on-board conditions imposed by Captain Bligh trigger a mutiny led by officer Fletcher Christian.

Directors: Lewis Milestone , Carol Reed , George Seaton | Stars: Marlon Brando , Trevor Howard , Richard Harris , Hugh Griffith

Votes: 17,739 | Gross: $13.68M

8. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

PG-13 | 138 min | Action, Adventure, Drama

During the Napoleonic Wars, a brash British captain pushes his ship and crew to their limits in pursuit of a formidable French war vessel around South America.

Director: Peter Weir | Stars: Russell Crowe , Paul Bettany , Billy Boyd , James D'Arcy

Votes: 236,805 | Gross: $93.93M

9. Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951)

Not Rated | 117 min | Action, Adventure, Drama

During the Napoleonic wars, a British Navy Captain has adventures in Central American waters.

Director: Raoul Walsh | Stars: Gregory Peck , Virginia Mayo , Robert Beatty , Moultrie Kelsall

Votes: 7,467

10. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)

Passed | 132 min | Adventure, Biography, Drama

First mate Fletcher Christian leads a revolt against his sadistic commander, Captain Bligh, in this classic seafaring adventure, based on the real-life 1789 mutiny.

Director: Frank Lloyd | Stars: Charles Laughton , Clark Gable , Franchot Tone , Herbert Mundin

Votes: 24,723

11. Poseidon (2006)

PG-13 | 98 min | Action, Adventure, Thriller

On New Year's Eve, the luxury ocean liner Poseidon capsizes after being swamped by a rogue wave. The survivors are left to fight for their lives as they attempt to escape the sinking ship.

Director: Wolfgang Petersen | Stars: Richard Dreyfuss , Kurt Russell , Emmy Rossum , Josh Lucas

Votes: 110,046 | Gross: $60.67M

12. Sink the Bismarck! (1960)

Approved | 97 min | Action, Drama, History

The World War II story of the Royal Navy's effort to defeat Nazi Germany's most powerful warship.

Director: Lewis Gilbert | Stars: Kenneth More , Dana Wynter , Carl Möhner , Laurence Naismith

Votes: 8,273 | Gross: $6.54M

13. In Which We Serve (1942)

Not Rated | 115 min | Drama, War

This "story of a ship", the British destroyer H.M.S. Torrin, is told in flashbacks by survivors as they cling to a life raft.

Directors: Noël Coward , David Lean | Stars: Noël Coward , John Mills , Bernard Miles , Celia Johnson

Votes: 6,394 | Gross: $0.45M

14. Captain Phillips (2013)

PG-13 | 134 min | Action, Biography, Crime

The true story of Captain Richard Phillips and the 2009 hijacking by Somali pirates of the U.S.-flagged MV Maersk Alabama, the first American cargo ship to be hijacked in two hundred years.

Director: Paul Greengrass | Stars: Tom Hanks , Barkhad Abdi , Barkhad Abdirahman , Catherine Keener

Votes: 490,202 | Gross: $107.10M

15. The Boat That Rocked (2009)

R | 117 min | Comedy, Drama, Music

A band of rogue DJs that captivated Britain, playing the music that defined a generation and standing up to a government that wanted classical music, and nothing else, on the airwaves.

Director: Richard Curtis | Stars: Philip Seymour Hoffman , Bill Nighy , Nick Frost , Michael Hadley

Votes: 115,807 | Gross: $7.99M

16. The Bounty (1984)

PG | 132 min | Adventure, Drama, History

Fed up with their Captain's harsh discipline, a sailing ship's crew decides to take action.

Director: Roger Donaldson | Stars: Mel Gibson , Anthony Hopkins , Laurence Olivier , Edward Fox

Votes: 30,125 | Gross: $8.60M

17. Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

G | 104 min | Action, Adventure, Family

The legendary Greek hero leads a team of intrepid adventurers in a perilous quest for the legendary Golden Fleece.

Director: Don Chaffey | Stars: Todd Armstrong , Nancy Kovack , Gary Raymond , Laurence Naismith

Votes: 30,807 | Gross: $4.58M

18. Moby Dick (1956)

Not Rated | 116 min | Adventure, Drama

The sole survivor of a lost whaling ship relates the tale of his captain's self-destructive obsession to hunt the white whale, Moby Dick.

Director: John Huston | Stars: Gregory Peck , Richard Basehart , Leo Genn , James Robertson Justice

Votes: 21,715 | Gross: $10.40M

19. Kon-Tiki (2012)

PG-13 | 118 min | Adventure, Biography, Drama

Legendary explorer Thor Heyerdahl's epic 4,300-mile crossing of the Pacific on a balsawood raft in 1947, in an effort to prove that it was possible for South Americans to settle in Polynesia in pre-Columbian times.

Directors: Joachim Rønning , Espen Sandberg | Stars: Pål Sverre Hagen , Anders Baasmo , Gustaf Skarsgård , Odd-Magnus Williamson

Votes: 51,788 | Gross: $1.52M

20. All Is Lost (2013)

PG-13 | 106 min | Action, Adventure, Drama

After a collision with a shipping container at sea, a resourceful sailor finds himself, despite all efforts to the contrary, staring his mortality in the face.

Director: J.C. Chandor | Star: Robert Redford

Votes: 83,632 | Gross: $6.26M

21. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

PG-13 | 143 min | Action, Adventure, Fantasy

Blacksmith Will Turner teams up with eccentric pirate "Captain" Jack Sparrow to save his love, the governor's daughter, from Jack's former pirate allies, who are now undead.

Director: Gore Verbinski | Stars: Johnny Depp , Geoffrey Rush , Orlando Bloom , Keira Knightley

Votes: 1,203,279 | Gross: $305.41M

22. The Perfect Storm (2000)

PG-13 | 130 min | Action, Adventure, Drama

An unusually intense storm pattern catches some commercial fishermen unaware and puts them in mortal danger.

Director: Wolfgang Petersen | Stars: George Clooney , Mark Wahlberg , John C. Reilly , Diane Lane

Votes: 177,288 | Gross: $182.62M

23. Jaws (1975)

PG | 124 min | Adventure, Mystery, Thriller

When a killer shark unleashes chaos on a beach community off Cape Cod, it's up to a local sheriff, a marine biologist, and an old seafarer to hunt the beast down.

Director: Steven Spielberg | Stars: Roy Scheider , Robert Shaw , Richard Dreyfuss , Lorraine Gary

Votes: 655,842 | Gross: $260.00M

24. Captain Ron (1992)

PG-13 | 100 min | Adventure, Comedy

A Chicagoan inherits an old yacht. He, his wife, daughter and son fly to a Caribbean island and hire a dubious Captain Ron to sail them on an adventure to Miami.

Director: Thom Eberhardt | Stars: Kurt Russell , Martin Short , Mary Kay Place , Benjamin Salisbury

Votes: 22,835 | Gross: $22.52M

25. Dead Calm (1989)

R | 96 min | Horror, Thriller

After a tragedy, John Ingram and his wife Rae are spending some time isolated at sea, when they come across a stranger who has abandoned a sinking ship.

Director: Phillip Noyce | Stars: Nicole Kidman , Sam Neill , Billy Zane , Rod Mullinar

Votes: 43,496 | Gross: $7.83M

26. Lifeboat (1944)

Not Rated | 97 min | Drama, War

Several survivors of a torpedoed merchant ship in World War II find themselves in the same lifeboat with one of the crew members of the U-boat that sank their ship.

Director: Alfred Hitchcock | Stars: Tallulah Bankhead , John Hodiak , Walter Slezak , William Bendix

Votes: 31,056

27. The African Queen (1951)

PG | 105 min | Adventure, Drama, Romance

In WWI East Africa, a gin-swilling Canadian riverboat captain is persuaded by a strait-laced English missionary to undertake a trip up a treacherous river and use his boat to attack a German gunship.

Director: John Huston | Stars: Humphrey Bogart , Katharine Hepburn , Robert Morley , Peter Bull

Votes: 83,989 | Gross: $0.54M

28. 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992)

PG-13 | 154 min | Adventure, Biography, Drama

Christopher Columbus' discovery of the Americas and the effect this has on the indigenous people.

Director: Ridley Scott | Stars: Gérard Depardieu , Armand Assante , Sigourney Weaver , Loren Dean

Votes: 32,668 | Gross: $7.19M

29. The Sea Hawk (1940)

Approved | 127 min | Action, Adventure, History

Geoffrey Thorpe, a buccaneer, is hired by Queen Elizabeth I to nag the Spanish Armada. The Armada is waiting for the attack on England and Thorpe surprises them with attacks on their galleons where he shows his skills on the sword.

Director: Michael Curtiz | Stars: Errol Flynn , Brenda Marshall , Claude Rains , Donald Crisp

Votes: 10,650

30. The Sea Wolves (1980)

PG | 120 min | Action, History, War

During World War II, British Intelligence brings a crew of ex-soldiers out of retirement, using their age as cover, to take to the seas and pull off an unlikely undercover mission in neutral Goa.

Director: Andrew V. McLaglen | Stars: Gregory Peck , Roger Moore , David Niven , Trevor Howard

Votes: 5,243

List Activity

Tell your friends, other lists by cswain-56232.

list image

Recently Viewed

go to homepage

Stay Connected

This site is made possible by member support . ❤️

Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.

When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!

kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.

🍔   💀   📸   😭   🕳️   🤠   🎬   🥔

Time Travel Movies, Ranked

For Ars Technica, science writer Jennifer Ouellette and theoretical physicist Sean Carroll review time travel used in 20 popular movies , ranging from The Terminator to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure to Interstellar. Each movie is rated on scientific accuracy and how entertaining the use of time travel is. Here’s part of their review of Superman (1978).

Our standards are admittedly lax when it comes to the physical mechanism by which cinematic heroes journey through time, but “flying really fast around the Earth so that it reverses the direction of its rotation and sends it back to a previous moment” is such thoroughgoing lunacy that one must almost pause in admiration. Then we return to our senses and ask, “Why does Superman’s flight have any effect on the rotation of the Earth? And what does that rotation have to do with the direction of time? Do I get younger if I start twirling counterclockwise?” No, dear reader, you do not. Indeed, by the rules handed down by Einstein, Superman’s near-speed-of-light journey would actually send him into the future, not into the past. To its dubious credit, Superman pioneers two different flaws that will frequently recur in movies to come. First, time travel is portrayed as a miraculous cure-all, which is then never used again. Superman essentially goes back in time to save his girlfriend. This is admirable, but aren’t there other, more historically significant global disasters that could be averted by the same strategy? This is a narrative problem, not a scientific or logical one, but it rankles. Then, of course, there is the flaw that almost always accompanies stories in which the past gets changed by time-travelers: Where did those time-travelers come from? We, the viewers, see a sequence of events that seems to make sense if we don’t think too hard. Lois Lane dies, Superman gets upset, he travels back in time, stops the events that led to Lois dying, and we live happily ever after. But at the end of this sequence, Superman still has the memory of Lois dying the first time around. Yet because he changed history, that event he remembers never happened. Lois certainly doesn’t remember it. How does he?

See also The Various Approaches to Time Travel in Movies & Books .

  • Jennifer Ouellette
  • Sean Carroll
  • time travel

Discussion   4 comments

Has anyone else read The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August? It's not time travel in the sense that you can pick a time and travel there, but fans of movies and books that mess with time lines might love it. The audiobook version read by Peter Kenny is my favorite audiobook of all time. It takes a bit to get used to the speed and accent of Peter but he does an amazing job. He flows thru so many character voices seemingly effortlessly. And the writing is great too. The plot is not the pinnacle of story telling buts it works well enough to make everything else go.

https://www.audible.com/pd/The-First-Fifteen-Lives-of-Harry-August-Audiobook/B00J27VX9Y?eac_link=OSYiALYYms7M&ref=web_search_eac_asin_1&eac_selected_type=asin&eac_selected=B00J27VX9Y&qid=z1A3JEsk28&eac_id=130-0801918-7028543_z1A3JEsk28&sr=1-1

Sorry for the run-on, but I do love this book.

Also, Primer is a very good time travel story that melted my brain.

It's not a movie, but one time travel story that gets to live in my head rent-free is an episode of The X-Files, where Mulder and Scully encounter a possible time traveler. Without giving the plot, I'll just say I think about it a lot because with AI and DeepFakes and the easy invention of mis- and disinformation and the feeling like everything is up for question, the episode feels relevant.

Wiki link in you just want the plot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrony_(The_X-Files)

Wait tho, Superman doesn't actually "make the earth rotate backwards and that's what makes time go backwards" Superman flies so fast he - breaks the arrow time* - and we're seeing the effect of his flying out of time, i.e., the flow of time coming to a stop and reversing, through the only other moving thing on screen - the earth.

And right before he does that the memory of Jor-El's words – that it's forbidden to interfere in history – means that there is a precedent here and he is knowingly violating it. So Supes understands why he shouldn't go back and change the outcome of other events, but this is too personal to not interefere. That's not a narrative problem, that's clearly part of the dramatic stake in that moment.

And, yes, it's still definitely not science, but a lot of the issues they bring up are addressed on the screen. My big question was how many other people die because in Superman's round 2 because he prioritized Lois's survival.

*which, i will not dispute, is hand-waving magic

It was needing to leave this comment that got me to renew my membership: The History of Time Travel (2014) is a favorite time travel movie of mine and likely to be appreciated by kottke.org readers, if I do say so myself. If you have not seen it, stop and watch it.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3727120/

Hello! In order to leave a comment, you need to be a current kottke.org member. If you'd like to sign up for a membership to support the site, you can explore your options here .

Existing members can sign in here . If you're a former member, you can renew your membership .

Note: If you are a member and tried to log in, it didn't work, and now you're stuck in a neverending login loop of death, try disabling any ad blockers or extensions that you have installed on your browser...sometimes they can interfere with the Memberful links. Still having trouble? Email me!

In order to leave a comment, you need to be a current kottke.org member. Check out your options for renewal .

This is the name that'll be displayed next to comments you make on kottke.org; your email will not be displayed publicly. I'd encourage you to use your real name (or at least your first name and last initial) but you can also pick something that you go by when you participate in communities online. Choose something durable and reasonably unique (not "Me" or "anon"). Please don't change this often. No impersonation..

Note: I'm letting folks change their display names because the membership service that kottke.org uses collects full names and I thought some people might not want their names displayed publicly here. If it gets abused, I might disable this feature.

If you feel like this comment goes against the grain of the community guidelines or is otherwise inappropriate, please let me know and I will take a look at it.

Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

10 Underrated Time Travel Movies from the 1980s

March 14, 2024 by Billy Oduory

Billy Oduory with ten underrated time travel movies from the 1980s…

With timeless blockbusters like Back to the Future setting the highest standards for 1980s sci-fi, many great films from the decade that didn’t hit similar heights in theatres failed to receive the credit they deserved. The creativity and innovation that went into 1980s sci-fi still transformed the whole movie industry and time travel films were not left behind. Films like The Final Countdown and Timerider , which weren’t instant hits when they were released, have continued to gain popularity in recent years as more people now appreciate the charm of 20th-century creativity.

With the surge in demand for classic gems from the decade, these underrated 80s time travel films have received the credits they deserve in public forums such as IMDB. For a modern audience wishing to travel back in time, the attraction from the past has to be something more than a typical time travel narrative, which is why these films have earned a cultic following for their eccentric stories and impressive cinematography that makes them feel like they were way ahead of their time…

Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann (1982)

While testing a new bike, Lyle Swann (Fred Ward), a dirtbike racer, strays into the field of a time travel experiment in the desert and is thrust back in time, finding himself in November 1877. The stubborn rider doesn’t realize the change in his surroundings until he is set upon by a gang of outlaws who would really love to lay their hands on the nice ride from the future. As Swann Grapples with his new reality, he finds refuge in the friendly town of San Marcos and now has to find a way to save the town from the outlaws and survive long enough for the scientists to come to his rescue.

Directed by William Dear, Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann has everything fans would expect from a classic Western, while still telling the interesting story of a time traveler. Despite its modest rating, the film boasts of impressive action sequences and a charismatic performance by Fred Ward as he brings life to the character. The blend of romance, crime, and sci-fi complements the intricately written film turning it into a worthy cult classic. 

My Science Project (1985)

Michael Harlan (John Stockwell) has nothing to submit for his final science project, so he breaks into a government aircraft boneyard and steals a strange-looking globe hoping to use it to impress his teachers. However, when he plugs the globe into a power source, he discovers that it has strange abilities including sucking the power grid dry and causing time travel. His project, which unleashes chaos on the school and his hometown, turns out to be a piece of alien technology. This is a coming-of-age comedy with a touch of Sci-Fi that transcends the traditional premise of time travel films to tell the human story.

Directed by Jonathan R. Betuel, My Science Project offers a humorous take on time travel. The film’s quirky premise and endearing characters make it an enjoyable watch for audiences of all ages, which explains its enduring popularity. With its blend of adventure, humor, and nostalgia for 1980s high school culture, the film offers a delightful trip down memory lane.

Trancers (1984)

Serial killers still make the most dreaded villains in TV and films, but a serial killer traveling through time takes the idea of dark comedy and time travel to a whole new level which explains why Trancers is now a whole franchise. The serial killer, in this case, is Martin Whistler (Michael Stefani) a 23rd-century criminal mastermind who discovers a way to turn people into senseless killers known as Trancers, whom he wants to use to destroy humanity. When his evil plans are thwarted by the relentless detective Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) the serial killer uses a special drug to travel back in time to 1985 to continue his reign of terror, but Jack Deth won’t let him off that easily.

Directed by Charles Band, Trancers brings zombies and time travel into its action-packed storyline, making a simple-sounding storyline interesting. Moreover, despite its modest IMDb rating, the film has gained a cult following over the years, appreciated for its imaginative storyline and entertaining performances. With its blend of gritty noir elements, futuristic dystopia, and time travel shenanigans, the film offers a unique and enjoyable experience for viewers craving a dose of 1980s nostalgia.

Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

Starring a young Nicolas Cage and Kathleen Turner, Peggy Sue Got Married is the comedic tale of the second chance at a better life for 43-year-old Peggy Sue who is planning to divorce her cheating husbands but feels trapped and regrets the decisions she made in her teenage years. While attending her high school reunion party, Peggy collapses and finds herself transported back in time to her senior year of high school with the chance to relive her past and make better choices all over again.

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, this charming romantic comedy offers a whimsical take on the time travel genre. Peggy Sue Got Married features one of Cage and Turner’s best performances in a romantic comedy. With its nostalgic 1950s setting, witty dialogue, and heartfelt exploration of regret and second chances, the film offers a delightful blend of humor and sentimentality that a modern classics fan will enjoy.

The Final Countdown (1980)

Filmed on the real-life aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, The Final Countdown tells the story of sailors and a civilian observer on the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that gets sucked back in time to December 7, 1941, just a day before the Pearl Harbor attack, while on a training exercise. After discovering the Japanese fleet planning to attack the US fleet, the commanders and the sailors are torn between changing history by preventing the most devastating attack on US soil in WWII or letting history take its course.

Being Don Taylor’s last film, The Final Countdown was a great way to sign out for the talented director as it features an epic combination of action and historical drama. Its impressive special effects and suspenseful storyline keep viewers hooked as they present the thrill of an epic war film as well as a travel drama. The film explores the ethical dilemmas and the consequences of altering history.

The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988)

The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey follows a group of villagers from 14th-century England who, while tunneling through the earth on a mission to make a sacrifice and save the world from the Black Death, inadvertently find themselves transported to modern-day New Zealand. Struggling to comprehend their new surroundings, the villagers embark on a quest to find a way back home, all this time, relying on the visions of a “gifted boy” called Connor (Bruce Lyons). 

It is a visually stunning film that seamlessly blends historical drama with elements of fantasy and science fiction, making it feel way ahead of its time while retaining the charm of black-and-white cinema. The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey won multiple awards in Australia and New Zealand for its thought-provoking storyline and eccentric performances by the cast and is only now receiving global recognition as seen in its improving IMDB ratings.

Flight of the Navigator (1986)

While walking through the woods to pick up his little brother on July 4, 1978, 12-year-old David Freeman stumbles into a canyon and disappears, only to reappear eight years later, having not aged a single day. An experiment by NASA doctors reveals that David was abducted by aliens who took him to a strange planet and used him in part of a scientific experiment on humans. David’s time with the aliens turns out to have more consequences on the future of humanity than previously thought and his adventures with the aliens are far from over. 

Directed by Randal Kleiser, Flight of the Navigator has become a cult classic over the years with Disney announcing that its remake is in the works. It was one of the very first Hollywood films to use CGI resulting in impressive visual effects that stand out from other 1980s Sci-Fi films. With its heartwarming themes of friendship and self-discovery, the film remains a beloved favorite among classic film fans.

Time Bandits (1981)

Time Bandits is a Terry Gilliam cult classic that has earned a top spot in the fantasy comedy genre over the years because of its innovative approach to telling a time travel story. The subject of the film is a young history nerd called Kevin who gets caught up with a group of time-traveling dwarves who have stolen a time-space map from their boss known as the Supreme Being. Kevin gets the chance to relive some of his best moments in history including the Napoleonic Wars and the Titanic and also meet legends like Robin Hood and King Agamemnon. However, his fun trip threatens to ruin his life back in 1981 as the stolen map catches the interest of a villain known as Evil.

Time Bandits is one of the best Terry Gilliam films and fans continue to enjoy its witty humor and innovative storytelling despite its moderate IMDB ratings. With its blend of adventure, satire, and philosophical undertones, the film offers a thought-provoking exploration of themes such as greed, mortality, and the nature of reality that still captivates a modern audience.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Directed by Leonard Nimoy, The Voyage Home is one of the most overlooked Star Trek films as far as ratings go, but it features one of the most captivating storylines with unconventional humor that many people are beginning to appreciate. The film follows the crew of the USS Enterprise as they travel back in time to 20th-century Earth to save the planet from an alien probe. This film holds a special place in history as it was dedicated to the crew of The Challenger Space Shuttle.

Environmentalism is at the center of the film’s message as the main story rotates around preventing the villains from contacting Humpback whales which are extinct in the year 2286 when the movie is set. Its modern-sounding themes and engaging storyline make it a standout entry in the series.

Somewhere in Time (1980)

The idea of a romantic relationship that transcends time itself is one of the few things that time travel films and that is exactly what Somewhere in Time brings to life. The film follows Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) who becomes obsessed with the photo of the actress Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour) while residing at The Grand Hotel in Mackinac Island, Michigan. Collier believes that the woman is the love of his life and he must find a way to go back in time to 1912 to be with her. With the help of an old pocket watch and a little self-hypnosis, Collier manages to manifest himself back in time to meet the actress, but their romance isn’t as straightforward as he imagined.

Also starring Christopher Plummer, Somewhere in Time is a timeless romantic classic in which the chemistry between Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve is intoxicating. Seymour later admitted that she fell in love with Reeve on the film set, although they didn’t end up together as is the case with their characters. With its timeless themes of love, longing, and destiny, the film continues to captivate audiences decades after its initial release.

SEE ALSO: 10 Most Underrated Sci-Fi Movies of the 1980s

What 80s time travel movies are worthy of a spot on this list? Let us know on our socials @FlickeringMyth …

Billy Oduory

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

movie about ship time travel

The Essential Films of John Woo

movie about ship time travel

Ten Iconic Modern Horror Classics You Have To See

movie about ship time travel

Ten Essential Korean Cinema Gems

movie about ship time travel

Revisiting Timothy Dalton’s Underappreciated James Bond

movie about ship time travel

Cannon’s Avengers: What If… Cannon Films Did the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

movie about ship time travel

Essential Gothic Horror Movies To Scare You Senseless

movie about ship time travel

Ten Action Sequels The World Needs To See

movie about ship time travel

The Essential Modern Day Swashbucklers

movie about ship time travel

It Happened One Night: The Essential Single Night Movies

movie about ship time travel

Ranking Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Post-Governator Starring Roles

  • Comic Books
  • Video Games
  • Toys & Collectibles
  • Articles and Opinions
  • About Flickering Myth
  • Write for Flickering Myth
  • Advertise on Flickering Myth
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy

IMAGES

  1. The 15 Best Time Travel Movies: A Countdown

    movie about ship time travel

  2. Ship Movies

    movie about ship time travel

  3. Best Time Travel Movies 2020

    movie about ship time travel

  4. Ship Movies

    movie about ship time travel

  5. Ship Movies

    movie about ship time travel

  6. The 15 Best Time Travel Movies: A Countdown

    movie about ship time travel

VIDEO

  1. ‼️ TIME TRAVEL ⌚ SEASON 2| part

  2. Let’s explore the worlds largest cruise ship 😍😍 #travel #travelvlog #familytravel #familyfun

  3. ABANDON SHIP!, movie review, Tyrone Power, British film, Mai Zetterling, ship wreck, James Hayter

  4. ‼️ TIME TRAVEL ⌚ SEASON 2| part

  5. Last Day Working on a Cruise Ship #cruiseshiplife

  6. Day 233 I booked the most expensive cruise ship ticket #travel #ytshorts #minivlog

COMMENTS

  1. The Philadelphia Experiment (1984)

    The Philadelphia Experiment: Directed by Stewart Raffill. With Michael Paré, Nancy Allen, Eric Christmas, Bobby Di Cicco. A United States Navy destroyer escort participates in a Navy "invisibility" experiment that inadvertently sends two sailors forty years into the future.

  2. The Philadelphia Experiment (film)

    The Philadelphia Experiment is a 1984 American science fiction film.It is directed by Stewart Raffill, stars Michael Paré, Bobby Di Cicco, Kene Holliday and Nancy Allen and is based on the urban legend of the Philadelphia Experiment.In 1943, United States Navy sailors David Herdeg (Paré) and Jim Parker (Di Cicco) are thrown forward in time to the year 1984 when a scientific experiment being ...

  3. Top 100 Time Travel Movies

    1. Back to the Future (1985) PG | 116 min | Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi. 8.5. Rate. 87 Metascore. Marty McFly, a 17-year-old high school student, is accidentally sent 30 years into the past in a time-traveling DeLorean invented by his close friend, the maverick scientist Doc Brown.

  4. Philadelphia Experiment

    The Philadelphia Experiment was an alleged event claimed to have been witnessed by an ex-merchant mariner named Carl M. Allen at the United States Navy's Philadelphia Naval Shipyard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, sometime around October 28, 1943.Allen described an experiment where the U.S. Navy attempted to make a destroyer escort class ship, the USS Eldridge, disappear and the ...

  5. The Final Countdown (1980)

    The Final Countdown: Directed by Don Taylor. With Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, Katharine Ross, James Farentino. A modern aircraft carrier is thrown back in time to 1941 near Hawaii, just hours before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

  6. The most memorable time travel movies

    The quintessential time travel movie. One of the biggest hits of all time. ... The crew of a ship travel through spacetime to steal treasures throughout the ages. 19 of 21 'Timecop' (1994) Universal

  7. The 25 Greatest Time-Travel Movies Ever Made

    24. Happy Death Day (2017) Pick away at the surface of a time-loop movie and you find a horror movie. Most of the entries on this list are covered in enough feel-good spin to land as comedies, but ...

  8. The 20 best time-travel movies

    14. The Time Travelers (1964) A 1964 movie made on the cheap with genuinely terrible effects, The Time Travelers is about a group of scientists who travel to the future, fight some mutants and ...

  9. Predestination Movie Ending Explained: The Fizzle Bomber's Real

    The Predestination movie explained covers the ending, the Fizzle Bomber's identity, the mind-bending time-travel elements, and so much more.Directed by the German-Australian brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, this 2014 sci-fi action thriller is in a long lineage of time travel movies, and, like the best of them, it offers an original twist on a classic story device.

  10. The best time travel movies you can watch right now

    15 best sci-fi movies on Hulu that you can watch right now. How to watch: Happy Death Day is now available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Prime Video, or Google Play. 10. Interstellar. Matthew ...

  11. 11 Time-Travel Movies to Watch After 'The Adam Project'

    March 11, 2022 10:12 AM EST. I n Netflix's The Adam Project, Ryan Reynolds plays Adam Reed, a fighter pilot from 2050 who heads back in time to stop the development of time travel. His mission ...

  12. 9 Time-Travel Movies to Stream in Your Past, Present and Future

    Captain Nova. The world is on the verge of environmental collapse, so a woman must travel back in time to save it. The only problem is, the time travel process causes her to age backwards to her teenage self. This 2021 Dutch sci-fi film is also family friendly — and was even selected as the opening film for the 35th Cinekid Festival in the ...

  13. Watch 1899

    1899. 2022 | Maturity Rating: TV-MA | 1 Season | Thriller. When mysterious events change the course of an immigrant ship headed for New York in 1899, a mind-bending riddle unfolds for its bewildered passengers. Starring: Emily Beecham, Aneurin Barnard, Andreas Pietschmann. Creators: Jantje Friese, Baran bo Odar.

  14. Best Movies About Time Travel

    Updated June 2023: If you're a fan of movies with time travel, you're in luck. This article has been updated with additional content and entries by Danilo Raúl . 15 Avengers: Endgame (2019)

  15. How the Navy Stole the Show In a Movie About the USS Nimitz Going Back

    The plot of "The Final Countdown" is pretty simple, especially for a movie about time travel. While on a routine cruise, the carrier and its F-14 Tomcats experience an electrical storm and ...

  16. The 35 Best Time Travel Movies of All Time

    27. Safety Not Guaranteed. FilmDistrict/Big Beach. Director Colin Trevorrow's debut film Safety Not Guaranteed follows three journalists—well, one journalist and two interns—on a road trip ...

  17. The 15 Best Time Travel Movies, Ranked

    9. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Image via Warner Bros. As the best movie in the franchise (fight me), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban also stands as one of the best time ...

  18. 'Things Will Be Different' Review

    7 10. Pros. Michael Felker makes a compelling time travel story by paring down this genre. The lead performances by Adam Thompson and Riley Dandy are almost as interesting as the mysteries at hand ...

  19. 10 Best Movies & Shows About Time Travel, Ranked

    Looper (2012) Rian Johnson possesses the extraordinary gift of elevating whatever genre he chooses to work in. Looper takes place in a universe where contracted killers murder people sent back in time. Their contract is complete when they have "closed the loop" by killing their future selves. Time travel is used as a means of changing the past ...

  20. The 15 Best Time Travel Movies Ever Made

    The 15 Best Time Travel Movies Ever Made. Lauren Thoman. March 12, 2022 @ 10:00 AM. In Netflix's "The Adam Project," a fighter pilot from the future named Adam (Ryan Reynolds) accidentally ...

  21. 'The Greatest Hits' Is the Most Original Time Travel Movie in Years

    The Greatest Hits earns its title, unassumingly throwing out cuts from Beach House, Peggy Lee, Jamie XX, and more. Even using a leaked Lana Del Rey song that went so viral on TikTok that she ...

  22. 10 Best Time Travel Movies on Netflix

    1 'Mirage' (2018) Image via Netflix. When Vera ( Adriana Ugarte) and her family move into a new home, they discover that a boy died there thirty years ago. Finding a way to communicate with the ...

  23. 10 best time travel movies of all time, ranked

    About Time follows Tim Lake (Domhnall Gleeson), who, on his 21st birthday, learns a family secret from his father, James Lake (Love Actually's Bill Nighy). The men in the Lake family inherit the ...

  24. The Best Movies With Time Travel That Will Bend Your Mind

    To determine the best movies with time travel, 24/7 Tempo developed an index of movies using average ratings on IMDb, an online movie database owned by Amazon, and a combination of audience scores ...

  25. We Ranked the 35 Best Time Travel Movies Ever

    Jean-Claude Van Damme is a cop who polices time. Don't need to say more, but I guess I will. In 1994, time travel becomes a favorite pastime of criminals, and timecops like Van Damme must catch ...

  26. Tim Travers and the Time Traveler's Paradox Review: Sci-Fi ...

    Produced by North By Northwest, Tim Travers and the Time Traveler's Paradox is low-budget sci-fi in all its glory. It's surprisingly funny, decidedly irreverent, and even a bit gory. The film is ...

  27. Top 30 Favourite Ship/Boat Movies

    1. The Poseidon Adventure (1972) A group of passengers must embark on a harrowing struggle for survival after a rogue wave capsizes their cruise ship at sea. 2. A Night to Remember (1958) On her maiden voyage in April 1912, the supposedly unsinkable RMS Titanic strikes an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean.

  28. The Final Countdown (film)

    The Final Countdown is a 1980 American science fiction war film about a modern nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that travels through time to the day before the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor.Produced by Peter Douglas and Lloyd Kaufman (founder of Troma Entertainment) and directed by Don Taylor, the film contains an ensemble cast starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, James Farentino ...

  29. Time Travel Movies, Ranked

    Time Travel Movies, Ranked. For Ars Technica, science writer Jennifer Ouellette and theoretical physicist Sean Carroll review time travel used in 20 popular movies, ranging from The Terminator to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure to Interstellar. Each movie is rated on scientific accuracy and how entertaining the use of time travel is.

  30. 10 Underrated Time Travel Movies from the 1980s

    Trancers (1984) Serial killers still make the most dreaded villains in TV and films, but a serial killer traveling through time takes the idea of dark comedy and time travel to a whole new level ...