Five times cinematic time travel made absolutely no sense
In the grand scheme of things, time travel isn’t supposed to make a lick of sense, but that hasn’t stopped it from serving as the basis for countless classic and massively successful movies.
The Back to the Future trilogy, the Austin Powers franchise, Avengers: Endgame, the original Planet of the Apes, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Primer, and many more have been dissected and picked apart for the mechanics of how their time travel works, but it’s easy to set that to one side and enjoy the films for what they are.
On the other hand, there are several instances – some of which are fantastic features in their own right – that fall apart under even the slightest scrutiny, whether it’s be making a mockery of the very rules they’d set out or creating paradoxes with unexpectedly off-putting or nonsensical undertones.
The following five titles vary wildly in quality from top-tier to the bottom of the barrel, but one thing that unites them all are nonsensical approaches to time travel that don’t hold many drops of water, if they even hold one.
Five times cinematic time travel made absolutely no sense:
5. The Butterfly Effect (Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, 2004)
A relatively low-budget thriller with Ashton Kutcher in the lead role was never going to answer the burning questions surrounding its central premise. While the title itself made it abundantly clear that there was going to be at least a little bit of confusion along the way.
The basic conceit is that Kutcher’s Evan Trebon has been suffering unexplained blackouts his entire life, which give him the ability to time travel when unconscious, a gift – or curse – he uses to alter the past to suit either his needs or the needs of others as he sees fit. On paper, it’s straightforward by the standards of the time travel movie.
And yet, it ultimately negates its own existence, which is about as paradoxical as it gets. It’s revealed that Evan’s childhood blackouts are caused by present Evan occupying the body of his younger self, but that perpetual circle doesn’t stop him from repeatedly altering the timeline.
Essentially, changing what happens when he has those blackouts should realistically remove any need for him to return to the past from the present, eliminating the need for him to time travel… because of all the time travelling he’s already done.
4. Looper (Rian Johnson, 2012)
Rian Johnson’s Looper is undoubtedly one of the 21st century’s very best time travel movies, but that doesn’t mean it can’t get caught in a never-ending cycle entirely of its own making.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Joe makes his living as a hitman who kills people when they’ve been sent back to a certain point on the timeline. Matters become exponentially complicated when he discovers he has to kill himself, with the Bruce Willis iteration of Joe convincing his past self not to do it.
However, if older Joe can get sent back in time and convince younger Joe not to kill him, then that instantly alters the future for Gordon-Levitt’s version. And yet, for Willis’ Joe to even exist in the first place to a point where he can be sent back to change the mind of his more youthful counterpart, young Joe is obligated to follow the exact same chain of events that led Willis to that point in the first place.
Of course, it’s all irrelevant by the time the ending rolls around and negates such confusion, but it’s a head-scratcher nonetheless.
3. Terminator: Dark Fate (Tim Miller, 2019)
Realistically, any entry in the Terminator franchise could be placed under the microscope and torn apart for the lack of rules to define its vast amount of time travelling, but Dark Fate arguably takes the cake.
In the fifth instalment, it remains canonical that John Connor sends Kyle Reese back to protect his mother Sarah, with John fully aware that Kyle is his father. However, in Dark Fate, it’s also established that even though the Connors prevented Judgement Day, Skynet still sent another Arnold Schwarzenegger-shaped Terminator through time to kill him anyway.
So, even though Skynet doesn’t exist, having been stopped by the events of Terminator 2, the machine uprising still happens, and the artificial intelligence responsible – Legion in this timeline – has nonetheless stumbled upon a method of designing, building, and sending Terminators back to achieve the goal of a Skynet that doesn’t exist that follow the same pattern as Skynet’s models, albeit not modelled after muscular, thick-accented Austrians.
The sole difference is that instead of John Connor, the target is Natalia Reyes’ Dani Ramos. The Schwarzenegger Terminator that did kill John – which then went about living a normal human life – explains this away by saying Gabriel Luna’s Rev-9 was “sent from a future that never happened”, which is nonsense.
2. Predestination (The Spierig Brothers, 2014)
In the broadest of terms, Predestination reads as a by-the-numbers time travel thriller, one that finds Ethan Hawke’s temporal agent moving through various timelines in order to apprehend the notorious Fizzle Bomber, the orchestrator of an attack that kills thousands.
And yet, by the time the third act ladles twists on top of turns and drenches them in revelations, things have become so paradoxical that it beggars belief. The key relationship formed over the course of the film is that between Hawke’s Agent Doe and Sarah Snook’s Jane, hinting there’s some kind of connection between the two, which turns out to be a substantial understatement.
The reality is that not only is Agent Doe the Fizzle Bomber, but he’s also Jane, and also the child they had together on top of that. Jane fell in love with a man – who was John – but her baby ended up being abducted shortly after it was born, by John. Not to mention, the baby is John, too.
After doctors subject Jane to gender reassignment surgery against her will, she also becomes John. In short, John and Jane – the same person – had sex with each other to procreate a baby that was also both of them, creating an endless loop that’s enough to make anybody’s head spin.
1. Kate & Leopold (James Mangold, 2001)
A whimsical romantic comedy predicated on incest that landed Hugh Jackman a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy’, Kate & Leopold is a lot more sinister than its creative team surely intended for it to be.
The plot device itself is stupid, caused by a person jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge at an exact spot at a certain time, specifically sending them back to April 28th, 1876, but that’s not what makes it so unsettling.
Liev Schreiber’s Stuart – the physicist who discovered how to time travel – is dating Meg Ryan’s Kate, and he goes back in time to hang out with his great-great-grandfather, which is where Jackman’s Leopold comes in. He follows his descendant to 2001, and then the meet-cute between Jackman and Ryan happens.
In the end, she chases her paramour back to 1876, where it’s revealed that she’s also Stuart’s great-great-grandmother. As well as being in a physical relationship with a direct member of her family line, she would have never even ended up with Leopold at all had her boyfriend – also her relation – not figured out the means to time travel in the first place, which makes a mockery of their place on the current-day timeline, too.
