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Temporal Anomalies

Main Page
Discussing Time Travel Theory
Miscellany
Conversation
Other Films
Perpetual Barbecue
About the Author
Contact the Author

See also entries under the
Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel
category of the
mark Joseph "young"
web log
elsewhere on this site.

Quick Jumps

11 Minutes Ago
Safety Not Guaranteed
Happy Accidents
The Time Traveler's Wife
About Time
The Jacket
Kate and Leopold
The Lake House
Somewhere In Time

Miscellaneous Articles
in original publication sequence except for indices inserted at correct points in the historic flow

Miscellany
Temporal Anomalies Classics
Temporal Anomalies Index 2009
Back to the Future Nationwide
  Theatrical Showing This Evening

People Magazine's Woman of the Year
  Sandra Bullock
    featured in time travel films

Temporal Anomalies Index 2010
Source Code Opens April 1, 2011
Future Time Travel Film Analyses--2011
Why Not Analyze
  Time Travel Television Shows?

Men in Black III Remakes History
Temporal Anomalies Index 2011
(Some of) The Best Time Travel Movies
  You Might Have Missed

Men in Black III May 25th U.S. debut
  midnight shows tonight

Future Time Travel Film Analyses--2012
Temporal Anomalies Index 2012
(Some of) The Best Time Travel Movies
  for Children

Films Currently Showing, November 2013
Upcoming Time Travel Films,
  from February 2014

(Some of) The Best Time Travel
  Romance Movies

Upcoming time travel films,
  from December 2014

Temporal Anomalies Index 2014
(Some of) The Best Time Travel Comedies
(Some of) The Best Time Travel Thrillers

Movies Analyzed
in order examined

Terminator
    Addendum to Terminator
    Terminator 3:  Rise of the Machines
    Terminator Recap
    Terminator Salvation
    Terminator Genisys
    Terminator:  Dark Fate
Back To The Future
Back To The Future II
Back To The Future III
Millennium
Star Trek Introduction
    Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
    Star Trek: Generations
    Star Trek: First Contact
    Star Trek (2009)
12 Monkeys
    Addendum to 12 Monkeys
Flight Of The Navigator
  Flight Of The Navigator Addendum
Army of Darkness
Lost In Space
Peggy Sue Got Married
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
Frequency
Planet of the Apes
Kate and Leopold
Somewhere In Time
The Time Machine
Minority Report
Happy Accidents
The Final Countdown
Donnie Darko
  S. Darko
Harry Potter and
    the Prisoner of Azkaban

Deja Vu
Primer
    Primer Questions
Bender's Big Score
Popular Christmas Movies
The Butterfly Effect
  The Butterfly Effect 2
  The Butterfly Effect 3:  Revelations
The Last Mimzy
The Lake House
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Hot Tub Time Machine
Premonition
Los Cronocrimines a.k.a. TimeCrimes
Timeline
A Sound of Thundrer
Next
Frequently Asked Questions
    About Time Travel

Source Code
Warlock
Blackadder Back & Forth
Watchmen
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III
11 Minutes Ago
Men in Black III
La Jetée
Triangle
Midnight in Paris
Meet the Robinsons
Looper
H. G. Wells' The Time Machine
The Jacket
Safety Not Guaranteed
The Philadelphia Experiment
    The Philadelphia Experiment II
Time After Time
TimeCop
About Time
Free Birds
X-Men:  Days of Future Past
Edge of Tomorrow
Mr. Peabody & Sherman
Predestination
Project Almanac
41
Time Lapse
Synchronicity
Paradox
O Homem Do Futuro
    a.k.a. The Man from the Future

Abby Sen
When We First Met
See You Yesterday
Mirage
The History of Time Travel
Copyright Information

The temporal anomaly terminology used here is drawn from Appendix 11:  Temporal Anomalies of Multiverser from Valdron Inc, and is illustrated on the home page of this web site.  This site is part of M. J. Young Net.

Books by the Author.


The Book

Temporal Anomalies in Time Travel Movies
presents
(Some of)
The Best Time Travel Romance Movies

We previously looked at (Some of) The Best Time Travel Movies You Might Have Missed, and commented that there were many categories within the subject that might be included; we have since covered (Some of) The Best Time Travel Movies for Children, and had also mentioned romances, so here is a stab at these.

It is not an easy category to consider.  For one thing, many movies that are not in themselves romance stories contain romances within them--Sarah Conner and Kyle Reese in Terminator, James Cole and Kathryn Railly in 12 Monkeys, Evan Treborn and Kayleigh Miller in The Butterfly Effect.  Also, the line is not always clear--Millennium is not really about Bill Smith and Louise Baltimore, but their relationship is very much the foil against which the subject of time travel and paradox is explored.

It also is problematic that two of the best time travel romances were already recognized as two of the best films overall; but we will recognize them again.  Also, several good time travel romances are also fairly well known; you are probably at least aware of some of these (and the more so if you follow this series).  However, we have endeavored to create a list of good time travel romance movies, movies in which the romance is at least as significant as the time travel, which are worth watching.  We agonized over the sequence in some spots, and maybe these are not all "the best", and most had some significant temporal flaws, but all were worth watching.


11 Minutes Ago

When we did the first article on the best unknown time travel movies, the first there was a quirky romance entitled 11 Minutes Ago.  In the opening moments, the world's first time traveler arrives from the future--and is greeted by a film crew waiting to cover his arrival.  They expected him because he is going to make future trips to moments earlier in the party, and as he is attempting to explain that there is no reason for him to do that an attractive girl abruptly gives him a big kiss and tells him that she's still thinking about the answer to his question.  He then manages to attend almost the entire party almost entirely out of sequence, eleven minutes at a time, becoming involved in the lives of the guests and particularly the girl.

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Safety Not Guaranteed

In the couple of years since our best of list was published, another wonderfully oddball romantic film was released.  The driving mystery of Safety Not Guaranteed is whether Kenneth Calloway actually has a working time machine, and if not what he is really doing; but the story is really about his relationship with Darius, the reporter intern sent to get the story who becomes his companion.  The film explores relationships more than time travel, and does a good job of giving us a believable bonding of two people who prove to be more the same than different.

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Happy Accidents

Also on our previous list of gems, Happy Accidents features Vincent D'Onofrio and Marisa Tomei in an unlikely pairing:  he came from the future simply because he wanted to meet her, but he is not allowed to tell her this, nor the deeper reason why he is here.  She has trouble believing him, particularly as the truth is revealed in fragments.  The black market in time travel in the future is interesting, and the interactions of time travelers in the past gives it some fascinating turns, but ultimately it is the love Sam has for Ruby that makes the story worth watching.

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The Time Traveler's Wife

When Clare first meets Henry, he has been married to her for quite a few years; when he first meets her, she is very much in love with him and has been waiting for years for that moment.  That is the backdrop for the love affair in The Time Traveler's Wife, a story of a relationship that spans a lifetime.  Henry suffers from something like an epileptic condition, except that his "seizures" cause him to vanish from the present and appear at some other moment in time--relatively random, sometimes future, sometimes past, and in different locations.  He always arrives completely naked with no notion of where or when he is or how long he will be gone.  However, he frequently appears in the wood behind the home of a young girl named Clare, who happens to be the girl he married before he started landing in her backyard.  Their relationship develops entirely out of sequence, as each already loves the other, to whom the other is a stranger, and wants to see the relationship blossom (although he never tells her that she is his wife before they are married).  Their life together is a fascinating study, and their daughter learns to do things with the ability Henry never imagined.

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About Time

In one of the most recent films we analyzed, About Time, Tim says that for him, it--the remarkable ability male members of his family have to travel to moments in their own history--was always going to be about love.  He ultimately is right.  He uses his strange ability to connect with Mary--or more precisely, to reconnect when he has managed accidentally to undo their first meeting and has to find a way to bring them back together.  This film, though, is more about life, about whether you would change the past if you could, and about the warm relationships not only between Tim and his wife Mary, but his relationships with his sister Kit and with his father.  It is made by the people who made Love, Actually, and is very much the same kind of movie in many ways.  It also, interestingly enough, features as Mary Rachel McAdams, who played the title character in The Time Traveler's Wife, also on our list.  Perhaps she has a knack for helping people travel through time.

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The Jacket

The Jacket is very different from most of the films on this list.  It is built as something of a murder mystery, a suspense thriller in which Jack is arrested at the scene of a murder and has no memory of events, but subsequently is mistreated by a doctor whose treatment causes him to travel in brief visits to the future--where he meets the young girl who could have provided some verification of the part of his story he did recall.  In his sporadic visits they build a relationship, and he changes his own future while trying to solve his own death.

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Kate and Leopold

The last three on our list are all the sort that are already fairly well known, popular films with well-known actors and ample budget.  They are "better" in those ways that mark an expensive film, but not necessarily in the ways that matter in time travel stories.  Kate and Leopold features Meg Ryan and a debonair Hugh Jackman, separated by most of a century but brought together by the explorations of her inept boyfriend.  Much of it is about the differences between the modern world and the nineteenth century, the attitudes of a nobleman transplated to America against a hard-selling Madison Avenue account executive.  The resolution smacks of fixed time theory, but overall it is a laudable plot in an enjoyable story.

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The Lake House

The Lake House is Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock maintaining a correspondence across a two-year gap thanks to the magic of a modernistic house by a lake in which they stayed a very short time apart.  It begins because she leaves a note for whoever is moving in after her, but he receives it when he lives there two years before.  Through their correspondence they fall in love.  Yet for some reason their efforts to meet each other are stymied, and ultimately she cuts off the relationship because she decides it will never work.  The complication is a major spoiler, and a clever twist, but it leads to a grandfather paradox as she undoes the event that brought them together originally.

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Somewhere In Time

There is a fanbase for a romance film which thinks it the greatest time travel love story of all time, Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour in Somewhere In Time.  The film gets kudos for an innovative notion of time travel, as Richard Collier wills himself into the past to meet Elise McKenna, because in her last years she came to him and asked him to return to her.  It has a fixed time feeling, and were it not for the inclusion of a pocket watch caught in a time loop it would be a perfect time travel story.  Resolving it, though, takes much of the romance out of it, and so it is really only enjoyable if you don't think too hard about it.  That can be said of many time travel films, of course, but in this case fans are usually upset at efforts to make temporal sense of the love story.

If there is a time travel romance you thought ought to have been mentioned here, drop me a note.  It is possible I missed it, in one sense or another.

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