There are two films which bear this title; the one that is of interest here is the time travel film in which H. G. Wells creates a time machine and Jack the Ripper uses it to escape to the twentieth century.

Of particular interest in this film is the treatment of the time machine, which is seen as existing in every moment of time at once.  The traveler gets into it, and moves through time; but if someone physically moves the time machine, the traveler arrives in the place to which the machine has been moved.  This seems most consistent with Wells' original story (note that it is a problem for the film The Time Machine precisely because it seems that the machine should exist in every second through which it passes).  However, time within the machine is confusing, and can't withstand much scrutiny.

There is an inherent problem with Wells being in the future; that is that his presence in the future temporarily removes him from the past.  On his journey forward, there will be no H. G. Wells museum, no books he wrote, no history about him, as he has not done any of those things before leaving the past.  He goes back, in the end, to do them, which would restore his place in history in the CD timeline, but the AB timeline is very difficult to reconstruct due to his absence from it.

The hop forward to read the paper about the death of the girl is a nice touch.  We accept that it was never the girl, and always her friend, who was the victim.  This is doubly clear, given that when she moved forward a day she removed herself entirely from history for that day and could not have been killed in her absence.  Had she returned and prevented the death of her friend (or become the victim) this would have caused a serious anomaly.

It has been quite some time since I saw the film (I've got a copy here somewhere, though, so I should be able to get to it eventually); I vaguely remember the girl going back to the past with Wells.  If that's so, it creates another sort of anomaly; but we'll deal with that if we get around to doing this page.

This earlier Gilliam foray into time travel (before 12 Monkeys) is a bit of magical fantasy.  The travels of the dwarfs are problematic, because they do not have a moment of origin in time--they are supernatural beings coming from outside space and time and using the "holes in time" to get around.  This makes their effects on time rather difficult to interpret.  However, once they pick up the boy, his movements through time will have specific traceable effects.  Again, I haven't seen this film in too many years, and can't address details at this time.

I've never seen this film.  I'm given to understand that a group of travelers somehow lands fifteen minutes behind normal time, and discovers that the past is being consumed by creatures of some sort.  I guess I'll have to see it, because it seems silly to me.  Meanwhile, I don't consider this to be time travel--if it were true, time travel would be impossible.  It does fit with our intuitions about time, in that if it is true then the future does not exist yet and the past does not exist anymore; but the way this is achieved makes no sense to me temporally, as it seems to say that the past does exist, but is completely different from our experience.

Don't get me started.  Right from its core premise, this film is a disaster; and rather than attempt to mitigate it, it pushes the envelope into the worst possible interpretations of its premise.

The central problem lies in the idea that it is possible to go back to "fix" the past based on some knowledge of what it should have been.  Throughout the film, our hero becomes aware that someone has traveled back in time to change it, and armed with the knowledge of what should have happened he goes back to prevent the change.  There are two problems with this that are insurmountable.

The first is, when we detect that someone has traveled through time, what are we detecting?  There seem to be three possibilities here:

1. We are detecting the arrival of someone in the past.
2. We are detecting the movement of someone from the future through our present.
3. We are detecting the departure of someone from our present.

If we are detecting an arrival in the past, then at the moment we have the capacity to do so, we must detect all arrivals to any point in time before the present.  This is an oversimplification.  Under my theory, in the original history you would detect no arrivals (because there cannot be any), but with each time trip, the number of such arrivals would increase.  There would be no way to identify which came "first", that is, from what point in time the travelers left.  All you could know is that there are arrivals in the past--some of which are bound to be your own police, moving from the future, so you'll wind up investigating yourself.

If you detect the motion of someone traveling through time as they pass through the present moment, you have the same problem, only slightly mitigated:  Anyone who will ever leave from the future for the past will pass through this moment, in some sense "at the same time"; and all such time travel events will be detectable from the moment the detector is operational until the moment of departure.  You might in theory be able to measure something about the temporal trajectory (this is extremely speculative) that would tell you the point of origin and the destination, but there is still insufficient information to determine anything useful.

If you detect a time travel event at the moment of departure, you're too late.  The time traveler has already arrived in the past, and any changes he is going to make have been made.  You cannot now discover what history was before the changes, because the changes have been made.  Attempting to undo what was done is a guaranteed anomaly, and if successful an infinity loop.  That is, once the time traveler has left, leave him alone.  If time still exists for you to follow him, you were fortunate; if you need to fix it, it's too late.

That is the second insurmountable problem:  you cannot go to the past to change the past in specific ways that are based on your knowledge of the past.  To do so is to erase the information on which the decision to make the trip was based.  The best hope in such cases is that you will fail, since success is the total destruction of time.

Ultimately, Time Cop traps its entire story into a massive infinity loop:  Cop's wife is killed by travelers from the future; cop becomes an enforcer of time travel law; cop prevents death of his wife.  Suddenly his entire life has changed, and we can be pretty certain he never became a time cop at all; he certainly is not the same person.

The film also suffers from a failure to have a theory of time.  It clearly does not hold either the fixed time or parallel dimensions theory; it would seem to have something similar to my theory, but to abuse it into nonsense.

This film pretends to be about time, but is not consistent with itself.  It uses the popular science fantasy notion of accelerated molecules, but calls it hypertime.  I'm of the notion that it does not involve any time travel at all.

It should also be noted that it is inconsistent in other ways.  For example, the scene in which they are causing their friend to dance is completely unacceptable, for a variety of reasons:

• They are unable to hear the music; they are so accelerated that it is moving too slowly for them to recognize it as sound.  This being the case, they couldn't possibly move his body in time with the music, and he would wind up just looking awkward.
• The puppetry they're attempting would seem to take them hours.  We see them slowly moving his body parts, but in reality it would be more like stop action animation--move the leg an eighth of an inch, wait, move it another eighth, wait, and so on.  It is a tedious process, requiring great care to do correctly.  Even so, those tiny movements have to be made slowly, to avoid injuring their friend.
• In hypertime, we see them kneeling beside their friend; but this means they are staying still while they do this, and if they are not moving they should become if not plainly visible at least a blurry presence obscuring the background.

It is also tremendously unclear how objects interact with them.  They drive cars at hyperspeed.  At what point have the cars been accelerated?

There is an older version of the H. G. Wells classic; I've seen fragments of it.  My impression is (the participation of Mr. Wells' descendant on the newer version not withstanding) the older one is more faithful to the book.  But again, I have not seen it through, so I can't comment specifically.  I will probably examine it in more detail eventually.

People write to ask me about this all the time; and my best answers are first that there is insufficient information to do a full analysis, and second that I think it likely that the film 12:01 happened on Groundhog Day, and that the stars of these two films were for different reasons able to remember the repetition of the day.

In any event, whatever the cause of the anomaly, it is clear that Bill Murray's character is caught in a sawtooth snap; the same day keeps repeating, but because he is aware of it he is able to make changes.  For some reason we never discover, that repetition comes to an end.

It is because we can't determine why it ends that the film defies analysis.  We can observe that the anomaly occurs, and that's about it.

This was a made for TV movie that has since been released on video tape; Martin Laundau and, I think, Helen Slater, were both in it.  I saw it on television when it was new.  For the longest time I kept calling this 11:59; I got the time wrong.

I often say that this film is the explanation for Groundhog Day; it also creates a Sawtooth Snap, in which one person is aware of the repeat of the day.  In this case, our hero actually finds the cause of the repetition (Landau's project) and resolves it.  It's a good film in this regard, as I recall, and I'll probably attempt to analyze it sometime.

I'm not certain whether this is two movies or three, nor even how many of them I saw.  I remember in the first, there was an experiment during World War II attempting to make ships "invisible to radar" which accidentally rendered them actually invisible--by removing them from reality altogether.  Two sailors leapt overboard, and came ashore forty years later.  They couldn't figure out what was happening to them.

One gets pulled back into this electrical storm that seems to follow them; after that, the other makes his way to that one's home, and finds him, elderly now and thought crazy for his story of having been to the future.  The one who is still visiting from the past eventually goes back into the storm voluntarily, where he shuts down the generators on the ship, allowing it to return to the Philadelphia naval yard minutes after it vanished.  He again leaps overboard, and comes out in the future.

I have vague memories of sequels, involving Nazi aircraft, a daughter, and a few disjointed details.  The most notable thing about these is that the star of the original film is replaced by an actor who neither looks nor sounds like him in any way, and the love interest is written out as deceased.  I can't begin to discuss them, although I suppose one day I'll have to do so.

In the original, travel to the future merely erases these two from history.  This is not a problem.  The one then goes back into the storm.  He does not yet appear in the past; he's trapped on the ship.  That means that the one still in the present will never find any trace of either of them.  However, ultimately the other reaches the ship and shuts off the power.  This completes his friend's trip to the past, creating the CD timeline.  Thus he meets his friend at the family home.

More serious, perhaps, is the fact that until that time travel event is completed, the ship cannot reappear in Philadelphia.  It must still be trapped in the alternate dimension for all those years, as part of the AB timeline.  It is in the CD timeline that it is released, moments after it vanishes, when the hero travels back from the nineteen eighties to the nineteen forties to release it.  This also means that in the AB timeline no one will report that he was seen rescuing the ship, because he never did it, and the ship was never rescued.  But this is remedied in the CD timeline.  In this connection, it is also significant that they do not have a record that says he did not come back with the ship, because the ship never came back; but they would still have a roster of who was missing.

The more I consider it, the more problematic it becomes.  I hesitate to do an analysis, however, as I seem to recall the sequels were terrible, and I'd rather not subject myself to multiple viewings of such bad movies.

Bruce Willis' other time travel movie is a delightful fantasy about growing up and knowing who you are; it's a terrible time travel movie.  We never understand why or how anyone moves through time, except that it's somehow connected to this magical diner which appears here and there.  It is also not explained why, if as a child he came forward in time and met himself, he as an adult does not remember having done it.  It appears that his older self helps his younger self cope with life, actually stepping back into his own past to give him the encouragement he needs to overcome some obstacle.  There is also a yet older self who buzzes around in a crop duster, trying to tell us that everything will be all right eventually.

Even under loose scrutiny, this film starts to fall apart temporally.  Mercifully, that's not it's point.  Suffice it that it could never happen, and leave it at that.

This movie was actually better than I anticipated.  That is not entirely due to the fact that the cover led me to anticipate a slapstick adaptation of Connecticutt Yankee.  The film has some good moments.  In the end, they try to sell us the notion that the entire story has been the dreams of the main character as paramedics attempt to revive him from a drowning accident; and yet they also try to leave it open as to whether that's right or not.  As goofy an ending as that is, it proves better than trying to figure out the timelines of it as reality.

This adaptation of a French film is a lot of fun, and the French actor who carries off the lead is quite believable in the role of the nobleman.  It's mostly comic, drawn in large part on the displaced medieval duo in the modern world.  Some of it is on the edge of disgusting, such as having them wash up in the toilet because of how clean it seems, and eating the minty urinal freshener.  Overall, it does an excellent job of giving us the feeling of men out of time.

It does not do at all well with the time travel part.  A disaster at a dinner has the nobleman slated for execution, and his wizard attempts to save him by sending him back to fix the problem--but the spell is interrupted, and the nobleman is instead propelled forward hundreds of years.  Here he happens to meet his own descendant, who is considering selling the ancestral property.  At this point we should shudder.  The man has been ripped out of time, unmarried and childless.  He has no descendants.  He won't have them until he returns.  Thus we can't be seeing the AB timeline; he must already have lived through some sort of modern world adventures that don't include his great-great-greater granddaughter.  Once he returns to the past and repairs the damage, then he can have children who begin the chain that leads to her.

It is further complicated by the nature of the magic.  The wizard ultimately sends the nobleman back to a moment before the disaster (a potion substituted for his wine, which is given to his bride by mistake), where he displaces himself.  Now, I'm not certain why he displaced himself in the final scene but not in the first trip.  Shouldn't he appear inside his own crypt?  The use of time travel is thus inconsistent; if he can travel to a point after his life would have ended and appear in a place without reference to the location of his corpse, then when he travels back he ought to temporally duplicate himself, such that there are two of him in the room.  That doesn't happen.  Perhaps of more serious consequence, in avoiding the disaster, he also derails the entire chain of events.  He will not be arrested and held pending execution; his wizard will not accidentally send him to the distant future; he will not help his descendant; he will not return to abort the disaster; and so the disaster will happen.

However, the film is certainly worth seeing, if only for the moment when the wizard pulls himself together.

Someone mentioned this film, and I said I didn't think I'd seen it; but when they started to describe it to me, suddenly it started to come back.  It has not come back nearly well enough for me to know even whether it's really a time travel story, but I'm going to have to hunt it down and find out.

I have seen this film.  I expect some would call it an excuse for showing a lot of footage of a buxom blonde bouncing along at a quick jog, but I don't think it's as bad as that.  However, I do not think it is a time travel movie.  It is a film about assessing and making choices, and where these take you.  As such, I don't expect to add it to this site.

This is the film which inspired 12 Monkeys, and as such I get questions about it periodically.  Not only have I not seen it, I have not seen it for sale or rent anywhere.  Also, my viewing of Run, Lola, Run notwithstanding, I try to avoid foreign language films, as they are more difficult to watch and understand, even with dubbing and subtitles.  If it happens my way someday I will probably watch it, but I am not making an effort to do so.

Primer is the first film to be discussed in the new series at The Examiner.  The serialized articles are indexed on the page here entitled The Examiner Connection.

Everyone who asks me about this film says it is not a time travel film.  That leaves me wondering why I'm supposed to watch it.  I keep assuring people that I will, if only to confirm their belief that time travel has nothing to do with it, but at the moment I don't know when that will be.

I got a number of questions about this film.  I have managed to obtain a copy, and have watched it once.  My expectations, based on those initial questions and comments, were correct:  the film creates an impossible infinity loop in the end.  It is a pleasant enough love story, with lots of anomalies to analyze and a Frequency-like transfer of information between two points in time, but in the end it fails.

I have a copy of this because a fan of the site gave it to me.  Since I'm backed up with Primer and Lake House I am not certain when I will get a chance to watch it.  From what I gather, the temporal element is that the hero can see a few seconds into the future and change what is about to happen.  I am already thinking in Minority Report terms of some sort of psychic probable future, but I have not yet seen it.

Sandra Bullock's other time travel movie (she is in Lake House apparently has her living fragments of her life out of sequence.  This is another that someone gave me so that I would have the chance to analyze it, so it is on the DVD player waiting for me to have time to view it.

I have some anticipation of this film, because people kept asking me if I had read and might analyze the book.  I have not and I will not--but having seen the film on a rack in a store, I bought it, and I will eventually watch it and attempt to analyze the movie.  Fans of the book will have to decide for themselves whether the movie analysis applies to the book.  That's rarely the case, but it might be.

I was early a fan of Futurama, but grew weary of it before the end of the first season.  I had absolutely no interest in the movie based on the series--but someone did, and sent me a copy of it.  I am still not completely sold on doing an analysis, because it apparently never had a theatrical release, and I have always insisted on limiting the site to movies which have been in theatres.  However, the argument has been made that I should at least watch it, so I might go so far as that.

The first I really knew of this movie came in a note from John "A1nut" Cross, who wrote the analysis of The Final Countdown.  He wrote to ask whether he could do an analysis of this warm and fuzzy environmentally friendly children's story.  I said I would look at it; then I happened upon a copy of the film, so I watched it so that I could discuss it with him meaningfully.

It turns out to be a much more complicated film than either of us anticipated, and he has gotten a bit caught up in trying to work out at least some of the impact of the two major prior anomalies which the film strongly suggests but does not detail.  I have every confidence that he will produce a solid analysis eventually, and if he does not, I have a copy and will probably get to it.