If time travel is ever to be invented, wouldn’t we already have had evidence of it? The question is enough to give grammarians seizures, let alone filmmakers. As Jeff Daniels’s world-weary time-traveling crime lord says in Rian Johnson's Looper, “this time travel shit fries your brain like an egg.” And the film, out this Friday, is far from the most brain-frying cinematic treatment of time travel.
In “consistent” time-travel stories, however, the time traveler was always a part of the events he affected (e.g. Twelve Monkeys, or Robert Heinlein’s classic mindfuck of a short story, —All You Zombies—, in which the main character is both his own mother and father). These are Moebius strip narratives. There is no first time around or second time around. There is just one past that contains the traveler. Stories of this type, Maudlin says, “are more like clever crossword puzzles, where all the various threads fit together in a satisfactory way. They appeal to the logician rather than the sentimentalist.”
With that distinction in mind, we can determine just how logical Looper and the other nine best time-travel movies are. (Another paradox: the more logical the treatment of time travel, the more it makes your brain hurt.)
Looper (2012)[Spoiler warning!]
Plot: Joe, a young gun-for-hire, must kill his future self or be killed, but Bruce Willis, naturally, has another outcome in mind.
Consistent? No. We see a whole timeline in which Young Joe kills Old Joe, then lives out the rest of his life before coming up with a plan to stop Young Joe from killing the now Old Joe. If he succeeds, he would never have been able to live the life he lived theretofore. And the ending raises an even bigger paradox.
Back to the Future (1985)
Plot: Marty McFly, a kid with a mad-scientist friend and a loser dad, travels from 1985 to 1955 in a souped-up DeLorean, fools around with his hot teenage mom, inspires his dad to grow a pair and knock Biff the bully out, then returns to 1985.
Consistent? No. If Marty goes back in time, then there would never have been a version of the past without him. The other thing is, for Marty to still be born after his disruption of his parents’ courtship, his mom and pop need to time the moment of fertilization to the microsecond. But that’s more a question of probability (and staying power) than logic.
Back to the Future II (1989)
Plot: Marty travels to the future, buys a sports almanac, which falls in the hands of elder Biff, who travels to 1955, and gives it to his younger self, thus helping Biff become a sports-gambling gazillionaire, and transforming Hill Valley into a seedy dystopia. Marty goes back to 1955 to destroy the almanac, without interfering with his previous time-traveling exploits from the first movie.
Consistent? No. In the words of Doc Brown, writers Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale weren’t “thinking fourth dimensionally.” Narratively, it’s fantastic. Logically, it’s all over the place, where multiple timelines coexist and alternate.
Back to the Future III (1990)
Plot: After reading that Doc, who traveled to 1885, died in a duel against Biff’s gunslinging ancestor, Marty finds the DeLorean Doc had hidden away and goes back to save him.
Consistent: Of course not. As with the first two, the multiple timelines are irreconcilable paradoxes. Plus, as several obsessive geek sites have pointed out, when Marty finds the DeLorean and goes back to 1885 with it, there should by all logic be two DeLoreans in 1885.
Plot: In a last-ditch effort to win the future war against mankind, Skynet’s intelligent machines send the Terminator back to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor and prevent her from giving birth to John Connor, who would grow up to lead the successful human-led Resistance. But the Resistance sends Kyle Reese back to protect Sarah. Overstepping his duties, he impregnates her, and she gives birth to… John Connor!
Consistent? Yes. It’s circular, chicken-or-egg logic, but it holds together.
Plot: Through unexplained magic, a disenchanted screenwriter on holiday in Paris makes nightly trips to the 1920s, where he hangs out with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Stein, et al.
Consistent: Yes—38 years after Sleeper, Woody Allen proves once again that he’s an unlikely master of time travel logic. Since the screenwriter is merely a wide-eyed observer of the Lost Generation’s moveable feast, his interference with history is minimal. One nice touch: he reads about a beautiful flapper’s love for him in her time-yellowed diaries, which he finds at a rare-book stand by the Seine. Thus, his own past includes him.
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)
Plot: In a distant future that worships the music and wisdom of Bill and Ted, a man is sent back to 1989 in a phone-booth time machine to make sure that Bill and Ted pass their history class. (Otherwise, Bill’s dad will send him to a military academy, putting an end to Bill and Ted’s musical dreams). The pair then use the time machine to gather great historical figures from Socrates to Abe Lincoln for a most excellent high school history presentation.
Consistent? Actually… Yes. Future people worship Bill and Ted because they passed their history class and perfected their music, which they could only do because future people intervened. Trippy, but no multiple timelines required. “As I recall,” says Maudlin, “Bill and Ted is consistent, or at least plays with the problems of consistency.”
Twelve Monkeys (1995)
Plot: Sent from a post-apocalyptic future to prevent the outbreak of a devastating virus, James Cole finds himself plagued by troubling dreams of a chase and a shooting at an airport. When he finally tracks down the man intent on releasing the virus, Cole is shot at an airport. A young James Cole sees this happen without realizing he’s witnessing his own death.
Consistent? Yes. The story, like La Jetée, the 1962 short film it’s based on, is an endless loop. There is only ever one timeline.
Primer (2004)
Plot: Two scientists accidentally create a time machine in their garage, then use it to go back in time and make a killing on the stock market, in a plan not too different from Biff’s in Back to the Future II. Problem is, they do it over and over again, leaving behind countless doubles of themselves and leaving audiences with throbbing migraines.
Consistent? I really have no idea. And this insane chart doesn’t help.
Plot: Three astronauts travel 2006 light years into space (during which time their bodies only age 18 months), and land on a planet ruled by intelligent apes, only to realize that that planet is Earth.
Consistent? Yes. I can’t vouch for the science, but there’s no pesky overlapping timelines here, since the crew was traveling into the future. Same with H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.
* For instance, my belief that time travel will never be invented because if it will be, we would already have seen evidence of it. Maudlin's refutation: “There is one obvious possibility,” he says “One could imagine a sort of time travel that not only needs a 'sending' machine in the future … but also a 'receiving' machine in the past — just as one needs both a transmitter and a receiver to send a radio message. If so, then there can't be any time travel until technology has advanced enough to build the first receiver.” Well, yeah, it’s obvious if you put it like that. Sheesh.
Julian Sancton is a writer based in Manhattan. He has contributed to Vanity Fair, Esquire and Playboy, among other publications.
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