Types of Fictional Time Travel Seen In Films

By Bharat “Barry” Krishna

There are a variety of fictional representations of Time Travel in films over the decades. Each one also sports a mechanism to physically travel through time - hitting 88 mph in a Delorean, transported in an energy bubble, a hot tub, a time capsule, and more. In this article, I'd like to look at the consequences of traveling through time and its impact on the fabric of fiction reality. Anyone who's read science books that address time-travel will be quite familiar with a couple of infamous paradoxes. Let's take a look at each and match them with their time-travel constructs with film examples.

Grandfather Paradox – Single Timeline

This happens when a character travels back in time and ends up in the same timeline that they started from. Any change to the past would have a cascading effect on the future. The Grandfather Paradox gets its name because a person could go back in time, when their grandpa was a little boy, and kill him. This would mean that (s)he would never be born. It becomes a paradox because if (s)he doesn't exist, then who killed the Grandfather?

One of the most popular films that sported time-travel this way was Back To The Future. While the film created a multitude of paradoxes, they more than made up for it with the wit, the characters, and the plot. In recent times we had Looper that implemented time travel this way. The conversation on paradoxes was brushed away, stating, "if we start talking about it, we're gonna be here all day making diagrams with straws".

Predestination Paradox – Single Timeline

A predestination paradox occurs when a time traveler is caught in a loop of events that "predestines" or "predates" them to traveling back in time. To simplify, this means that the person does land in the same timeline that they started off from, but anything that (s)he does will only create history as (s)he knows it. Let's assume John is someone who lost his wife to a car accident. Years later, John finds a way to travel back in time and decides to save his family. Once he goes to the past, he enters a car and rushes to the location where his wife met with the accident... only to crash into her car and kill her. An event of the future predestined an event in the past. The timeline is immutable. This type of a time-loop also gives birth to another sub-paradox...

The Bootstrap Paradox

The above time-loop can give birth to something present neither before nor after the loop. Let's assume Jess and Jane are good friends. One day Jane gives Jess a pen and says, "keep this safe and give it to me after one year". Jess does so and hands the pen over to Jane after a year. Jane then stumbles upon a time machine and travels back to the past by one year. She carefully avoids her younger self and meets Jess. Jane gives Jess a pen and says, "keep this safe and give it to me in one year". In this loopy nature of things, the pen was bootstrapped into existence for that 1 year, seemingly from nowhere.

The most prominent example of a film that operates in a singular time-loop has got to be Predestination. The film can really put your mind in a knot. Other famous ones are 12 Monkeys, Interstellar, and, more recently, Arrival. Even the first two parts of The Terminator are constructed in this manner. I could tell you what gets bootstrapped in these films, but that would give away the plot.

Non-Paradoxical - Alternate Timelines

This variant to going back in time creates no paradoxes. This happens when the time-traveler goes back and arrives in an alternate timeline. This means that any changes here will leave the original timeline unaffected. Let's test this with a couple of the above scenarios. A person going back to kill her Grandfather would create a new timeline in which she will never be born. However, the events in the original timeline remain intact. In the example of Jane's pen, it would move from one timeline to another after a year, but it would have a distinct starting point.

Examples of movies that followed this pattern are The Butterfly Effect (although not a time-travel based film), X-Men: Days of Future Past, Primer, and the very popular anime Kimi No Na Wa. Sequels after Terminator 2 switched to alternate timelines that went all over the place. There is one caveat in these movies, however. The birth of the new timeline potentially makes it impossible for the time traveler to go back to the original timeline.

A blockbuster from 2019 leveraged the ability to navigate between the alternate timelines to enable a fantastic storytelling, and that was Avengers: Endgame. This implementation of fictional time travel ensured that the Marvel Cinematic Universe through the years was untouched, and yet, we saw the original timeline move forward in terms of plot.

Non-Paradoxical - Time-Loops

Some films set up a circumstance where characters get trapped in a time-loop. They end up going through the same period repeatedly. The situation is as though only the consciousness is sent back in time, and the character remembers everything from the previous loops. Here too, each loop creates a new timeline, and the person can no longer access the previous timelines (they are erased). As a result, there is no room for the classic paradoxes.

One of the most popular films that follows this construct is Groundhog Day. Source Code, ARQ, Edge of Tomorrow, and Triangle are other great examples. The movies focus on what the lead learns from each loop to turn it into an advantage.

And there you have it, every pattern of time travel in movies. Is there a scenario that you think didn't get covered in the article? If so, please drop a comment below.