Time Travel in Hollywood Films

Movies with time travel as a plot device is as common today as any other film genre.  This has not always been the case. Before the 1980s time travel films were a rare find. Something happened in the Reagan years that made Hollywood embrace the idea of traveling through time.

One of the first time travel films of note was 1949's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in which Bing Crosby travels back in time to King Arthur's Camelot. It was based on a story by Mark Twain.  It would be ten years before another such film was made. This time it was a film adaptation of H.G. Well's The Time Machine, starring Rod Taylor who travels to a future world of Morlocks and Eloi. It would be almost ten more years before another significant time travel film was made.  Only this time the time travel was the twist ending. I am talking about Planet of the Apes (1968), in which a astronaut, played by Charlton Heston, does not even realize that he has traveled through time until the classic ending on the beach. Excluding the Planet of the Apes sequels, the next big film to feature time travel was at the climax of Superman (1978) when Superman travels back in time to save Lois Lane.

In 1980, time travel took a romantic turn. In The Final Countdown, a modern aircraft carrier, The USS Nimitz, gets caught in a storm that sends it conveniently back in time to the day before the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor.  In Somewhere in Time, Christopher Reeves again travels through time for love's sake. Here he surrounds himself with only things from the past and by sheer force of will travels back in time to fall in love with Jane Seymour. The following year saw Terry Gilliam's comedy Time Bandits, about midget thieves who steal from the famous and then escape to another time. 

The time travel floodgates really opened up with the releases and success of Terminator (1984) and Back to the future (1985). Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) was clearly influenced by Back to the Future as it likewise features a person traveling back to the 1950s, attending high school and seeking help from the smartest person they know. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home plays like Terminator. Both feature people/androids going back in time to save their future. Nearly every year since, Hollywood has released at least one, if not more, films that feature time travel. 

What was a rare plot device has become a large genre with sub genres. There are the comedy time travel films such as Army of Darkness (1992),  Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures (1989), Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), 13 Going on 30 (2004) and Hot Tub Time Machine (2010). There are the romantic time travel films such as Forever Young (1992), Kate and Leopold (2001), The Time Traveler's Wife (2009) and Midnight in Paris (2011). The most exciting of the genres is, of course, the action time travel films. From the Terminator sequels to Time Cop (1994), Source Code (2011) and Looper (2012), time travel provides plenty of excuses for mindless and creative action sequences.

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