Time travel is a fascinating idea: we can change our past or look into the future. It can motivate your imagination and create stories filled with adventure, surprises, and many more wonders. But as I dive deeper into time travel stories, I find myself feeling more and more frustrated.
Time travel is so over-used in modern day writing, and often leads to unimaginative plots and clichés. In this piece, I attempt to portray my musings and reminiscences, hoping you find it as intriguing as I do. The first time I saw time travel in a movie, I was hooked.
Movies like *Back to the Future* thrust me into a universe where I could press a button and go on exciting adventures. While watching, the best part was McFly’s mid-adventure struggles, which appeared to balance how complicated time travel is with emotional elements. I’ll forever cherish the memory of the DeLorean speeding through time with the flux capacitor powering it; the feeling was amazing.
Yet, the more complicated and interesting the stories got, the more patterns I started to see. One of the most troubling aspects was that a lot of films that included time travel appeared to depend on gimmicks rather than real narratives. Take *Looper*, for an example.
The time travel part made me nervous—the idea of a younger and older version of a character meeting each other was far more interesting. Their meeting shouldn’t have worked; instead, it did, and that was irritating. The way the movie tackles time travel doesn’t feel like it serves the plot.
It’s almost like there’s a concussion grenade they set off without any regard for the emotional skeleton that simply stands in for the characters. There is no sense of wonder within the characters! And the question is asked: why was this device needed?
Was it to create some dazzling effects or was it meant to help enrich the characters and their conflicts? For some reason, I couldn’t shake this idea off and it did not take long for me to arrive at the other films with a similar approach to squandered time travel. *Terminator: Dark Fate* was one of them.
The first *Terminator* movie undoubtedly had a storyline that incorporated time travel realitively well in terms of enhancing the character arcs. Unfortunately, *Dark Fate* appeared to be a feeble attempt at recapturing the lost magic. Driving the story forward became driving the gaze into the story instead of away from it, creating everything in and around a riddled mess.
I walked out of the theater dazed, as I attempted to figure out a plot that had completely lost itself. The more I analyzed time travel stories, the more I noticed a set of time patterns: when the stakes are lessened by the ability to rewind or change events, the tension is gone. There is no urgency that those of us care about their journeys.
It’s a paradox of storytelling – if everything can be undone, why should we care? This phenomenon was stunning in *Tenet*, a movie whose beauty blinded me so much that I was looking at it as a puzzle rather than a story. After watching the exquisite time inversions for 2.5 hours, I was not met with emotional gratification, but confusion.
As I considered these experiences, I began wondering why time travel works as a narrative device in some cases. The answer centers around the emotional stakes of the journey. *Arrival* is a great candidate for how to deal with the idea of time meaningfully.
The movie departs from the conventional time travel cliches and instead approaches the story with a non-linear view of time. It beautifully crafted a narrative on loss, choice, and acceptance. I remember being deeply impacted by its analysis of how people’s perception of time can influence their experiences and the choices they make.
In contrast, *The Butterfly Effect* wanted to dissect the effects of time manipulation, but instead leaned toward more sensationalist and bombastic imagery. Ashton Kutcher’s character went through unimaginably terrible and absurd scenarios that, to me, felt devoid of any real emotional gravity. That was a textbook example of a style-over-substance situation.
The plot had overtaken the story and its complex set of mechanisms. I found myself wishing the movie took a more simplistic approach that focused on the emotional journeys of the characters rather than the eye-catching premise. This pulls me back to my previous encounters with time travel.
I wish that there were more stories that incorporate time travel not as a plot twist, but as a way to analyze humanity. From my perspective, the most compelling stories are the ones that are deeply intertwined with our greatest fears and wants, inspiring self-analysis about their lives and choices. If used correctly, time travel can metaphorically embody the struggle of regret, hope, and redemption.
However, the pendulum still swings back to the negative side. It appears that quite a few authors and screenwriters use time travel as a lazy way out. Rather than undertaking the complex task of crafting characters and themes, many simply add the element of time travel as a way to conveniently explain bad story development or absent character building.
This has become too visible for me not to get disenchanted with how this phenomenon is spread across the media, from blockbuster movies to hit TV shows. It’s quite curious to think how time travel works in shows like *Doctor Who*, which keeps the mystery alluring in its own way. Sometimes the mechanics of how time travel works in the universe of the show can be a bit ridiculous, but since the *Doctor Who* fandom is so large, they seem to be pretty forgiving.
Still, as much as I love the series, I can acknowledge that even *Doctor Who* has its downfalls when it chooses to ignore the driving heart behind its plots. The show shines the most when it tackles the paradox of humanity with drama and comedy while poetically exploring time and space. The show seems to struggle the most when it steps away from the characters and their personal relationships.
While reflecting on how time travel is portrayed in media, I can’t wrap my head around how much thought is actually put into the choices of devices used by the writers. There’s no denying that the ability to travel back and forth in time is fascinating and caters to everyone’s wish to alter their future plans, but it can also be completely overdone and lack substance and depth. When thinking of the many stories that have fascinated me with the concept of a time machine behind them, I seem to be always let down afterwards because my emotional attachment to the characters wasn’t sufficiently fulfilled.
Overall, time travel can be used creatively but it must be approached with care. Personally, as a consumer and a future creator of stories, I think it is important to understand that every narrative’s core is built from characters and the choices they make. Time travel, when cleverly integrated within the deeper context of human experiences, can facilitate remarkable storytelling.
If it is abused as merely a plot device, it turns bland and loses its charm, rendering the audience unsatisfied. Next time you experience a time travel story, I suggest pondering over what sits below the surface. Is the plot using this amazing concept to tackle the human condition, or is it an attempt to cover the absence of depth with the use of temporal manipulation?
How you answer this question might just determine whether the story brings you joy or exasperation.
