Ali Plumb's Top Five 21st Century Time Travel Sci-fi Movies

After all the different genres I've wrestled with lately - see the increasingly expansive list in the 'Wondering what else to watch' section elsewhere on this page, featuring comedies, thrillers, animation and horror - you'd have thought I'd have pinned down a 'Top Five 21st Century Sci-fi movies' list too. Well... it's not quite happened yet.

The trouble is, there are just too many good ones. With that in mind, I've put together a pleasingly selective - some might say "hipstery" - top five time travel sci-fis, as for some reason we've been blessed with a glut of them over the past twenty years and I'd love to shine a light on some my favourite, indier, obscurer ones.

After all, when it comes to time travel chicanery, blockbusters are more and more willing to indulge in a spot of the 'wibbly wobbly timey wimey' stuff, flat-out refusing to let the Terminators have all the fun. Here are just some of the multi-million dollar budget Hollywood tentpoles that have gone, to paraphrase Marty McFly and co, "back in ti-yee-yime":

Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
Star Trek (2009)
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)
Shrek Forever After (2010)
Men in Black 3 (2012)
X-Men: Days Of Future Past (2014)
Doctor Strange (2016)
Deadpool 2 (2018)
Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Then there are comedies like Midnight In Paris, About Time and both Hot Tub Time Machines (purposefully forgetting the likes of Land of the Lost and Black Knight), on top of the animated decade-hopping seen in Mr. Peabody And Sherman and Meet the Robinsons.

Not forgetting romances like Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams' The Time Traveller's Wife and adaptations of classics like 2004's Guy Pearce-starring The Time Machine as well as the pleasingly bonkers self-referential horrors Happy Death Day and Happy Death Day 2U.

I should also give a shout-out to Donnie Darko, which is - when you squint to remember - a time loop sci-fi, albeit one that got a lot of attention back in 2001, what with its 'Mad World' Christmas number one and all, so perhaps it doesn't need any love from me. And then there’s Interstellar, but that’s for another time, another place…

Anyway, enough of all that. Let's crack on with it, shall we? And apologies in advance: when it comes to time-travel movies, it's very easy to say too much, so I'm sorry if my attempts to not reveal any spoilers results in me being... vague.

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To love HBO's Succession is to love Sarah Snook, also known as "Shiv". Before she was jostling for a kiss from daddy however, one of Australia's finest acting exports appeared in this brain-bending adaptation of the 1959 short story "—All You Zombies—" by Robert A. Heinlein. Ethan Hawke also stars, and it's the work between both leads that really raises this film up. Ultimately it's one of those movies that can offer no real plot teaser because it's almost immediately potential spoiler territory, but if you like dark, twisty, thoroughly strange sci-fis, look no further. A word of warning, mind: you will probably want to get a pen and paper out afterwards to work out the "science" of it but my advice is to hop onto Reddit and let those who've come before show you the temporal way. Trust me, it saved me a lot of time...

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Written, directed, produced, edited and scored by Shane Carruth (Upstream Color), this indier-than-indie sci-fi centres around the accidental discovery of time travel in a grounded and unpatronising way. Carruth himself is a mathematician and an engineer, and his decision to use complicated and realistic dialogue is part of what sets Primer apart - that and the ziggedy-zaggedy plot structure, morality elements and truly two-yoghurt-pots-and-some-sticky-back-plastic production design. This is a homemade time travel movie "for the thinking man", as annoying as that phrase is, a clever-clever motion picture put together for peanuts by a man who casually quotes Richard Feynman (and perhaps the world would be better if we all did to be honest). Here's a film that wants to make you think until your head hurts a bit, which sometimes you might actually want in your life.

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Known in its native Spain as Los Cronocrímenes, this time loop thriller sees a man caught in an increasingly dangerous time travel tailspin as he is forced to get rid of other versions of himself in order to stay alive. Directed and written by Nacho Vigalondo, this is a darkly funny corkscrew of incident and accident as one man haplessly - or not, as the case may be - whirls round and round his own original mistake in a knot that may make your head spin. In a good way!

Deemed so impressive upon release the legendary David Cronenberg was lined up to direct an American remake, this is one of those "Have you heard about Timecrimes?" sci-fis beloved by those in the know. Plus, it's only 88 minutes, so like Primer (79 minutes) and Predestination (97 minutes) it doesn't outstay its welcome. Oh, and if you enjoy this one, may I recommend another sci-fi - though not a time travel one, admittedly - in the form of Colossal, featuring Anne Hathaway, Jason Sudeikis and Dan Stevens. It's not for everyone but look it up if you're in any way intrigued.

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Looper, then - possibly the first film on my list you might actually recognise. It stars Bruce Willis for starters (no stranger to time travel and all sorts of science fiction fun), as well as Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blunt (another time-hopping aficionado, see below). Written and directed by the appallingly talented Rian Johnson (Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Brick, The Brothers Bloom and most recently Knives Out), Looper is about time travel, sure, and contract killers, absolutely, but also the fact that Gordon-Levitt and Willis play the same person, one sent back in time to kill the other. Set minds to blown, naturally.

Altogether, here's a neatly constructed, clever sci-fi that delivers those good ol' genre thrills with style and intelligence. There's this beautiful, reassuring feeling that the director behind the megaphone knows exactly what he's doing, taking you on a time-twisting adventure with big ideas and powerful set-pieces without the conforming oversight of an all-powerful studio looming over everything. We're lucky to have Looper. We're lucky it exists. Just... get ready to be forgiving to the make-up department, as popping certain facial prosthetics onto Gordon-Levitt's face can only go so far. As with all sci-fis, you'll need to use your imagination. Quite a bit, to be honest.

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I end this 'alternative' list with a flat-out blockbuster. One starring Tom ruddy Cruise, no less, but hear me out. This is a time-travel, time-loop, big budget mech-suits-and-giant-swords alien-smashing war film starring Ethan Hunt himself and somehow it didn't do all that well at the box office. This is despite its intriguing premise, fantastic action sequences and good reviews. Don't get me wrong, this film did okay but it should have been the film of the summer.

Quite why it didn't land is hard to say - the "easy" answer is that "Edge Of Tomorrow" is a terrible, meaningless title, something Cruise himself has said to me in an interview - but there's got to be more to it than that. What matters now, years later, is that there's a slick and smart sci-fi actioner waiting for you out there. You will not regret seeing Tom Cruise killed over and over and over again in a pleasingly offbeat conceit where a combat-avoiding PR executive (Cruise) is forced to relive the same day in the same alien war over and over again to learn how to defeat the enemy and get out of his time bubble, helped by the only person who's endured this before, the "Angel of Verdun" herself, Sergeant Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt).

As with so many time-jumping tales, there's a dark sense of humour at its core, but a lot of heart too, as well as all that exo-skeleton, massive machine gun fun you want to see in a manga adaptation like this one. And on that note, it's worth remembering the Japanese work that the film is based on was called 'All You Need Is Kill' so perhaps the tweaked title wasn't too bad, but the home entertainment release jamming the tagline 'Live. Die. Repeat' into the new title seems a little... inelegant.

And by the way, if you're looking for an example of how Japanese anime has been tackling time travel this century, may I recommend 2006's The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and even the 2010 live-action version if you're really, really curious.

Any road, if you haven't seen this film, go hunt it down and enjoy yourself. This is arguably the most entertaining and flat-out successful work from director Doug Liman since The Bourne Identity (2002), and I don't say that lightly. Did I mention Tom Cruise is killed in a variety of humorous ways in a series of exciting and funny montages? Well quite. So... what are you waiting for?