Top 5... Time Travel Films

After my recent cinematic adventures with Looper, this list was going to be my Top 5... Fainting Scenes, however I couldn't think of any good ones outside of Sleepy Hollow. So, to celebrate Looper and my finally remaining conscious throughout its entirety, here's my Top 5... Time Travel Films. Also, apologies for posting a day late, I wanted to sort out my thoughts on Looper to see if it would be on the list, and I was out last night, sorry about that.

Time travel in films has always had one major problem - paradoxes. To my knowledge, no film or franchise has successfully made an entirely plausible and plot-hole-free time travel story. They either travel through parallel universes in ways they shouldn't be able to (Back to the Future Part II), ignore ways in which the present/future would change because of events in the past/present (Deja Vu), or conveniently forget the existence of the time travel device when it could be incredibly useful elsewhere (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban). This is generally the most important aspect I look for in a good time travel film, although occasionally sheer entertainment value can often outweigh this.

Terminator 2: Judgement Day

How do you make a sequel to Terminator? It seems like the perfect movie to create a franchise with, featuring the possibilities for labyrinthine time-travel plotting, self referencing paradoxes and a villain who can be killed, but can also always return, but therein lays the biggest stumbling block. The villain from the original, Schwarzenegger’s unstoppable mechanical monster, the main draw of the first film, surely must return for the second, especially seeing as, in 1991, he was one of the biggest stars in the world. But how could the same robot come back as the villain? The sequel must somehow build upon the original, develop it further, else why bother? Having the same villain, with essentially the same plot, would seem a waste of time. So, proving that necessity is indeed the mother of invention, director James Cameron pulled a full character flip on not just Arnie’s T-800, now here as protector rather than foe, but also of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor, discarding the ditzy 80s hairdo for some badass fighting skills, tank tops and a permanent ticket to the gun show. The introduction of John Connor (Edward Furlong) as a ridiculously irritating teenager spouting laughable phrases (Asta-la-vista, baby? Seriously?) is also a diversion from the expected, as he’s the so-called saviour of mankind, but he’s so goddamn annoying that whenever he was onscreen I found myself rooting for the bad guy.

And what a bad guy. Tackling the insurmountable challenge of topping the Governator’s performance in the previous film, Cameron used Robert Patrick as the liquid metal T-1000, able to mimic anything it touches. The T-1000 is superior to the T-800 in every way, making the formerly unstoppable Terminator now seem genuinely flawed. R-Patz plays the T-1000 with a similar steely, machine-like physicality to Schwarzenegger, but is much more agile and flexible, creating a more efficient killing machine.

The CGI (and indeed, lack thereof) is incredible (I recently discovered that the shot where the Connors go digging around in Arnie’s head whilst he is talking was done completely without computers, instead using a fake mirror and Linda Hamilton’s twin sister) especially the T-1000’s morphing abilities (the shotgun-blasted creature at the end is in actual fact a fully mechanical model, that someone probably has in their house somewhere. I want it). 

The film also comes with one of cinemas coolest moments, when the T-800 single handedly reloads a shotgun whilst riding a motorcycle, with Arnie not even looking at it. I also enjoyed how the Terminator universe had expanded from the first film, the events actually causing progression, as the arm of the T-800 that was trapped in the factory has been discovered, as has an integral chip from within its head, allowing scientists to invent the technology required to create the Terminators, possibly sooner than would have happened had the original T-800 and Kyle Reese not come back from the future in the first film.

Choose Film 9/10

The Terminator

Film night strikes again with the Terminator. This is a film that is so deeply ingrained within popular culture that I cannot remember the first time that I saw it, and probably did not even realise it was my first time then, as the character is so well known, from the way he moves to his handful of lines of dialogue, but I tried to watch it afresh, as though it was 1984 and I’d wandered blindly into a cinema and sat down. The most surprising thing I found was that there is no indication that Schwarzenegger is a cyborg until about 45 minutes into the films, though it is now the most famous aspect of the film. Up until Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) tells Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) that he is a robot sent from the future to kill her, preventing the birth of her son and therefore the revolution against the cyborgs that he will eventually cause, we only assume that Schwarzenegger is just a specially trained, seemingly unstoppable killer, possibly a soldier or hitman of some kind. Yes there are some hints; his stiff-legged walking and even stiffer speech mannerisms, but at the time no-one would have been expecting anything more acting-wise from the former bodybuilder. 

It seems that not just the cyborgs are out to get Sarah either, in fact almost all the machinery in the film is on the brink of turning against humanity, from the police radio or answering machines that lead the terminator to her or the man complaining about his garbage truck in the opening scene, the robot uprising is already upon us. Occasionally the soundtrack jarred with the action though, particularly the awkward synth noises during the motorcycle/car chase, and the effects in places looked a little ropey, but at the time they were incredible, and I don’t intend to belittle them now.

This is a film you can be a fan of without even watching it, so iconic are the scenes, characters and lines that it is ranked up with Star Wars and Indiana Jones for the effect it has had on today’s culture. So if you haven’t seen it because you think you already have, make sure that you do, if only for one of the greatest dead-oh-wait-no-he’s-not bits in cinema history.

Choose Film. 9/10