Time-Travel Movies We Love

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Mar 11, 2022

When done right, the time-travel movie can be transcendent. From an influential 1962 French film (La Jetee) to 80s popcorn entertainment at its finest (Back to the Future) to a new time-traveling Ryan Reynolds Netflix movie (The Adam Project) out this weekend, the movies have loved exploring the concept of time travel. And with all of the different versions of them out there, filmmakers are still inventing new entry points, whether it’s via a small budget (Primer, Safety Not Guaranteed), romantic-comedy (Groundhog Day, About Time), or time-loop action (Edge of Tomorrow, Source Code).

Today we’re recommending two of our favorite time-travel movies, but you can find even more in the “From the DYLA Archive” section below. Have a fantastic weekend and read, share, and subscribe!

Billy recommends…

Field of Dreams

I want to merge two of the amazing things that happened this week into one post. First, we are talking about time-travel movies and Field of Dreams fits loosely into that structure, but deals with time in an extremely unique way. Second, the MLB season is up and running again. Using the opportunity to acknowledge both is something I have to do. Field of Dreams stars Kevin Costner (Ray Kinsella) who plays a farmer that is encouraged by spiritual premonition to build a baseball field on the corn fields he farms. Jeopardizing his family, money, and reputation in the process. The premise is absolutely absurd and there is no reason that this should work, but what we get is a spiritual journey that is all about dealing with some daddy issues and highlighting the simpler things in life.

Ray Kinsella is a fish-out-of-water in Iowa. He is originally from New York and grew up living that hippy lifestyle. The idea of settling in the Midwest felt like a version of selling out, but finding the love of his life, Annie, changed all of his priorities. Annie is from Iowa and is played magnificently by Amy Madigan. An MVP performance in a movie full of superstar actors. Annie is a spark plug that feels comfortable in any environment. In the hippy, nomad life that she led when she met Ray or the quiet midwestern life in Iowa that she grew up in. Out of necessity Annie needed to tend to sick family members back in Iowa and Ray came back with her. Falling into a family and career in a part of the country where Ray never thought he would end up. What he finds, though, is comfort but a longing for something greater out there.

All this yearning begins to manifest in voices speaking to him, saying things like, “if you build it, he will come,” “ease his pain,” and “go the distance.” He takes these weird orders to mean he needs to build a baseball field. In hopes that his lifelong hero Shoeless Joe Jackson (Ray Liotta) will come. Hopefully creating clarity in what his unsettled soul is searching for. This is where I am loosely tying in the time travel of it all. Because it is not the main characters time-traveling, but the side characters that appear who are coming back from the dead or leaping to different eras to help understand the voices Ray keeps hearing. Shoeless Joe is the first of our friends to pop up on this newly created baseball field. An awestruck Ray is finally interacting with his lifelong hero. Shoeless Joe famously utters, “is this heaven?” when he is vanishing for the night. Hinting that he may bring some friends with him tomorrow.

The next day there is a whole ball club of former famous athletes that join in this still mysterious quest. All of this is cool, but the yearning persists. His heart then turns to his favorite author Terrence Mann. A source that helped make Ray the person he is, but finding a story about Mann’s early life and baseball made clear that he needed to ease Mann’s pain. A small story set in Iowa goes national. He heads to Boston, the home of the Mecca of baseball fields, coincidentally.

To speed up this synopsis and fully make clear why this is a time-travel movie, Mann and Ray realize the next figure they need to find is Moonlight Graham, a former MLB baseball player that was never able to register an at bat in the Major Leagues. We are transported without explanation or even knowingly to any of the characters to a 1940s-ish Boston to find Moonlight. Instantly transported back to modern times and on their way back to Iowa they pick up a hitchhiker, who is a young 20s Moonlight Graham that travels back with them to Iowa to fulfill his wish of registering an MLB at bat.

As you can tell by now the meandering of this story may sound exhausting, but the central message and theme is really quite simple. All the searching will not ease any unrest until he deals with his own trauma (the daddy issues explained before). Conveniently, yet movingly, all of the whispers point back to one relationship in his life: the relationship with his father. Ray had to build a baseball field, travel the country, and seemingly time, to understand what was hurting him. As the memes across the internet say, men will literally do anything except go to therapy. At every turn this movie should have been an eye-rolling experience. For some of you it may be eye-rolling, but for me, all of the emotional manipulation creates a wonderfully honest movie-watching experience that pulls at the heartstrings.

P.S. One of my favorite things to do now is whenever I see Gaby Hoffmann (Girls, Transparent, C’mon C’mon, etc…) in a modern show or movie, is to shock the person I’m with by pointing out she is the little girl from Field of Dreams. It gets a surprised reaction every time. - Streaming on Tubi

Drew recommends…

Looper

If time travel existed in more than a theoretical sense, you can bet it would be outlawed. That’s the starting point for Rian Johnson’s 2012 sci-fi thriller Looper. Set in the year 2044, time travel doesn’t exist yet, but it will in 30 years. However, it will be very illegal and very expensive. Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Joe is a “looper,” which is a hit man that works for the mob in the future. When these criminals want someone killed, they send them back in time for Joe to do the deed and get rid of the body. It’s a high-paying gig, but the catch is that one day the mob will “close the loop,” meaning they will send the looper’s future self back in time to get killed.

It’s an intriguing premise that could be hard to cash in on. But Johnson (who wrote and directed) builds it into a smart and riveting piece of grounded sci-fi entertainment. This was the director’s third film, but his first sizable budget before Star Wars handed him the keys to make The Last Jedi. Johnson proved here that he knew what to do with big stars and a healthy budget.

This was one of the last good movies that Bruce Willis starred in. One glance at his IMDb page will tell you he’s spent the last several years appearing in *so many* subpar action thrillers with names like Out of Death and Hard Kill (these are real movies), but 10 years ago Johnson convinced him to play the older version of JGL’s character. Willis still gets moments to flash his John McClane shoot-em-up macho side, but Looper’s story also teases out the tragic wounded man full of regret that Willis can play so well when called upon. Plus, the cast around him is talented enough to hold up the elevated but risky sci-fi material. Emily Blunt enters the movie halfway through, adding a compelling character that harbors a big secret. She’s a persuasive enough performer to pull off scenes that might’ve come off as silly in the hands of a lesser actress.

Looper is an increasingly rare product in Hollywood, the original mid-budget R-rated genre film. It’s a fresh take on the time-travel movie that creates a visionary new world with an intelligent screenplay targeted for adults. It entertains its audience with gripping action while also prompting them to consider the effects of a reality-shifting proposition such as time travel. - Streaming on Netflix