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TIME TRAVEL
IN THE MOVIES


by Douglas Chapman



TIME MACHINE
Perhaps George Pal's finest film, this limited-budget 1960 adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel features Rod Taylor as H. "George" Wells, the inventor of an ornate time machine with which he travels to the future through a succession of wars. Eventually he finds that the human race splits into mentally bovine Eloi and the monstrous Morlocks who eat them. The movie's special effects, which include time-lapse and stop-motion, are Oscar(TM) winners, and all aspects of production and design combine into an unforgettable, vivid experience.

TIME AFTER TIME
Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) originally debuted as a director with this adventurous and scary romance in which the young Victorian writer H. G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) pursues Jack the Ripper (David Warner) into 1979 San Francisco where the latter's violent tendencies easily blend in. Once there, Wells encounters a bank teller (Mary Steenbergen), with whom he falls in love, and he must forestall a future in which she dies at the Ripper's hands.

TIME BANDITS
Six dwarves, accompanied by a British schoolboy, use time portals to travel through Earth's history--and beyond--to steal anything they can get their hands on. Sean Connery portrays Agamemnon, John Cleese plays Robin Hood and Ralph Richardson is the Supreme Being ("I'm not entirely dim") whose portal map the thieves have taken. This surreal creation of scripter-director Terry Gilliam combines epic scope with characters who generally think small, except for Evil (David Warner) who has high-tech plans for a new creation.

SOMEWHERE IN TIME
Christopher Reeve uses willpower to travel back to 1910, where he falls in love with a noted actress (Jane Seymour). This 1980 film explores time paradoxes, the changes time brings on, and a love aided by time itself. The non-technological time travel theories presented in Jack Finney's classic book Time and Again very much influenced scripter Richard Matheson's novel Bid Time Return upon which this movie is based.

THE TIME TRAVELLERS
This 1964 opus stars Preston Foster as the leader of a group of scientists who accidentally construct a time portal. They travel to a post-apocalyptic future in which nuclear survivors, besieged by mutants and androids, try to build a spaceship to carry them off-planet. Sci-fi veteran Ib Melchior wrote and directed this low-budget but imaginative opus.

STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME
James Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and the crew of the erstwhile Enterprise use a captured Klingon spaceship to speed back through time to 1986 San Francisco so they can save the whales, and thus rescue future Earth. Nimoy directed a script co-written by Nicholas Meyer, with amusing variations on his Time After Time shtick. This remains the best of the Star Trek(TM) features.

DR. WHO
The Doctor, whose name is not "Who", careened through most of space and time in a machine which looked like a police box during his show's 26-year BBC-TV run, which began in 1963, and in the process utilized most of the extant ideas about time travel. He was and is a two-hearted alien (from the planet Gallifrey) with a Treklike knack for solving most any world's problems, and he periodically transforms appearance and personality. His portrayers have included William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy who have been, respectively, cantankerous, clownish, dandified, Bohemian, Edwardian, egomaniacal and professorial.

BACK TO THE FUTURE, PARTS I TO III
Robert Zemeckis, pre-Gump, directed this trilogy, in which the character played by Michael J. Fox, making use of a souped-up DeLorean, discovers about time paradoxes through extensive personal experience. In the first of the trilogy, he has to be matchmaker to his parents so that he will be born. The second in the series takes his adventures into the future, and the third into the old West. Part III also features another one-of-a-kind machine: a time train. The cast in all three films includes Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson and Thomas F. Wilson.



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