Brainstorming time travel movies

R

rc444

Well-known member
I've always enjoyed movies about time travel. The neat thing about time travel movies is that they are often subject to their own rules.

I have some random brainstorms for time travel plots. How good (or bad) do you think they are? Feel free to comment. Or even pitch your own ideas for fun.

-- A Pleasantville themed time travel story. People travel to a different time, but when this happens the screen changes. Perhaps whenever they travel to a different era they see and experience everything as if it were an impressionist painting, or a German expressionist painting. That would be cool.

-- A Strange Days themed time travel story. Time travelling is sold on the black market in discs, like the discs that Lenny manufactures in Strange Days. The protagonist has to bring to justice 'time dealers' in order to stop them ripping up the fabric of the space-time continuum.

-- A Total Recall themed time travel story. Thrill seekers pay to go on 'simulated' journeys to different eras, but there is a complication and conspiracy somehow.
 
I like time travel stories too! So here are my thoughts...

Your first idea isn't really a plot, it's just a concept for execution. As a concept, it's interesting.

The other two ideas have a common problem -- it would be dangerous for anyone to just haphazardly let people travel back in time, because they could do something that would change the future. No person would take the risk of selling time travels when it could endanger their own lives. This might work, though, if you only sent people forward in time.

And there could be the crux of a plot for a story. A black market dealer is selling discs for time travel to the future, but one customer goes into the past instead. Recognizing the danger, the black market dealer has to chase the guy through the past and catch him before he can do any damage. That might be a good story.
 
There's a short story about people in the future who go back in the past to hunt dinosaurs. What's it called?

And one of the guys steps on a bug, and changes the future, and when they get back the shoot him.

Kind of similar.
 
Timestalkers (1986), is an interesting, if not dated telemovie.

It's about this history professor who comes across an 1886 photograph of someone holding a gun. He zooms in on the photograph and finds out the stranger in the photograph is holding an 1980 revolver. This woman from the future comes and explains one of the co-creators of a time machine had an disagreement with his collaborator, and went back to 1886 to try and change the course of history with regards to this famous gun shoot out in the past.

It's an interesting film. But like many time travel films, the plot seems to be king, rather than the characters.

Has anyone seen Time After Time (1979) by Nick Meyer?
 
That "A Sound of Thunder" movie... so bad... Ray Bradbury should sue. He should go back in time and unwrite it, knowing what would become of it.
 
Bradbury should travel back in time and stomp on the right bug to ensure that the producers of the movie are never born and that the movie therefore never gets made.

Time After Time was fun. David Warner makes a good Jack the Ripper.
 
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