Story Type: Time Travel
In Hollywood movie circles, there are genres like Horror or Science Fiction, cross genres like Action-Thriller or Drama-Comedy, and sub-genres like Romantic Comedy or Mystery Thriller.
Then there are story types, a shorthand way to describe a specific narrative conceit that is almost always tied directly to the movie’s central concept. They can be found in any genre, cross genre, or sub-genre.
Knowledge about and awareness of these story types can be a boost not only to your understanding of film history and movie trends, but also as fodder for brainstorming new story concepts. Mix and match them. Invert them. Gender bend them. Genre bend them. Geo bend them.
Story types exist for a reason: Because they work. Hopefully this series will help you make them work for you.
Today: Time Travel.
Time travel has inspired storytellers for centuries and Hollywood hasn’t slacked off in that department either. Here is a short list of time travel movies:
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949): A singing mechanic from 1912 finds himself in Arthurian Britain.
The Time Machine (1960): A Victorian Englishman travels to the far future and finds that humanity has divided into two hostile species.
Time Bandits (1981): A young boy accidently joins a band of dwarves as they jump from time-period to time-period looking for treasure to steal.
The Terminator (1984): A human-looking, apparently unstoppable cyborg is sent from the future to kill Sarah Connor; Kyle Reese is sent to stop it.
Back to the Future (1985): In 1985, Doc Brown invents time travel; in 1955, Marty McFly accidentally prevents his parents from meeting, putting his own existence at stake.
Peggy Sue Got Married (1986): Peggy Sue faints at a high school reunion. When she wakes up she finds herself in her own past, just before she finished school.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989): Two seemingly dumb teens struggle to prepare a historical presentation with the help of a time machine.
Twelve Monkeys (1995): In a future world devastated by disease, a convict is sent back in time to gather information about the man-made virus that wiped out most of the human population on the planet.
Timeline (2003): A group of archaeological students become trapped in the past when they go there to retrieve their professor. The group must survive in 14th century France long enough to be rescued.
One of the most interesting movies in recent memory is this one:
Looper (2012): In 2074, when the mob wants to get rid of someone, the target is sent 30 years into the past, where a hired gun awaits. Someone like Joe, who one day learns the mob wants to ‘close the loop’ by transporting back Joe’s future self.
Here is the trailer:
The time travel setup leads to great moments like this:
And this:
What is it about time travel that makes for a potentially appealing story?
- It’s an excellent ‘what if’ scenario, one that can grab a viewer’s imagination
- Great FOOW (Fish-Out-Of-Water) dynamic, not only different place and culture, but also a different era
- Major complication typically in time travel movies: How the hell do we get back?
- Play to viewer’s wish fulfillment — to go to the past and see how things really were like or go into the future and experience how things will be
There’s also this: Time travel movies will often get us to consider the mystery of time. Every moment we live, time passes. And yet, we generally go about our day to day lives hardly thinking about time. But think on this: If you live to be 80 years old, you will have lived for…
948 months
4,122 weeks
28,855 days
692,538 hours
41,552, 284 minutes
2,493,137,087 seconds
Time travel movies can make it feel as though the limitations of our life (after all, each of us is born with an ‘expiration date’) are permeable, that we can somehow stretch the amount of time we’ve been granted to live.
What are your favorite time travel movies? And what time travel movies did I not include in my list?
For more articles in the Story Types series, go here.
