As a scientist (albeit, not a physicist) I often ponder “is time travel possible?”. The answer is, naturally, I don’t know. Maybe it is.
There are many time travel theories. On one hand if it were possible to journey in time, would we not be surrounded by billions of people from countless years into the far future who have come to say hello? Then again, why should they visit now when they have untold eras to visit instead.
Regardless, maybe they are in fact here? Maybe it is possible to journey to our time, but there are rules? Time travel movies usually play a lot with these ideas, with the complex connection between cause and effect, past and future.
One great example is the film Timecrimes. Although a large percentage of it is predictable and can be said to repeat the standard time travel genre, at some point during the middle of the movie it breaks from that and starts asking questions that aren’t normally investigated: what is cause and what is effect? It does so in a very convincing and exciting manner, and when I left the cinema I couldn’t help but wonder why so few films deal with those fascinating ideas.
In most movies that deal with time travel one of the following scenarios may occur:
(a) The protagonist may go back in time and change something and cause a paradox (these movies tend to contradict themselves almost every single time).
(b) The protagonist may travel back in time only to discover he can’t change anything - he is a part of history.
(c) The hero may travel back in time only to explore an historical era (in a sense, this needn’t be a science fiction film).
(d) The protagonist may journey to the future - in many ways this is not a time travel film but rather a futuristic film (think ‘Buck Rogers’ - an astronaut gets frozen for 500 years and wakes up in the far future).
All these are fascinating notions. Until they are resolved by science, I will enjoy whatever films and novels are created about the subject despite any (major) flaws.