In the second instalment of cult sci-fi adventure film series ‘Back to the Future’, Marty McFly and Doc crashed the future landing at 21st October 2015. On this day, we celebrate the film by taking a journey back through time to pick the best time travelling movies around…
5. Looper
Set in 2044, Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars in ‘Looper’ as a contract killer who shoots victims sent to him from the future so he can can dispose of their bodies in the past. Still following? It’s when his older self played by Bruce Willis arrives to be killed that things get really complicated.
4. Midnight in Paris
Bored and creatively unfulfilled in the present day, screenwriter and novelist Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) finds himself travelling back to the 1920s using a car in the backstreets of Paris as a portal. At a party in the roaring decade he encounters a host of famous artists and writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Salvador Dali. When he meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), he has to decide whether he wants to exist in the 21st century. Woody Allen directs.
3. Twelve Monkeys
Bruce Willis features again on the list, this time starring as James Cole alongside Brad Pitt in Terry Gilliam’s neo-noir sci-fi flick ’12 Monkeys’. Set initially in Philadelphia in 2027, Cole goes back in time to 1990 to gather information on a deadly virus that wipes out nearly all of humanity in 1996.
2. The Terminator
It’s hard to talk cinema time travel without hitting on James Cameron’s action classic The Terminator, a franchise which is still going today! Arnold Schwarzenegger is in the titular role as a cyborg assassin sent back from 2029 to 1984 to take out Sarah Connor, in order to prevent her son’s actions decades later.
1. Back to the Future II
Of course, taking top spot is the Robert Zemeckis film that inspired the article. ‘Back to the Future II’ follows the original’s protagonist Marty who, after time-hopping to 2015, has to jump back to 1955 and take the same trip as he did in the first movie without affecting 1985. Easy!
Cinema Perspective 