Since antiquity, humans have envisioned various means of time travel into the future or the past. The concept has since become a staple of modern science fiction. In particular, the number of films that make use of time travel has increased significantly over the decades, while the real-world science has evolved right alongside them, moving from simple Newtonian mechanics and general relativity to quantum mechanics and the notion of a multiverse or more exotic alternatives like string theory.
But not all time-travel movies are created equal. Some make for fantastic entertainment but the time travel makes no scientific or logical sense, while others might err in the opposite direction, sacrificing good storytelling in the interests of technical accuracy. What we really need is a handy guide to help us navigate this increasingly crowded field to ensure we get the best of both worlds, so to speak. The Ars Guide to Time Travel in the Movies is here to help us all make better, more informed decisions when it comes to choosing our time travel movie fare.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list; rather, we selected films that represented many diverse approaches to time travel across multiple subgenres and decades. We then evaluated each one—grading on a curve—with regard to its overall entertainment value and scientific logic, with the final combined score determining a film's spot on the overall ranking. For the “science” part of our scoring system, we specifically took three factors into account. First and foremost, does the time travel make logical sense? Second, is the physical mechanism of time travel somewhat realistic? And third, does the film use time travel in narratively interesting ways? So a movie like Looper, which makes absolutely no sense if you think about it too hard, gets points for weaving time paradoxes thoroughly into the fabric of the story.
(Many spoilers below in the interest of meaningful analysis.)
Here are our 20 representative picks, discussed in chronological order of their release to highlight how the understanding and treatment of time travel in Hollywood has evolved over the decades. There are some truly delightful entries here (plus a few stinkers for balance), but our deep dive into the topic has convinced us that the perfect time travel movie has yet to be made. That's a worthy goal for future filmmakers to strive for.
The Time Machine (1960)
Director George Pal's The Time Machine was the first feature film adapted from H.G. Wells' 1895 novella. The plot hews pretty closely to the novella, replacing the nameless Time Traveler with a fictional version of H.G. Wells himself (Rod Taylor), an inventor in Victorian London. Wells travels to 1917 and World War I; 1940 and the London Blitz; 1966 (where he narrowly escapes the detonation of an "atomic satellite"); and finally to the very distant future of 802,701, where he meets the Eloi and the Morlocks, before returning to 1900. Reviews were mixed and the film hasn't aged well, but it did win an Oscar for best special effects. The actual time machine is an iconic prop in film history—it's a sled-like design with a large clock-like rotating disk and a brass plate on the instrument panel identifying the inventor as "H. George Wells."
Entertainment Score: 4
Science Score: 7
Superman (1978)
No disrespect to other incarnations, but Christopher Reeve will always be our Superman, solely based on his performance in this 1978 film. Director Richard Donner gives us the canonical origin story: his infancy on the doomed planet Krypton and journey to Earth; his idyllic childhood in Smallville; and his extended education in the Fortress of Solitude at 18, emerging years later as a full-fledged superhero. He is Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent by day and a crime-fighting defender of truth, justice, and the American way on the side. So Superman inevitably comes into conflict with brainy arch-villain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman, sporting a marvelous selection of outrageous wigs).
Its impeccable mix of action, humor, emotional resonance, and what were then groundbreaking special effects made Superman an instant classic. We're knocking off a point for the cheesy "Read My Mind" spoken song as Superman takes Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) on a romantic flight over Metropolis, which has aged poorly. But otherwise, Superman remains our favorite of the many adaptions and reboots centered on the character. (Skip the later "extended cut" with several deleted scenes added back in; Donner cut that footage for a reason, and the longer version is noticeably inferior to the theatrical release.)
Superman's inclusion on this list is due entirely to a key plot element in the final act: Superman fails to save Lois during a major earthquake in California, and the grief-stricken superhero defies his father's moratorium on interfering in human history by turning back time so he can remedy his mistake. Sorry, Supes fans, but the time travel here doesn’t make the tiniest iota of sense.
Our standards are admittedly lax when it comes to the physical mechanism by which cinematic heroes journey through time, but “flying really fast around the Earth so that it reverses the direction of its rotation and sends it back to a previous moment” is such thoroughgoing lunacy that one must almost pause in admiration. Then we return to our senses and ask, “Why does Superman’s flight have any effect on the rotation of the Earth? And what does that rotation have to do with the direction of time? Do I get younger if I start twirling counterclockwise?” No, dear reader, you do not. Indeed, by the rules handed down by Einstein, Superman’s near-speed-of-light journey would actually send him into the future, not into the past.
Entertainment Score: 9
Science Score: 1
Time After Time (1979)
Time After Time also features H.G. Wells himself (Malcolm McDowell), time-traveling to San Francisco in the late 1970s in pursuit of Jack the Ripper—aka, his former good friend Dr. John Leslie Stevenson (David Warner), who used the time machine to evade arrest after his most recent murder. Wells thought he was heading into a socialist utopia and is shocked to discover that the future is anything but. As Stevenson puts it when Wells tracks him down, in 1893's London Stevenson was considered a monster—"here, I'm an amateur." Wells must thwart the killer's plan to permanently steal the machine so he can continue butchering women throughout time.
Writer/director Nicholas Meyer based his screenplay on the premise of Karl Alexander's novel of the same name. McDowell originally planned to model his speech after Wells' actual voice but changed his mind after hearing a 78 rpm recording of the author, purportedly "absolutely horrified" at Wells' accent and high-pitched squeaky voice. McDowell opted for a more typical posh London accent for his performance. But other aspects of Wells' life and work remain intact; he even "arrives" in the middle of a San Francisco museum exhibit in his honor, conveniently replacing his glasses that broke en route through time with a fresh pair carefully preserved within his writing desk. Those little touches make Time After Time a genuinely charming and entertaining film.
Entertainment Score: 8.5
Science Score: 8
The Terminator (1984)
This is the blockbuster science fiction action film that started it all, launching a hugely influential franchise and director James Cameron's highly impressive career. A cybernetic assassin, or Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), travels back in time from 2029 to 1984 Los Angeles intent on killing a young woman named Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). Unbeknownst to her, she will give birth to a son, John Connor, who will lead a future Resistance against a synthetic intelligence called Skynet, created by the US government as a military defense.
The Resistance sends its own champion back in time: a soldier named Kyle (Michael Biehn), who falls in love with Sarah and fathers John. The film's focused, relentless, horror-inspired plot delivered plenty of thrills, violence, and snippets of humor. The Terminator racked up an impressive $89 million worldwide against its $6.4 million budget. Terminator 2: Judgement Day will always be our franchise favorite by a long shot, but the original Terminator comes in at a solid second.
If Superman studiously ignores the potential inconsistencies in its treatment of time travel, The Terminator glories in them. They are the fulcrum around which the action pivots, although actual inconsistencies are largely avoided. The audience doesn’t raise too much fuss because the story is now told from the perspective of characters being visited from the future rather than going to the past themselves. They worry about their individual lives being in danger and the fate of the world. Philosophical coherence is low on their list of priorities.
Entertainment Score: 9
Science Score: 3
Back to the Future (1985)
No list like this would be complete without Back to the Future, arguably one of the most influential time-travel movies ever made, as well as an iconic comedy of the 1980s. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is accidentally transported back to 1955, thanks to his friend Doc Brown's (Christopher Lloyd) newly invented time machine—a plutonium-fueled DeLorean that goes into time-travel mode once it hits 88 mph. Marty inadvertently prevents his parents (Crispin Glover and Lea Thompson) from meeting and falling in love, placing his future in jeopardy. He must rectify that situation while a younger version of Doc helps him figure out how to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of energy needed to refuel the time machine to send Marty home.
Back to the Future is a terrific piece of entertainment, but scientifically, it has a lot to answer for. Director Robert Zemeckis co-wrote the script with Bob Gale, both of whom never liked the fact that most time-travel films followed the principle that the past was immutable. They specifically wanted to explore how the past being altered might affect the future, and the rest is film history.
Entertainment Score: 10
Science Score: 1
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
The Star Trek franchise has engaged in its share of time-travel shenanigans, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is a classic in that regard. This was the second film directed by Leonard Nimoy (who played the original Spock), a sequel to Nimoy's Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) and completing a narrative arc that began with 1982's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Nimoy wanted to do something lighter with no clearcut villain and an environmental message (the plight of humpback whales): "No dying, no fighting, no shooting, no photon torpedoes, no phaser blasts, no stereotypical bad guy." He brought on Nicholas Meyer (see Time After Time above) to co-write a new script, in which the (now former) crew of the USS Enterprise time travel to 1980s Earth to bring back a pair of humpback whales—the only species capable of responding to the signal from an alien space probe back in their future that now threatens the planet.
The result was a film that recaptured some of the charm of The Original Series, grossing $133 million worldwide against its $26 million budget and snagging four Oscar nominations for cinematography and sound. Meyer's script has a lot of fun with the time travel "fish out of water" elements, most notably Spock and Kirk encountering an annoying punk rocker on a public bus. (Spock performs his trademark Vulcan nerve pinch on the punk.) And who doesn't love McCoy griping in exasperation about primitive 20th-century medicine or Chekov earnestly asking random passersby about "nuclear wessels"?
Entertainment Score: 6
Science Score: 8
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)
Nobody expected this goofy, slapstick comedy to become a time-honored favorite that spawned two popular sequels (1991's Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, and 2020's Bill and Ted Face the Music). But audiences couldn't resist the winsome charm of Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves), two scattered-brained high school students with big hearts and endless optimism who are in danger of flunking history. ("Dude. We are about to fail most egregiously.") If that happens, Ted's father will ship him off to a military academy, thus breaking up their band, Wyld Stallyns. But the band is destined to usher in a future utopia, which is now threatened.
With the help of a time machine in the form of a phone booth—provided by Rufus (George Carlin) from the year 2688—the pair travels through history, meeting Socrates, Billy the Kid, Sigmund Freud, Beethoven, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, and Abraham Lincoln, among others, bringing them back to 1989 for the history report to end all history reports. Napoleon naturally wanders off to the Waterloo local water park at one point, while the other historical figures wreak havoc at the mall. Watching Beethoven rock out on multiple electronic keyboards while Joan of Arc takes over an aerobics class is priceless. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure wasn't exactly a box office smash, grossing a modest $40 million against its $10 million budget, but it's a film audiences have returned to again and again when they crave silly feel-good escapist fare.
Entertainment Score: 7
Science Score: 4
Timecop (1994)
Directed by Peter Hyams , Timecop is based on a three-part Dark Horse Comics anthology story written by Mark Verheiden (who co-wrote the screenplay with Mike Richardson). It's basically a cross between Lethal Weapon and The Terminator while never being as good as either of those two films. But it remains star Jean-Claude van Damme's most successful film—if only for the famous scene where van Damme jumps into the splits on a kitchen counter clad only in his underwear. Van Damme plays Max Walker, a DC Metro police officer who becomes an agent with the Time Enforcement Commission (TEC) in 1994 after the death of his wife Melissa (Mia Sara) in an attack by mysterious assailants. Ten years later, he must foil the plans of a corrupt senator (Ron Silver) who has been abusing the TEC's time-travel technology to raise funds for his presidential campaign, altering the future in the process.
Entertainment Score: 3
Science Score: 0
12 Monkeys (1995)
Director Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys is our top choice for a film that combines terrific storytelling and time-travel logic in a near-perfect union. It's inspired by a 1962 French short film called La Jetée. The film stars Bruce Willis as a convict from 2035 named James Cole, who is sent back in time to investigate the origin of a a deadly virus that appeared in 1996 and wiped out almost all of humanity, forcing any survivors to live underground.
A terrorist group called the Army of the 12 Monkeys is the prime suspect. The hope is that if the original virus can be found, it will help scientists in 2035 devise a cure. But Cole arrives in 1990 instead of 1996 and ends up in a mental institution, where he meets a fellow patient named Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt, in an Oscar-nominated performance). And he's haunted by a recurring dream involving a shooting at an airport. There are twists aplenty, but the viewer never loses the thread of the nonlinear plot, and the look and feel of the film harkens back to Gilliam's 1985 masterpiece Brazil.
Entertainment Score: 9.5
Science Score: 9
Donnie Darko (2001)
This 2001 sci-fi psychological thriller was writer/director Richard Kelly's first feature film. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Donnie, a psychologically troubled teenager who meets a mysterious figure in a creepy rabbit costume named Frank while sleepwalking one night. Frank tells him the world will end in 28 days, six hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. When Donnie wakes up on a local golf course and goes home, he discovers a jet engine has mysteriously crashed into his bedroom, so his sleepwalking saved him from certain death. He keeps seeing Frank as events unfold, ultimately leading to tragedy and a strange vortex forming over Donnie's house that sends Donnie back in time to be crushed by the jet engine hitting his bedroom.
Donnie Darko had the misfortune to hit theaters six weeks after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; audiences were just not in the mood for any film in which a crashing plane featured prominently. It has since attracted a significant cult following. Despite its flaws, there's something about this strange film that sticks with you, and it is certainly a unique, original vision.
Kelly released a director's cut in 2004 that expounded (poorly) on the philosophical and scientific underpinnings of his fictional world in greater detail, involving the spontaneous creation of an unstable Tangent Universe in which the film's events play out. Donnie's ultimate demise leads to the collapse of that Tangent Universe and restores the Primary Universe. Constructing a complete and internally coherent theory of the physical universe turns out to be hard, even when the universe is the real one and you can do experiments to check your math. A completely different kind of universe is even harder. So it’s maybe not surprising that the overexplained director’s cut of Donnie Darko wasn’t as satisfying as the more vague original. If we don’t know too much about what’s going on, it’s harder to complain about inconsistencies.
Entertainment Score: 5
Science Score: 4
Primer (2004)
This 2004 indie film about two engineers who accidentally figure out how to time travel has a strong cult following despite a confusing, unnecessarily complicated plot that makes Tenet (discussed below) seem simple and straightforward. Writer/director Shane Carruth (who also co-stars) has said he deliberately chose to make the plot incomprehensible to capture the inherent confusion of what he thought it would be like to experience the disorienting effects of time travel (namely, cumulative interference). Honestly, it might have worked, except he also deliberately chose to avoid any of the usual expository dialogue with regard to the scientific elements. This, too, can work in principle. Too often, exposition is a clumsy "as you know, Bob" affair. It's great that Carruth wanted authentic science-speak, but you've got to have a clear narrative as a trade-off.
Think of it as a good storytelling uncertainty principle: You can obfuscate the plot and not litter your dialogue with jargon, or you can keep the jargon and clarify the plot, even if it's just via a few well-placed signposts. Pick one. And while Carruth's overarching theme is the breakdown of Abe's (David Sullivan) and Aaron's (Carruth) friendship, neither character is sufficiently fleshed out to the extent that we care about their eventual estrangement. That said, Carruth did a great job making the most of his shoestring $7,000 budget; the stripped-down aesthetics of the production design work very well. But Primer is most certainly not the best time-travel movie yet made. It's more a cautionary tale of a filmmaker being a bit too clever for their own good.
As for the science, the basic idea is that Aaron and Abe are trying to build a device to counter the effects of gravity by creating a room-temperature superconductor (a hot topic in physics this year, albeit a controversial one) that exploits the Meissner effect to remove the magnetic field inside a plain gray box large enough to fit one person. (Carruth has said he was partly inspired by Feymann diagrams and the fact that elementary particle interactions are the same regardless of whether they happen "forward" and "backward" in time.)
Entertainment Score: 2
Science Score: 3
Timecrimes (2007)
Written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo, this twisty, darkly humorous Spanish sci-fi thriller was partly inspired by a 1983 comic one-off called Chromocops by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons. The film centers on a middle-aged man named Héctor (Karra Elejalde), who is renovating a house in the countryside with his wife Clara (Candela Fernández). One day, he finds a young woman naked and unconscious on the ground, and a mysterious man with bloodied bandages on his face stabs Héctor in the arm. A local scientist (Vigalondo) offers help by hiding Héctor in a strange mechanical device—but it's a time machine that sends Héctor back one hour in time, snaring him in a causal loop with multiple versions of himself. Wacky hijinks ensue.
Entertainment Score: 6.5
Science Score: 9
Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
The title pretty much says it all. There's a hot tub that turns out to be a time machine, transporting three middle-aged, depressed friends (and one teenaged nephew) back to their wild 1986 weekend at the Kodiak Valley Ski Resort. Directed by Steve Pink, Hot Tub Time Machine stars John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, and Clark Duke, with a cameo by Chevy Chase as a hot tub repairman who might know more about what's happening than he's telling. Can the guys manage not to interfere with their past selves and irrevocably change the future while they figure out how to get back to their own time? It's a classic gross-out screwball bro-comedy (there are both R-rated and unrated versions) a laThe Hangover, and the film is much better and funnier than the ludicrous title might suggest, thanks in large part to its hugely likable cast. Pink leans into the silly, and Josh Heald's script pokes playful fun at all the classic time-travel movie tropes.
Entertainment Score: 6.5
Science Score: 2
Looper (2012)
Directed by Rian Johnson, Looper is a strikingly original dystopian time-travel tale. In 2044, a young man named Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) works as an assassin (or "looper") for a crime syndicate in Kansas City. The twist: The targets are sent back in time, hoods over their heads, from the year 2074, since it has become impossible to dispose of bodies undetected in the future. Loopers get paid in silver bars that are attached to the targets from the future. Should a looper live until 2074, he (or she) will be sent back in time to be killed by their younger selves, thereby "closing the loop" and terminating their contract. But what happens when a looper fails to kill their older self? That's Joe's dilemma when he encounters his older self (Bruce Willis) and the latter escapes.
As fresh and entertaining as Looper might be on the storytelling scale, its time-travel science leaves much to be desired. One of the most memorable scenes shows Joe's friend Seth (Paul Dano) in the present timeline being captured by the syndicate's "Gat Men" (basically enforcers), who are after his escaped older self. They carve an address into his arm, which instantly appears on the arm of Old Seth (Frank Brennan). Then the Gat Men begin methodically cutting off Seth's body parts as Old Seth desperately races to that address, losing fingers, a nose, and so forth before he is killed upon reaching his destination. It works incredibly well narratively, especially since we are never shown the graphic amputations on young Seth; just the aftermath on Old Seth. But as science? Not so much.
Entertainment Score: 8.5
Science Score: 4
Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)
Director Colin Trevorrow shot this understated indie Sundance favorite on a shoestring budget with old Panavision lenses to capture the visual style and tone of 1970s auteur Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Being There). Screenwriter Derek Connolly was inspired by a 1997 joke ad in Backwoods Home by the magazine's editor, John Silveira, seeking "someone to go back in time with me" and including the line "safety not guaranteed." (Silveira was shocked to receive thousands of letters in response.) The film uses the ad's wording almost verbatim.
Aubrey Plaza stars as Darius, a disaffected recent college graduate interning at Seattle Magazine, who joins reporter Jeff (Jake Johnson) and fellow intern Arnau (Karan Soni) on a trip to Ocean Shores to track down the person who placed the ad: a paranoid grocery clerk named Kenneth (Mark Duplass). Darius goes undercover as a respondent to Kenneth's ad, and the two slowly bond over mutual loss in their pasts. Is Kenneth crazy, or is he really building a time machine? Much of the film hints at the former until the final shot. Safety Not Guaranteed is frankly rather light on the time-travel science. It excels in its moving exploration of why humans are so fascinated with the notion of being able to travel back in time—usually because so many of us long for the chance to right a wrong or correct a tragic mistake.
Entertainment Score: 7.5
Science Score: 3
Predestination (2014)
This 2014 sci-fi action thriller stars Ethan Hawke as Agent Doe with the Temporal Bureau, which is devoted to traveling back in time to prevent crimes from being committed. Doe is tasked with preventing the March 1975 bombing of a New York City public building but doesn't quite succeed, suffering severe burns as a result. An unseen person helps him grab his time-travel device to return to the Bureau in 1992, where he undergoes facial reconstruction surgery; his vocal cords have also been badly damaged, altering his voice. The Bureau wants him to retire but sends him back to 1970 for one final mission. Spanning events in 1945, 1963, and 1985, as well as the 1970s, Predestination is primarily concerned with whether or not it's possible to change the future, even with the advent of time travel. But the various parts don't add up to a compelling whole; the film flopped at the box office, grossing just $4.8 million against its $5 million budget.
Entertainment Score: 3
Science Score: 9
Interstellar (2014)
In Interstellar, Earth in the distant future is beset by a devastating global famine that threatens to wipe out the entire human race. NASA scientists need to locate an exoplanet capable of supporting human life, and a former NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), is tapped to lead a space expedition to three potential planets orbiting a supermassive black hole called Gargantua. The plot gets increasingly complicated from there, culminating with Cooper falling through a black hole and finding himself in a five-dimensional tesseract that enables him to communicate with the past—and ultimately save the day.
The premise of Interstellar came from Caltech physicist Kip Thorne and producer Lynda Obst, inspired by Thorne's research on black holes, wormholes, time warps, and other exotic concepts in theoretical physics. Initially, Steven Spielberg was meant to direct, but then Spielberg moved his production company to Walt Disney Studios, and Christopher Nolan took over directing duties. The CGI depiction of the film's rotating black hole, accretion disk, and gravitational lensing effect was based on advanced theoretical equations, and working on the project actually gave Thorne new scientific insights, resulting in three scientific papers—a prime example of science inspiring Hollywood and Hollywood inspiring science in turn.
Entertainment Score: 7
Science Score: 9
Arrival (2016)
Arrival is based on a short story by Ted Chiang, who said he was partly inspired by the variational principle in physics. Director Denis Villeneuve's critically acclaimed fledgling foray into science fiction is a moody, leisurely paced, atmospheric film with big ideas and existential themes. Amy Adams turns in an amazing performance as linguist Louise Banks, who is called upon by the US government to make contact and communicate with aliens called "heptapods" (since they resemble cephalopods and have seven limbs).
Much of the film concerns Louise's attempts—working with physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner)—to learn the aliens' palindromic language rendered in strange circular symbols. She gradually realizes that doing so alters her linear perception of time because the aliens experience events in time all at once rather than in succession. Louise begins experiencing "memories" of future events (i.e., premonitions) that include the future birth and eventual death of her daughter (with Donnelly) from an incurable disease. Louise nonetheless "chooses" to follow that same path, knowing it will end in tragedy, raising the age-old argument of whether free will is just an illusion. It's to Villeneuve's (and Adams') credit that the film works as well as it does.
Entertainment Score: 8
Science Score: 6
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, Avengers: Endgame is a direct sequel to 2018's blockbuster Avengers: Infinity War, bringing the narrative arc over 22 films full circle to an action-packed, emotionally powerful conclusion. After Thanos (Josh Brolin) erased half of all life in the universe with a snap of his fingers using the Infinity Glove, the remaining Avengers are despondent and directionless. Thanos destroyed the Infinity Stones after achieving his goal, dashing their hopes of reversing The Snappening. Then Scott Lang/Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) returns from the quantum realm, having only experienced five hours' time instead of five years. The team ends up traveling back in time via the quantum realm to retrieve the stones and bring the other half of the universe back. Endgame had one key element that Infinity War lacked: hope. Perhaps that's why it grossed a whopping $2.799 billion worldwide, compared to Infinity War's $2.052 billion.
Entertainment Score: 9
Science Score: 5
Tenet (2020)
Christopher Nolan has the distinction of being the only director to appear twice on our list with Tenet, arguably his most ambitious and conceptually complex film to date. A character known only as the Protagonist (John David Washington) leads a covert CIA mission that goes awry. He ends up being recruited by a top-secret organization called "Tenet" that is trying to track mysterious artifacts with reversed entropy that move backward in time. Ultimately, the Protagonist and Tenet must foil a plot by future antagonists who are trying to reverse the flow of time to undo the devastating effects of climate change in that future.
It took Nolan five years to write the screenplay, and he was contemplating the central ideas for 10 years. But there's such a thing as overthinking things. Frankly, the plot is actually too complicated. Kudos to anyone who caught everything in a single viewing—especially the climactic "temporal pincer movement" and the multiple forms of palindromes embedded throughout—because we didn't. That makes it harder to connect emotionally with the characters, and the film is further marred by inexplicably poor sound mixing. But it's certainly an exciting film with fascinating ideas, and there's no denying that the visual sequences of time running in reverse are a tour de force of filmmaking. Small wonder that Tenet snagged an Oscar for Best Visual Effects; the honor was well-deserved.
Entertainment Score: 8.5
Science Score: 7
