no mention for hot-tub time machine?
i love fantasy etc. so enjoy time travel films but every single one of them is flawed.
take the terminator (the whole franchise, sarah connor chronicles and all) - everything that happens has to happen, if they don't then john connor never gets born in order to send his father back in time to seduce his mother.
in T2 they still continue to try to stop the 'rise of the machines' but still any success on the connor family's part would result in an all consuming paradox that the machines would rise anyway, only the leader of the resistance - john connor - would no longer exist in the future thus rendering the whole episode obsolete given that it would never have happened if they had have won - in fact any futile effort from john and sarah connor would have to end in defeat otherwise john would never exist which would result in john never being born because they used machine technology to send rhys back in the first place (and so on and so on)
back to hot-tub time machine - i don't know if any of you have seen it - the guy who stays fundamentally alters the parameters of the experience so the other three - one, his unknown son - would never need to be wherever it was they went because he would never have been suicidal in the life he then went on to lead - another paradox that just cannot be fixed.
like i say, i love time travel films but pretty much all of them are fundamentally flawed.
bttf 1 does all it can to do everything right in that sense but then bttf 2 forgets all of it by biff getting his hand on the almanac and going back to 1955 (is that right?) and marty and doc returning to a 'present' where they are strangers to, again the paradox is that with the world biff created due to his sporting knowledge the time machine would never have been invented in the first place...
as an aside - source code isn't time travel as it is based in the theoretical mind of a near brain dead soldier that some agency managed to access in order to find a terrorist.
of course the star trek reboot is technically a time travel film which pretty much gets it right except that (old) spock has a different memory to that of young spock but that is sort of explained by the black hole... that though means two entirely different spocks will end up in the same point in time, in the same place together though years apart with different memories of how their respective relationships with the enterprise crew developed - again, an inescapable paradox.
i could go on and on and on on this subject... it is so flawed yet i can't imagine film without the genre and for me i enjoy the questions it brings.
i was rattling on for ages there but had to delete it all. i just find the whole idea so fascinating and so absurd all at once that my mind can't stop thinking about it.
finally (thank god...) the butterfly effect is superb, still flawed of course but so well constructed. that is all
you could have just said "the grandfather paradox" but I take your point
Primer is pretty good with this actually, slightly different take on it which they address and actively work around the 'paradoxes' which are created... as there always will be with any suggestion of time travel.
Which is why in the real world as we understand it, time travel will never exist, still love watching films about it though
