This week will see the release of The Time Traveler’s Wife, a movie about a man with a genetic disorder that causes him to time travel involuntarily, and the problems that causes for his marriage. I say, if your genes are turning you into a time traveler, your marriage is the least of your problems. I’d be worried about what other genes I had wandering around in there, and whether any of them might cause me to turn into a dinosaur or a walking nuclear reactor, which seems equally feasible. No matter what happened, I’d blame exposure to cleaning products.

Regardless, it joins a fine tradition of time travel movies, which all share one remarkable characteristic: If you think about them too much, your brain will explode. (Which is not necessarily unique to time travel films – I find I have the same problem with Meg Ryan movies.) Still, it’s a worthy genre; if you don’t believe me, go back in time and review these classic examples.

12 Monkeys (1995): Would it be going out on a limb to call this the last great time-travel movie? OK, how about the last great Bruce Willis movie (the one with the dead people notwithstanding)?

Willis had quite a trifecta in 1994-’95 with Pulp Fiction, Nobody’s Fool, and then this film, which strikes just the right note of off-kilter paranoia and impending, unchangeable doom that marks more than a few sci-fi classics. I mean, it’s nice that Marty McFly winds up rich with better-looking parents, but wouldn’t that movie have been even better if he’d caused the whole planet to be wiped out by a killer virus? Wait, scratch that — then we wouldn’t have had the sequels.

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