The found footage flick Project Almanac,
formerly titled Welcome to Yesterday and delayed a number of
times, finally hits theaters this weekend, closing out the first month of 2015
with a bit of time travel. (Oddly enough, the month also started with a time
travel joint, the Spierig Brothers’ under seen
Predestination.) This teen-centric movie about a group of
nerdy high school friends who discover that one of their dads made a time
machine, got us thinking about our favorite young-folk themed time travel
movies. With that in mind, here is a list of our favorite offerings in this
realm, there are slackers, robots, and everyone’s favorite DeLorean.
Back to the Future
When you set out to make a list of time travel movies,
teen-centric or otherwise, you have to start with Back to the
Future, shocking as that is. There’s a reason that 30 years later we
still love this movie, and it’s not just Part 2 promised us
we’d have hoverboards by later this year. This is what every kid wants out of
life: you get to go on an awesome adventure, drive the coolest car you can
imagine, have a huge influence on history, and invent rock and roll in the
process. All while wearing one sweet ass vest that your mom thinks is a life
jacket. Not only is this the absolute blast it sounds like, you get emotionally
invested in the characters, and it is such a tight, almost perfectly written
script, one that Robert Zemeckis and Michael J. Fox execute to precise
perfection. There’s nothing not to like here.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is
another movie that directly informs Project Almanac, and one
that actually shows up in the movie itself. We were tempted to throw Bogus
Journey into the just for the
hell of it, but we realized that, while they heroes are still young, they’re
not exactly teens anymore. Every kid who has ever strapped on a guitar has
dreamed of being a rock god, and slacker burnouts Bill S. Preston, Esquire
(Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) not only get to realize
their dream, but ride a magic phone booth through the circuits of time with the
help of George Carlin, all without being able to play a note. Rescuing
beautiful princesses, meeting the greatest historical figures of all time, and saving
the future; acing a damn history report has never been so much fun. Strange
things are indeed afoot at the Circle K.
Time Bandits
For some reason Terry Gilliam’s Time
Bandits tends to get lost among the rest of his filmography. That’s a
risk you take when you make classics like 12 Monkeys and
Brazil, but it’s also a damn shame. As you would expect from
a Gilliam joint, the story of an eleven-year-old boy who teams up with a group
of time travelling dwarves to pillage valuable artifacts from historical
figures is even stranger than the description makes it sound. Full of fantastic
cameos—Sean Connery plays Agamemnon, Gilliam’s Monty Python brother John Cleese
shows up as Robin Hood, among others—this is a lunatic ride from beginning to
gleefully delirious end. If you haven’t watched this in a while, you owe it to
yourself to pop it in the player or cue it up on your preferred streaming
service. It’s a wild ride well worth taking again.
Flight of the Navigator
If you love mid-1980s adventure films where the kid is the
real hero, like The Goonies, D.A.R.Y.L.,
and Explorers, then 1986’s Flight of the
Navigator is right up your alley.
And if you like seeing kids pilot their very own spaceship, even better. Young
David Freeman has somehow lost eight years of his life, and the explanation
involves alien abductions, star maps implanted in his brain, and blasting off
in an awesome, retro future spaceship. The whole thing is
way more complicated than that, but there are also some
awesome practical puppet aliens, and who among us didn’t want to spend most of
our childhoods zipping around in an awesome spacecraft and travelling light
years from Earth?
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Easily the most badass installment on this list, Edward
Furlong’s young John Connor in Terminator 2 also has the
distinction of being the biggest criminal among the protagonists of these
particular films. He’s way more adept than the others at doing things like
ripping off ATM machines, and when you add his very own futuristic killing
machine into the mix, that’s the making of a very good time indeed. Making the
titular robotic assassin, who is so cold and terrifying in the first film, the
good guy, took some stones on the part of James Cameron, but the results obviously
speak for themselves. Instead of trying to destroy the future, this unlikeliest
of duos embarks on a quest to save the human race, and just for the hell of it,
they bring John’s mom along for the ride.
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