The Best and Worst Modes of Time-Traveling Transportation

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time comes out on DVD/Blu-ray this week and because of that, I thought it would be great to examine how time traveling has affected moviegoers over many decades.  Making choices in our present lives will always change our past and future and since everyday we are faced to make seemingly impossible choices in our lives in regards to our family, love lives or career, we are bound to question our past or future life paths from time to time. (cheesy pun intended.)  There are always things we do in our lives that we wish we could change and certain films have been our gateway into making our seemingly impossible fantasy of going back or further into time come true for 90 minutes at a time.  Prince Dastan may have been able to jump back into the sands of time through a magical dagger, however there are other modes of time-traveling transportation that have entertained viewers no matter how implausible they seem in reality.  Let’s take a look at a brief history of time-traveling vehicles, shall we?

TIME SPHERE

In 1984, James Cameron introduced the world to the bad-ass Terminator and in 1991, he also re-introduced the tamed yet still bad-ass Terminator by means of cyborgs traveling through a time displacement sphere that would drop Michael Biehn, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Robert Patrick into the middle of the street and make female viewers blush everywhere.  Rating: 1 –As cool as it seems to be traveling through a time displacement sphere, I wouldn’t risk being dropped in a strange time with no clothes on whatsoever. Nightmares of being naked are bad enough.

GENETIC DISORDERS

Last year, the rom-com crowd were treated to an unbelievably sappy and tragic tale of a man named Henry Detamble (Eric Bana) and a woman named Clare (Rachel McAdams) dealing with Henry’s unfortunate case of sporadically traveling through time.  The challenges, constant disappearances and miscarriages never seem to kill the love between the two. How sweet. Rating: 2- Having a disease that would make you time travel at any time seems as appealing as narcolepsy to me. Also, I really wouldn’t want to end up with a grown man I first fell in love with as a child. Creepy.

A MOAT

In the Martin Lawrence dud The Black Knight, Martin Lawrence was able to travel back in to Medieval times by going through a magic moat at a cheesy amusement park. Rating: 3-How I even remembered this movie is beyond me.

FAINTING

In 1986, director Francis Ford Coppola released a comedy about a woman named Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner)  fainting at her high school reunion only to travel back into time to re-live her senior year of high school all over again.  Fun, fun, fun. Rating: 4-I would love to time travel, yet I would probably vote against being knocked out of consciousness to do so. Also, you couldn’t pay me to want to go back to high school.

MAGIC DUST

After locking herself in a closet because of humiliated at her 13th birthday bash, Jenna Rink (Jennifer Garner) travels seventeen years in the future after magic wishing dust falls on her head in the closet.  Jenna ends up finding out she is a successful yet horrible adult and realizes the errors in her ways when waking up as a teenager again.  Rating: 5-Even though glitter seems like the least painful and scary means of time-traveling, I’m sure if this was plausible, director Vondie Curtis-Hall would have caked himself in glitter from many unused press packages of the Mariah Carey atrocity GLITTER and he would have went back in time to give the studio the finger and refusing the directorial job on the spot.

JOURNAL

In The Butterfly Effect, viewers are witness to a University student (played by Ashton Kutcher) who is able to travel back in time by reading troubling passages in his diary so he can change traumatizing events in his past. Rating: 6-I don’t think re-living painful childhood memories in a journal would be the most appealing means of time-traveling. I already have a shrink to deal with all that noise.

PHONE BOOTH

In Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, notorious slackers Bill and Ted are able to travel through time by means of a red phone booth in order to complete their high school project. Party on dudes! Rating: 7-Time-traveling through a phone booth would be fun, although where exactly would you be able to find one these days?

TIME MACHINES

Obviously, the time machine is the most famous mode of transportation in films. We have seen it used in the original film named The Time Machine and its god-awful remake.  We have also seen it in Time Cop, Austin Powers, Stargate and even the most recent time-traveling hit A Hot Tub Time Machine. Rating: 8- The time machine is obviously the most popular option, but there are films that have tarnished the time machine’s reputation. (*cough Napoleon Dynamite *cough.)

THE DELOREAN

The DeLorean time machine introduced to us in Back to the Future will always be treasured in every film buff’s heart.  Fans can witness the model at Universal Studios in California, however we all wonder how awesome it would be to hit 88 mph in the driver’s seat.  Rating:9 –Seriously, was there any doubt that this pick wouldn’t be number one?