This month’s Terminator Salvation sees rant-happy Bat-guy Christian Bale and newly minted Aussie megastar Sam ™ Worthington crunching their way through the future war long promised by the trilogy. While red-eyed robots who have a way with one-liners have always been the mainstay of the series – and I’m betting The Governator makes some sort of cameo in Salvation – what’s always been most fascinating to me is the time-travelling aspect.
This has meant that in the past few months I’ve been bugging my local store clerk with requests like, “What if you put ‘future’, ‘warp’ and ‘paradox’ into the search field?”. The results are nothing short of spectacular. Anyone wanting to bend their brains in such fashion, of course, has to start with the Back To The Future trilogy. Sure, it’s lightweight, and Huey Lewis and the News feature heavily, but the narrative loops that see Michael J. Fox almost father himself are still trippy, man. Definitely sillier is Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure and the sequel Bill And Ted’s Bogus Journey. A trip through time is certainly the boss way to pass history – and Keanu Reeves has never sounded ‘smarterer’. What’s much smarter, and based on an H.G. Welles story, is The Time Machine – the one from 1960 with Aussie Rod Taylor, not the 2002 remake with Aussie Guy Pearce. It offers similar ‘wow, you changed it all!’ thrills for fans of classics. Much darker – and spookier still thanks to recent swine flu scare – is Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece 12 Monkeys . In it, Bruce Willis’ convict travels back from plague-ravaged 2035 to alter future events with the help of nutjob Brad Pitt. Let’s just say it doesn’t end well for everybody.
Time travel has also leant itself to some pretty dodgy movies. One of the first Terminator rip-offs was called Future Cop and it’s about a… er, future cop named Jack Deth who returns to 1985 to track down future freaks called Whistlers. It’s all pretty bogus, but great fun, and you’ll see a young Helen Hunt before she went serious. You could do worse than to team it up with Future War (1997), in which a time travelling martial arts expert is pursued by cyborgs who have T-Rexes as hunting dogs. Made for about $7.55, it’s as dumb as it sounds. Happily, the wags at American cult TV parody show Mystery Science Theater 3000 got their teeth into it and the result – released this month as part of the 20th anniversary box set – is so funny you’ll be spraying soft-drink through your nose.
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