The time-travel genre has stayed with me for many years – not just because of the science fiction, but because I often find myself wondering how things might have turned out differently if I had made a different choice, said something else, or taken a different path. I can relate to it when I watch characters go back in time and try to fix something, even if it never quite goes as planned.

What I enjoy most is how different stories use different mechanisms to explain time travel – machines, wormholes, memory loops, secret experiments – and how each version comes with its own rules, limitations, and consequences. I like figuring out how those systems work and all the paradoxes they create, even if it needs me to read several explanations online for hours.

But what I love most are the closed loop stories… the ones where someone goes back in time to change something, only to end up causing the very future they came from. The kind of stories where the original cause and effect gets blurred, or where attempts to alter an event lead to tragic consequences, always stay with me.

Here are some that stood out to me and why:

  • Primer: While this one was quite hard to put together, it’s probably one of the most interesting time travel movies I’ve seen. It goes on to show how even people who go out of their way to take every possible precaution when messing with time (and their own doubles), unexpected events can still happen.
  • Terminator (1 and 2): I initially thought it was just about robots taking over the world but the closed loop of the 1st part and the alternate future of the 2nd made it worthwhile. Arnold [can’t spell surname] was so great as the robot trying to act like a human.
  • Time Lapse: It’s simple at first, just a camera taking photos of the future – but soon turns into something dark. The ending, for some reason, kept showing up in my dreams after watching it.
  • Predestination: Although a bit too much, I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterwards – the idea of identity and loops was handled in a way that’s unsettling and fascinating.
  • 12 Monkeys: This kind of a movie tells a story where both the past and future have already happened, my favourite kind.
  • Looper: The concept of confronting your older self and having to kill them was a nice concept, and even better was the idea of both selves working against each other.
  • Dark (Netflix): This show had me spend so much time figuring out all the timelines, family trees, and the cause-and-effect of the characters’ choices in significant years; and in the end, feel the weight of all the consequences. The ending was probably the only way it could have ended.
  • Donnie Darko: The ‘rules’ around the artifact to be returned to the original timeline were interesting, and the ending (with Mad Love playing) was both beautiful and sad at the same time.
  • Interstellar: While not exactly a time travel movie, the time dilation and the tesseract part gave it that same feeling of looping.
  • Avengers Endgame: I am still not sure how returning all the stones to their original timelines works to prevent changing those timelines, but I liked the concept of the plan and its eventual success.

I also enjoy stories where characters re-live the same event over and over. Source Code and Reset (Chinese drama) show a similar confusion of being stuck in the same explosion and trying different actions to prevent it. For a lighter mood, Palm Springs is a fun take on the same day repeating. I was disappointed that Sisyphus (Chinese drama) ended up calling the loop a memory experiment due to censorship. I also didn’t enjoy The Time Machine book much, maybe because it was about humanity’s future far ahead in time and not about the past.

With Tenet, I had a hard time understanding what was really going on, but it was definitely a new type of time travel mechanism which was interesting, even if a bit overcomplicated. The part where [hero] knows what is going to happen to his friend but is unable to prevent it because “what’s happened has happened”, was what stayed with me the most.

I think most time travel stories aren’t just about all the mechanics and paradoxes, but also about regret, inevitability, the desire to change outcomes; and maybe that’s why I like them so much.