5 Best Time Travel Movies Of The 21st Century, Ranked

Static Media Add Looper on Google: Preferred Source Google Discover Time travel stories have fascinated filmmakers since the earliest years of cinema. How could they not? Artists of all stripes have been persistently compelled to explore what happens when the past, present, and future collide, as well as the relationships people have to these differing segments of existence. With advancements in visual effects and more genre films getting made than ever before, a wide swath of modern time travel movies are carrying on the legacies of films like “The Terminator” and “Back to the Future.”

There have been so many, in fact, in the current pop culture landscape (including dismal titles like “The Tomorrow War” or “Hot Tub Time Machine 2”) that it can be easy to lose track of the quality time travel movies. The five best time travel movies of the 21st century (ranked from “least best” to greatest based on this authors subjective opinions) exemplify why these kinds of films endure and remain popular. Some of them are great because of their emotional qualities. Others excel because of their visuals or unique tones. Still others get an extra artistic boost from how their stories relate to the larger careers of outstanding filmmakers.

Whatever sublime qualities comprise the wonders of these five 21st century time travel movies, they’re all emblematic of why people still can’t get enough of these kinds of features.

Walt Disney Pictures Widely considered one of the best Disney movies you’ve never seen, 2007’s “Meet the Robinsons” is a time travel yarn focused on orphaned boy Lewis (Jordan Fry/Daniel Hansen) getting transported to the future by Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman), where he encounters Wilbur’s wacky family. The production can sometimes be too hyperactive for its own good and certain members of the Robinsons remain only broad caricatures. However, on the whole, the film is surprisingly delightful, especially in its home stretch where it begins to really lean into all the possibilities of time travel movies. The concept of altering the past and creating a new future, for one thing, proves critical to the finale.

Meanwhile, the seemingly goofy baddie Bowler Hat Guy (Stephen J. Anderson) gets his backstory revealed in the third act, with this character’s motivations and history rendering him one of the more intriguingly complex foes in the Disney Animation canon. As a cherry on top, the animation team clearly had a ball coming up with technology designs and brightly colored sets that could capture a futuristic world of tomorrow, ensuring that “Meet the Robinsons” still dazzles visually even after decades of advancements in computer animation.

Most importantly, though, “Robinsons” crushes its final 10 minutes, which hinge heavily on time travel-specific material to show Lewis growing as a person. Throw in the moving original tune “Little Wonders,” and the end of “Meet the Robinsons” firmly cements its status as a modern time travel gem.

GKIDS Writer-director Makoto Shinkai doesn’t play it easy with his 2016 animated feature “Your Name.” Cited as one of the best movies of 2016, the film involves high school students Mitsuha Miyamizu and Taki Tachibana abruptly beginning to switch bodies. This premise alone would be enough to make “Your Name” one of those must-watch body-swap movies you must add to your bucket list. However, it’s eventually revealed that these two characters are actually separated by several years. Mitsuha lives in the year 2013, while Taki exists in the year 2016, a fact that becomes extremely urgent once a deadly comet comes into play.

Embracing the idea of two souls swapping physical forms across dissonant points in time already differentiates “Your Name” from countless body-swap movies. However, Shinkai’s script is also rich with specific character details that further accentuate the film’s compelling ambiance. The wildly contrasting financial upbringings of each character, for instance, leads to fascinating explorations of what makes these characters tick. Who are they now that they get to live a wildly unique life in terms of dollars and cents? The hand-drawn animation in “Your Name” is also utterly gorgeous — many of its images could be hung in a museum due to their radiance.

The film’s most achingly bittersweet moments, meanwhile, hinge on that time-based disparity looming over the film’s lead characters. You don’t just get a great time travel movie with “Your Name.” it excels in so many other cinematic forms as well.

Hulu If you had to be stuck in an infinite time loop without any immediate hope for escaping, there’d be worse people to experience that with than the tremendously talented Cristin Milioti. Ditto Andy Samberg, the “Saturday Night Live” veteran whose hysterical exploits have included going from Berkeley to internet stardom as part of legendary comedy troupe The Lonely Island.

Both of these incredible performers star in “Palm Springs,” a 2020 feature about two wedding guests (Milioti and Samberg) who find themselves repeating the same day over and over. They try to have fun with these bizarre circumstances, but inevitably problems begin to surface in this new status quo.

Releasing in July 2020, a few months into the COVID pandemic lockdown, “Palm Springs” (which premiered at the January 2020 edition of the Sundance Film Festival) inevitably resonated with many confined audiences as a potent film about being trapped in unspeakable external circumstances forcing your life into repetition. Even divorced from that context, though, “Palm Springs” is a fantastically funny comedy whose engaging and richly human lead performances keep you fully engrossed. Even the wackiest, outsized gags never puncture the intimate qualities that make “Palm Springs” so emotionally satisfying.

Milioti, Samberg, and supporting performer J.K. Simmons all deliver exemplary work, lending believable personalities to an outlandish premise. Sharp visual sensibilities, meanwhile, make sure the gags hit like a ton of bricks. “Palm Springs” works on all levels in its exploration of two people navigating how to live in a very constricted patch of time.

Sony/TriStar Pictures One of Rian Johnson’s many gifts as a writer is taking familiar genre hallmarks, contorting them into something unexpected, and then reminding you why you loved them in the first place. That love proves irresistibly infectious as Johnson crafts exciting new concepts of what murder mysteries, noirs, or even “Star Wars” movies can look like. He’s just so good at balancing the old and the new.

Johnson’s sublime talents in this department were clearly evident in his 2012 time travel tale “Looper.” Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an assassin who kills people sent back in time from the future, suddenly finds himself in peril when he can’t kill his older self (Bruce Willis). Rian Johnson’s exhaustive writing approach to “Looper” landed him in uncharted territory, but it certainly paid off creatively. The movie’s a riveting exercise, with deeply inspired twists on familiar time travel story hallmarks (like a change in the past making something from the future vanish).

At the heart of this collision of the present and future, though, is a fascinating idea about how we love people and how we express that affection. Do we hurt others? Do we protect people? Johnson’s got a lot on his mind with “Looper,” and the result is a masterpiece among both time travel movies and cinema writ large.

Paramount Pictures Time fascinates writer-director Christopher Nolan, clearly entrancing the filmmaker as far back as the days of “Memento” and its backwards approach to telling a story about a guy with amnesia. Since then, his films have often leaned heavily on non-linear narratives and fiddling around with time, as in “Dunkirk” and “Oppenheimer.” Even “The Odyssey” profoundly emphasizes Matt Damon’s Odysseus being unsure how long he’s away from his family, as well as how he is molded into more of a mythic figure with each year he remains missing. Among the most important things that happen in every Christopher Nolan movie is this pronounced exploration of time.

Even more so than “Tenet” (a movie about characters moving backwards in time to do espionage stuff), 2014’s “Interstellar” is arguably Nolan’s most extensive and grand exploration of the fourth dimension. It’s the only one of his films to really embrace the classical definition of time travel in its finale, with Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper trying to communicate with a version of his daughter from decades ago. The visuals in this set piece are magnificently trippy, while the rich emotions of the sequence are similarly impactful. “Interstellar” constantly finds ingenious ways to utilize time (such as how one hour on a planet can equal years while orbiting it) throughout its cosmic journey.

The result is one of Nolan’s most moving works, a microcosm of the filmmaker’s time obsession, and the peak of 21st century time travel cinema.