The Most Confusing Time Travel In Movies

In Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, a pair of teenage slackers save the universe (and score an A+ on their history report) with a little help from Socrates, Billy the Kid, Joan of Arc, and other historical luminaries. How did they accomplish this feat? By using a time traveling phone booth sent from the future, where a utopia built on their music has emerged. While the phone booth is most certainly a questionable vehicle for cruising through the calendar, our problem isn't with the means, but the ends.

Shocking though it may be, the movie about a time traveling phone booth doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Here's the issue: Rufus (played by the late, great George Carlin) is sent back in time from a future that idolizes Bill and Ted for creating music that brought peace to the galaxy. But Bill and Ted were only able to create said music because Rufus went back in time to come to their aid. But Rufus only went back to help them because of their godlike status in the future, which arose from their music. But they only made that music because Rufus traveled through time to help them do it ...

You see the problem here? It's a dog chasing its own tail. In time travel lingo, this is called a "bootstrap paradox" in which cause and effect are intertwined. And while the movie is excellent, it simply doesn't make any sense.

The Back to the Future films are the kings of time travel cinema. It's right there in the name, after all. But here's the thing—they're absolutely riddled with paradoxes and inconsistencies. 

For example, why don't Marty's parents in 1985 recognize their son as the Calvin Klein who played such a key role in their relationship in 1955? If Doc Brown left a DeLorean hidden in a cave for Marty to find 100 years later, as is revealed in Back to the Future Part III,  shouldn't the original DeLorean that Doc hid still be there when Marty drives back to 1885? The list goes on, but the biggest paradox involves Doc Brown in all three time periods. Now, part of the reason Marty has to go back to 1885 in Part III is to save Doc, who he'd learned would be killed by Biff's ancestor from the Doc of 1955. But here's the thing—if 1955 Doc knew he would get shot in 1885, then grew to become 1985 Doc who then traveled back to 1885, shouldn't he have known that his death was impending and therefore been able to avoid it?

Does it ruin the movies? No. Does it make any sense? Also no. But this isn't a list of great time travel moves—it's a list of confusing time travel movies, and Back to the Future is about as confused as it gets.

2012's Looper follows Joe — portrayed by both Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt — a man caught up in a crime syndicate that uses time travel to dispose of bodies. Whenever the syndicate wants to kill someone, they send that person back through time, where they're immediately killed by a hitman known as a "looper." Complicating this is the fact that, at some point, the syndicate will want to sever their connection to said looper. Therefore, they send the aged looper back, for the younger version of themselves to kill in a process called "closing the loop." This is what happens to Willis and Gordon-Levitt, except the former decides to avoid his death by convincing the latter not to kill him. So far so good?

While this plot doesn't seem so confusing on its surface, things start to fall apart under closer examination. Here's the problem: if Old Joe goes back in time and convinces Young Joe not to kill him, then Young Joe's entire future is changed. But for Old Joe to exist and come back to change Young Joe's mind, Young Joe still has to grow up to make the same decisions as Old Joe, including going back in time to change Young Joe's mind.

You see the problem here? Regardless, Looper is a great movie with a killer ending — just don't get hung up on how it got there.

Directed by Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek IV is delightfully weird. The action is launched when an alien probe journeys to Earth because it can no longer hear the songs of humpback whales. The reason it can't hear the whales is because they're long extinct, which angers the probe for reasons that are never precisely explained. It proceeds to decimate the planet.

From there, the crew of the Enterprise decides to travel back in time by sling-shotting around the sun (which makes no sense—their ship already goes faster than the speed of light) so they can go back to when humpback whales were still alive, pick up a couple, then sling-shot back around the sun the other direction to return to their own time and repopulate the Earth with the whales.

Okay, while none of that makes sense, here's the real question: Why, instead of bringing a pair of whales back to their own time, didn't our heroes simply prevent their extinction in the first place? Because it would risk altering the past, you might say? Well you can forget about that, because they spend much of the movie stumbling around the 1970s as obvious as can be. Their actions there already could have changed the future in an infinite number of unforeseeable ways. But hey: The whales return, and the probe returns to its far-off home, satisfied. Hooray?

In the original Terminator film, Kyle Reese is sent back in time by John Connor to protect his mother Sarah Connor, knowing all the while that Reese would become his father. This is a classic paradox: Connor would never be born if he didn't send back Reese, but Reese would never be sent back if Connor wasn't born to send him in the first place, but if Reese doesn't go back then Connor will never be born...

So time travel confusion is par for the franchise course. Dark Fate ups the game by saying, okay, the Connors successfully averted Judgement Day, but the machines had sent back another Schwarzenegger-style terminator, which still exists even though now the future it was made in never happened, and this terminator kills John Connor. And even though Skynet never ends up happening, a different AI system called Legion decides to pull a Skynet and send back its own version of a terminator (that for some reason is very similar to Skynet's terminators) to kill a new future resistance leader. The Schwarzenegger-terminator that killed John Connor even goes as far as saying it was "sent from a future that never happened." What?

Little of Terminator: Dark Fate makes any sense at all, but that's okay. At least it pulls off whatever it's doing better than whatever Terminator Genisys did.