time travel movie with dinosaurs

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A Sound of Thunder

2005, Sci-fi, 1h 41m

What to know

Critics Consensus

Choppy logic and uneven performances are overshadowed by not-so-special effects that makes the suspension of disbelief a nearly impossible task. Read critic reviews

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A sound of thunder photos.

In the year 2055, greedy entrepreneur Charles Hatton (Ben Kingsley) makes a fortune with his company, Time Safari Inc., which allows millionaires to travel back to the prehistoric era to hunt dinosaurs. Strict regulations are in place so that the present is not altered. But, during one time-travel safari, a hunter steps on a butterfly and unleashes a drastic ripple effect through time. Now researcher Dr. Travis Ryer (Edward Burns) must travel back to prevent the source of the disruption.

Rating: PG-13 (Partial Nudity|Language|Sci-Fi Violence)

Genre: Sci-fi

Original Language: English

Director: Peter Hyams

Producer: Howard Baldwin , Moshe Diamant , Elie Samaha , Phil Anchutz

Writer: Thomas Dean Donnelly , Joshua Oppenheimer , Clement Enlatarne , Gregory Poirier

Release Date (Theaters): Sep 2, 2005 wide

Release Date (Streaming): Jul 24, 2014

Box Office (Gross USA): $1.9M

Runtime: 1h 41m

Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures

Production Co: Dante Entertainment, Forge, Franchise Pictures, Warner Brothers, Crusader Entertainment LLC

Sound Mix: Dolby SRD, DTS, SDDS

Aspect Ratio: Scope (2.35:1)

Cast & Crew

Edward Burns

Travis Ryer

Catherine McCormack

Ben Kingsley

Charles Hatton

David Oyelowo

Tech Officer Payne

Wilfried Hochholdinger

August Zirner

Clay Derris

Corey Johnson

Christian Middleton

Armin Rohde

John Wallenbeck

Peter Hyams

Howard Baldwin

Moshe Diamant

Elie Samaha

Andrew Stevens

Executive Producer

Nicolas Clermont

Phil Anchutz

Thomas Dean Donnelly

Joshua Oppenheimer

Clement Enlatarne

Gregory Poirier

News & Interviews for A Sound of Thunder

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"Transporter 2" Kicks Some Labor Day Box Office Butt

Critic Reviews for A Sound of Thunder

Audience reviews for a sound of thunder.

bad special effects and badly made sci film. how this film fails is beyond me, I just can't believe the budget for this trash

When I first read Ray Bradbury's masterful short story, I immediately thought "this would make a great movie." So naturally, when I first saw that this was coming out, I was immensely excited. Boy, was I in for a shock. While watching this, I was literally speechless at how bad it was. The special effects were transparent, the performances were flat, and the dialogue is terrible (ANOTHER TIME WAVE IS COMING!!!! ZOMG!!!!). Of all the book adaptations Hollywood has screwed up, this has to be one of the worse ones.

Some Rules Should Never Be Broken.

This movie had a good concept that could have set it up for some great action sequences and ohhh moments but it isnt done justice here. Firstly I dont mind new actors like in the recent district 9 but I didnt really care for these ones. Also the special affects are really bad for the timing and the action is quite poor. Overall it has some good parts and the story is ok but it could be so much better.

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The 25 Greatest Time-Travel Movies Ever Made

It must say something, surely, about humans, how often time-travel movies are about returning to the past rather than jumping to the future. As Mark Duplass’s forlorn character says in Safety Not Guaranteed , “The mission has to do with regret.” With all the potential to explore the unknown world of the future, so often when our minds conspire to bend the rules of time it’s instead to rehash the old. It’s compelling to watch a character in a movie do what we cannot — right past wrongs or uncover the reason for or meaning behind the events in their lives, whether they be emotionally catastrophic or merely geopolitically motivated.

So absent is the future from the canon, in fact, that when it is involved, typically future dwellers are leaving their own time to come back to the present. Back to the Future Part II aside, it seems as if there’s something about going forward in time that just doesn’t track for humans. (Of course, you could argue that this is because the present-day concept of bidirectional time travel would infinitely multiply or change beyond recognition any future that may occur, but that’s a knot for another article.)

In any case, the time-travel stories deemed worthy of Hollywood budgets aren’t always straightforward in their mechanics. Some films on this list barely qualify as time-travel movies at all; others could hardly qualify as anything else. There are movies about trips through time but also ones about the bending and fracturing and muddying thereof; then there are those about, as Andy Samberg aptly puts it in Palm Springs , “one of those infinite time-loop situations you might have heard about.” There’s even a movie in which we get only 13 seconds’ worth of time travel, when it functions more like a joke whose punch line hits at the film’s climax.

What these films all do have in common is a fascination with changing the way time works. That being said, the list leaves out movies in larger, more extended franchises in which time meddling is a one-off dalliance thrown into a sequel with little by way of foreshadowing: think Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban , Avengers: Endgame , and Men in Black III . (It also leaves off perhaps the Ur-time-travel movie, Primer , and the quite good Midnight in Paris because their directors don’t deserve the column inches.) We’re looking at self-contained stories using time mechanics from the start, with preference given to those that involve themselves more intently with the ins and outs of time travel; that ask questions about time, aging, memory and so forth; and that try to succeed at it in new and interesting ways. So let’s get to it.

25. Galaxy Quest (1999)

Does Galaxy Quest really count as a time-travel movie? Some compelling reasons argue that it doesn’t: Time travel isn’t a major factor in the plot, and the time traveling that does occur is, yes, only a 13-second jump. But its use of time travel is meaningful insofar as the movie itself is a loving spoof of Star Trek , which makes use of time travel in three films ( one of which made this list ), not to mention dozens of episodes across its various TV iterations. Tacking on time travel as a deus ex machina for the actors in a Star Trek– like show pressed into service as an actual space crew by an endangered alien race is the exact right amount of ribbing in a movie that’s as on point as it is hilarious.

Galaxy Quest is available to rent on Amazon .

24. Happy Death Day (2017)

Pick away at the surface of a time-loop movie and you find a horror movie. Most of the entries on this list are covered in enough feel-good spin to land as comedies, but Happy Death Day stares the horror of the time-loop phenomenon right in the face. (It’s also quite funny.) Reliving the same day over and over is an unimaginably potent form of psychological torture, and adding murder to the equation does little to dull that edge. The film follows a college-age protagonist struggling to escape from a masked slasher hell-bent on killing her again and again while she tries to solve the mystery of how she got stuck in a time loop.

Happy Death Day is available to rent on Amazon .

23. Back to the Future Part II (1989)

Seriously, this may be the only good movie in which the film’s whole focus is using a time machine to travel into the future. The fact that it’s a sequel is telling — the characters already traveled into the past in the first movie , and the filmmakers decided to save “traveling even further into the past“ for the third film in the trilogy. Still, Back to the Future Part II is a fun time that makes great use of sight gags and references, recasting scenes from the first film in the distant future year of 2015 with all its hoverboards and self-lacing Nikes.

Back to the Future Part II is available to rent on Amazon .

22. See You Yesterday (2019)

It’s a dirty little secret of time-travel movies that they tend to be, well, pretty white. Tenet ’s Protagonist aside, if Hollywood’s sending someone through time, they’re almost certainly not a Black person, and for obvious reasons: Most of post-contact North American history is deeply unfriendly to people of color, and the problems a person running around out of time and place is going to encounter are deeply compounded if they’ll likely be the target of racist abuse or violence — which makes See You Yesterday all the more compelling. Produced by Spike Lee and featuring one of filmdom’s most famous time travelers in a cameo role, it follows a Black teenage science prodigy who uses a time machine to try to save her brother from being killed by a police officer.

See You Yesterday is streaming on Netflix .

21. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

No offense to the Back to the Future franchise, but time travel never looks more fun on film than it does in the first Bill & Ted movie. It’s a concept that feels distinctly of a different era, so pure is its zaniness, that it’s hard to imagine anyone concocting it today. The titular duo, Californian high-school students in the ’80s, travel through the past looking for historical figures in order to ace a history project, then bring them all back to the present. High jinks ensue! We get Genghis Khan in a sporting-goods store and Mozart on an electric keyboard. What more could you want?

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is streaming on HBO Max .

20. Source Code (2011)

Time-travel-film aficionados know this won’t be Jake Gyllenhaal’s only stop on this list, but no matter. Source Code finds him repeating the same eight minutes over and over as he struggles to find the culprit in a train bombing — with each replay ending in his own death by explosion. For some reason, a romantic subplot is shoehorned into this, along with a bunch of frankly unnecessary technical mumbo-jumbo, but the core idea is a compelling mix of the time-loop movie and the train whodunit that Gyllenhaal is a perfect fit for.

Source Code is available to rent on Amazon .

19. 12 Monkeys (1995)

Some sort of law of nature dictates that every genuinely good idea and/or piece of true art has to at some point be turned into a Hollywood movie. Thank God La Jetée was adapted into something that can stand on its own feet artistically. 12 Monkeys may not retain its source material’s black-and-white look or stripped-down, static-image presentation, but it is a rollicking good time nonetheless. That’s in no small part due to director Terry Gilliam getting the best out of Bruce Willis and a young Brad Pitt, and recasting World War III as a planet-decimating virus. Which, like at least one other movie on this list , “speaks to the present moment,” or whatever.

12 Monkeys is available to rent on Amazon .

18. Run Lola Run (1998)

Unlike almost all of the other films on this list, the terms time travel and time machine don’t show up anywhere in Run Lola Run . Rather, it’s a sort of de facto time-loop scenario in which the protagonist tries repeatedly to pay a ransom to save her boyfriend’s life. In fact, if not for a few key details, it could easily be characterized (and often has been) as an alternate-endings movie rather than a time-travel film. But the fact that Lola seems to be learning from her past attempts with each successive one suggests that she is, indeed, using knowledge gained from previous loops to bring a satisfactory end to this situation.

Run Lola Run is available to rent on Amazon .

17. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

One of the most striking things about Groundhog Day is the mutability and replicability of its core conceit. Perhaps the best case in point is Edge of Tomorrow , sometimes known as Live. Die. Repeat. after its original tagline. It’s the kind of physically grueling movie only an actor as genuinely unhinged as Tom Cruise could pull off. A noncombatant thrust into a war against invading aliens, Cruise’s character finds himself reliving day one of combat over and over, slowly but surely refining his techniques in order to survive the extraterrestrial onslaught. Like the central twosome in the much less violent Palm Springs , he winds up with a partner in (war) crime, teaming up with the similarly time-trapped Emily Blunt, and the explanation for the replay glitch here is actually pretty satisfying.

Edge of Tomorrow is streaming on Fubo TV .

16. Star Trek (2009)

If you could create some sort of an advanced stat to measure controversy generated per unit of interesting filmmaking decisions, J.J. Abrams would have to be near the top in terms of his ability to rig up movie drama from almost nothing. This is a guy whose filmography is like Godzilla rip-off, Spielberg homage, safe reboot of cherished IP, repeat. Star Trek may be his best film, though, a sure-footed reinvention of a dorky sci-fi franchise that made it, well, cool. Somehow, the beauty of Spock and Kirk’s bromance being woven through chance encounters with future selves kind of … works?

Star Trek is available to rent on Amazon .

15. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)

There’s a relative dearth of time travel in animated film, which perhaps is a function simply of the fact that it’s less impressive to stage in a world that’s already unreal. If you can Looney Tunes your way through physics, what’s so special about grabbing the flow of time and tying it into a bow? Still, the original Girl Who Leapt Through Time deserves mention here. It’s a beautiful story that interlaces the complexity of time leaping with the intensity of teenage emotion and the thorny process of growing up where the opportunity to redo things leads, over time, to growth — a less shitty Groundhog Day , in a way.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is available to rent on Amazon .

14. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

She may not be the most famous, decorated, or emulated actress of her generation, but Aubrey Plaza is someone whose personality spoke to the irony-soaked 2010s in a way that simply could not be denied. Her character on Parks and Recreation , April Ludgate, was, by all accounts, created specifically to channel Plaza’s real-life personality to the screen, and she plays essentially the same character in Safety Not Guaranteed . Here, she’s a sarcastic intern at a magazine working on a story about a would-be time traveler and using her feminine wiles to slowly gain his trust. The chemistry between Plaza and Mark Duplass is probably the film’s high point; the subplot about the FBI feels like it was clipped out of a bad X-Files episode.

Safety Not Guaranteed is streaming on Tubi .

13. La Jetée (1962)

At only a 28-minute run time, La Jetée is arguably too short to merit inclusion on this list. However, what it lacks in content (and in, well, moving images; it’s almost exclusively a collection of static black-and-white shots set to voice-over), it more than makes up for in inventiveness and influence, and it would be a travesty to leave it out in favor of more recent by-the-book fare. Tracing the tale of a man held prisoner in post-WWIII Paris being used in time-travel experiments as his captors seek to remedy the postapocalyptic state of the world, he’s sent into both the future and the past and ends up unraveling a lifelong personal mystery while he’s at it.

La Jetée is streaming on the Criterion Channel .

12. Planet of the Apes (1968)

Unlike the worse but more straightforwardly time-traveling Tim Burton remake, the relationship between the original Planet of the Apes and time travel is inexact — technically, the astronaut crew that lands on the titular planet does travel forward 2,000 years, but it’s not done via a time machine. The travel isn’t instantaneous: It literally does take them 2,000 years to get there; they’re just unconscious and on life support. Still, the way the film’s ending handles the iconic reveal is exactly in line with the best of the time-travel canon, the telescoping, mise en abyme feeling of the world shifting in front of your very eyes without your moving an inch.

Planet of the Apes is available to rent on Amazon .

11. Groundhog Day (1993)

The famous Bill Murray vehicle essentially invented the infinite-time-loop genre (and it’s hardly a movie that succeeds on the strength of its concept alone), but the idea at its core is so steeped in the casual misogyny of late-’80s and early-’90s cinema that it’s hard to watch today without cringing. Murray’s character employing what amounts to PUA-style techniques over and over and over in a desperate bid to fuck his hapless co-worker just doesn’t hit the way it did back then. If the story arc didn’t present a guy detoxifying himself of the worst aspects of masculinity in order to be worthy of a woman’s love as the primary way for a 20th-century white man to achieve full personhood, this would be much higher on the list.

Groundhog Day is streaming on Starz .

10. Predestination (2014)

This is probably the most complicated film on the list. Following a “temporal agent” (played by Ethan Hawke) who’s trying to prevent a bombing in 1970s New York, it’s based on a Robert A. Heinlein short story and features Shiv Roy herself, Sarah Snook, in a star-making turn as someone with a complicated backstory and a secret. Like the best sci-fi, the film’s premise raises all kinds of fascinating questions about the titular concept and throws in some interesting musings on sex, gender, and the self in the process.

Predestination is streaming on Tubi .

9. Looper (2012)

Wes Anderson gets a lot of flak for his overwrought twee visuals, but Rian Johnson has a knack for making movies that feel and function like dioramas even if they don’t look it. Narratively speaking, everything here is constructed just so — and there’s a certain beauty in that — but who ever had a profound experience of art by looking at a diorama? Looper was probably Johnson’s least precious pre– Star Wars film, which is nice because the temptation to drastically overmaneuver the mechanics of a time-travel story can lead to disaster. The tech used to Bruce Willis–ify Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s face is distracting, and the third act’s retreat from the postapocalyptic city of the future to the postapocalyptic corn farm of the future is a brave choice that the film struggles to land. Still, Johnson’s vision of a future in which organized crime runs time travel is compelling and well worth a watch.

Looper is streaming on Netflix .

8. Donnie Darko (2001)

Donnie Darko is a bit of a genre mash-up. Part high-school movie, part sci-fi flick, part bleak meditation on the soullessness of late-’80s America, it’s nevertheless a weirdly successful piece of filmmaking that makes fantastic use of a young Jake Gyllenhaal, a great supporting cast (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, Jena Malone, and Patrick Swayze among others), and an absolutely iconic haunting cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” Watching high schoolers navigate parallel universes, wormholes, and time travel is a dicey proposition, but director Richard Kelly makes it work, somehow.

Donnie Darko is streaming on HBO Max .

7. Back to the Future (1984)

While it’s clearly superior to the sequel (and leagues ahead of the final film in the trilogy), the original Back to the Future is a bit of a mess (John Mulaney was right , to be honest). Its racial and gender politics are cringey, and the incest subplot is weird (“It’s your cousin Marvin. Marvin Pornhub . You know that new plot element you’ve been looking for?”), but there’s a clear interest in time travel beyond its shimmering surface: the very real addressing of the “grandfather problem” in time travel via the slow disappearance of Marty from his family photo, the accidental invention of rock music, and a genuine curiosity about the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of time machines. Ahh, what the hell. It’s a romp.

Back to the Future is available to rent on Amazon .

6. Palm Springs (2020)

No offense to Gen-Xers and boomers, but the best time-loop movie of all time is Palm Springs . The film isn’t without its missteps, but it’s much more curious about life than Groundhog Day was through the eyes of Murray’s misanthrope. Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg‘s characters, stuck in the loop together, are a perfect comedic match, and their shared humanity makes for a beautiful arc. The film raises questions about what’s worth doing in life when nothing lasts and how to stay sane when every day is the same. Of course, as a sort of polar opposite of Tenet , it benefited from coming out during the pandemic by speaking, as it does, to the experience of lockdown.

Palm Springs is streaming on Hulu .

5. Tenet (2020)

Interstellar wasn’t enough for Chris Nolan, apparently. Tenet ’s legacy may end up being little more than that of the COVID action movie no one saw — a bloated thriller that Nolan fought to get into theaters and bar from home viewing reportedly to swell the size of his own pockets. It really did suffer from bad timing, though, because this is genuinely a quintessential big-screen popcorn movie whose absurdity is all the more palatable when it’s given the audiovisual bombast it deserves. Ambitious in scope as it traces a war on the past by the future (yes, you read that right), Tenet is as enamored of action tropes as it is in bucking them, and its investment in rendering visible the brain-bendingly knotty mechanics of moving through time is laudable, even when the movie itself remains opaque — as impenetrable as the future, as hazy as the past.

Tenet is streaming on HBO Max .

4. The Terminator (1984)

A partner to Blade Runner in the mid-’80s invention of sci-fi noir, The Terminator is a stunning film in many ways, despite the third act’s now-iffy visual effects. While it’s not James Cameron’s debut, and it would go on to be bested by its sequel , it functions as an incredible showcase for an emerging young director who would exclusively make big stories for the rest of his career. Arnold Schwarzenegger is perfectly cast as the relentless, unemotional killer cyborg sent back from the future to terminate the mother of the eventual resistance leader, and the film’s romantic subplot has just the perfect amount of time-travel-induced cheesiness for it to work.

The Terminator is streaming on Amazon Prime Video .

3. Interstellar (2014)

It’s not inaccurate to say Christopher Nolan is a director who’s more interested in scale and scope than in expressing the minutiae of the human experience in its purest form. But in Interstellar, a Nolan movie in its titular ambitions, there’s a core element of time travel wrought not as sci-fi fireworks but as a paean to the sheer force and will of the power of love. It both does and doesn’t work, depending on your capacity for cheese in space, but even besides that, Nolan’s use of time as story arc — the way Miller’s planet functions, in particular — is conceptually masterful in the best kind of time-travel-movie way.

Interstellar is streaming on Paramount+ .

2. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Whereas the franchise’s first movie spends more time on the question of time travel, in the second it takes a bit of a back seat to the action itself. It’s hard to fault director James Cameron for this decision; T2 remains one of the best action movies of the ’90s and — along with Jurassic Park and The Matrix — one of the decade’s best when for special effects. The groundbreaking T-1000 would honestly be enough to get this movie on the list; a tween John Connor grappling with questions of predestination and the fact that he is vicariously responsible for his own conception feel almost like icing on the time-travel cake. Much as in 12 Monkeys , time travel here is mistaken for delusion, as valiant Sarah Connor, in a Cassandra-esque nightmare, has to battle against the future only she knows is coming. Of course, Cassandra never had access to any firepower stored in underground desert arsenals.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is streaming on Netflix .

1. Arrival (2016)

It’s fair to wonder whether Arrival really is, in fact, a time-travel movie. The Ted Chiang short story it’s based on isn’t about time travel per se; rather, it’s an exploration of alternate forms of temporal understanding. The linguist protagonist, played by Amy Adams, doesn’t travel through time so much as come to experience it differently. Still, the plot ends up hinging on foreknowledge that she is granted not via visions but by actually experiencing her future simultaneously with her present and past. For our purposes, though, that’s time fuckery enough to merit inclusion, and boy howdy does the film deliver in overall quality. Partly, that’s simply a question of the source material. Chiang is arguably the most talented (and possibly the most decorated) American sci-fi writer of his generation. But the source story is not especially Hollywood friendly, and director Denis Villeneuve has adopted it lovingly, borrowing a plot device from another of Chiang’s stories, the more straightforwardly time-travel-based “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” in order to add some third-act blockbuster flavor. The result is a beautiful meditation on love, choice, and courage that packs art-film ethos into a genuine sci-fi blockbuster.

Arrival is streaming on Hulu and Paramount+ .

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'65' and 9 Other Non-traditional Time Travel Movies, Ranked by IMDb Score

Travel through time to enjoy these amazing movies again for the first time.

The time travel genre has come long since H.G. Wells first coined the term "time machine" in his 1895 novella. For example, on March 10, the movie 65 crash-landed into theaters, throwing us 65 million years into the past. Despite their perceived scientific complexity, time travel stories provide a rich canvas for artists to tell human stories of regret, hope, and personal development.

RELATED: The 15 Best Time Travel Movies, Ranked

Time travel doesn't always go according to plan. Actually, it rarely does. Not everyone can hop in a TARDIS . Sometimes, it even happens by accident. Regardless, there is more than one way to get where you want. Here is a list of films with more unorthodox methods of leaving the sacred timeline.

1 The Undead (1957)

IMDb Score: 4.6

Directed by the legendary Roger Corman , The Undead follows a psychic researcher accessing the past life of a woman he has recruited off the street. Operating under the impression that she won't be missed should anything go wrong, he plunges her into her own subconscious. It is every bit as wild as you would expect a Roger Corman film to be.

RELATED: Roger Corman's 'Virtually Heroes,' Starring Mark Hamill, Finally Gets Theatrical Release

Clocking in at a brisk 75 minutes, The Undead feels like a glorified and incredibly bonkers episode of The Twilight Zone ; the time travel is achieved via hypnosis and psychic links. The Undead tries to pack a lot into that short runtime, including hypnosis, witches, and a run-in with Satan. Ultimately, it's too much for such a short film, so it scores low.

2 Detention (2011)

IMDb Score: 5.6

In Detention , by director Joseph Khan , a killer is on the loose at Grizzly Lake High School. Modeling their crimes after the notorious local, "Cinderhella," the killer begins targeting the student body. It's up to a misfit group of students in detention to figure out a way to stop the murderer. Oh, and they have to figure out how to keep the world from ending in 1992.

Detention is a mishmash of genres and homages that works surprisingly well, moving at an impressive pace for a movie with so much going on. And if you thought that the psychic links in The Undead were wild, the students in Detention utilize a time machine inside a stuffed grizzly bear. If you're a fan of Scream 's meta humor, this might be the time travel flick for you.

3 65 (2023)

IMDb Score: 5.7

Just when you thought the "attractive, reluctant dad" genre was going the way of the dinosaur, 65 decides to add the dinosaurs. Scott Beck and Bryan Wood , directors of the hidden gem Haunt and writers of A Quiet Place , drop space piolt Mills, played by Adam Driver, 65 million years into the past.

65 utilizes a fun twist in the "time travel" trope, and to say any more would spoil the film. But with space being the final frontier, we know very little about how it works. For example, the Star Trek reboot in 2009 saw two different characters enter the same black hole and come out years apart from one another.

4 Synchronic (2019)

IMDb Score: 6.2

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead are making some of the most exciting science fiction films lately, and Synchronic is no exception. Two best friends, played by Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan , are working as paramedics in New Orleans. They respond to a string of bizarre injuries and deaths, eventually discovering that they are all linked to a new designer drug called Synchronic.

RELATED: We've Ranked Directors Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson's Other Projects Before 'Moon Knight'

Utilizing the pineal gland and its chemicals, the drug allows users to travel to specific, uncontrollable points in the past. The pineal gland has a long history associated with esoteric and spiritual principles, with H.P. Lovecraft suggesting the pineal gland could be used to view alternate realities. This is the high-concept filmmaking Benson and Moorhead have become known, and they aren't stopping anytime soon .

5 Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)

IMDb Score: 6.8

In the rare case of the movie being as good as the book, Slaughterhouse-Five earned praise not only from critics but from the author of the original novel. That is no small feat in an arena that routinely botches adaptations. The film went on to win multiple awards and is remembered fondly to this day.

Billy Pilgrim has become "unstuck in time" and now simultaneously experiences the past, present, and future. There is some debate in interpretations. Is he traveling, or is this all in Billy's head? Regardless, Slaughterhouse-Five is an emotional study of war, its effects on those that experience it, and a sharp examination of religion.

6 Palm Springs (2020)

IMDb Score: 7.4

You all remember 2020, right? Aside from the obvious, 2020 gave us this Andy Samberg -led comedy-drama. Nyles, played by Samberg, and Sarah, played by Cristin Milioti , are attending a wedding and eventually are trapped in a time loop. Weddings, am I right?

RELATED: 'Palm Springs' and 9 Other Must-See Time Loop Movies to Binge Over Groundhog Day

For all its barren appearances, the desert is full of strange things. If you don't believe that, ask anyone from The Outwaters . Or Sarah and Nyles in Palm Springs . Quantum physics and cave-dwelling aside, Palm Springs is a fun little movie that asks deceptively big questions. You can stream it now on Hulu.

7 Army of Darkness (1992)

Army of Darkness is the looniest film in the entire Evil Dead canon. As a result of a magic spell and not a scientific advancement, ash is transported to the Middle Ages with a chainsaw, a shotgun, and a sedan.

Typically, magic lets you see the future or past but not physically visit. But the Necronomicon has never met a rule it didn't want to break. Be sure to catch the next installment of the series this Spring. It will not be this funny, but I will be a welcome return to the world of the Deadites.

8 Deadpool 2 (2018)

IMDb Score: 7.7

Professor Charles Xavier and Magneto. Captain American and Bucky Barnes. Ant-Man and The Wasp. Marvel Comics has its fair share of dynamic duos. Few are more entertaining than Deadpool and the time traveler Cable. They are a great team when they aren't trying to kill each other.

Cable's method of time travel is vague, a change from other movies' overwrought and over-explained time travel. The reasons why are always more important than the reasons how. Cable travels back in time out of love for and a desire to save his family. Cable's motivations, though they'll also save the world, are grounded and intimate, humanizing the cyborg character.

9 Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

IMDb Score: 7.9

Edge of Tomorrow , or Live. Die. Repeat. or Live. Die. Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow was directed by Doug Liman and released in 2014. It follows the survivors and soldiers of an alien invasion doomed to fail. It was a critical and commercial success, utilizing an invigorating mix of action and science fiction with a stellar cast. It was one of the top films of the year.

Part of that success is because of the time travel mechanic's ingenuity. The aliens, known as mimics, can manipulate time as a part of their connected neural network. William Cage, played by a refreshingly vulnerable Tom Cruise , is injured and covered in alien blood and wakes up able to utilize the ability. Cage uses the mimics' strategy against them until a final showdown. Edge of Tomorrow is sci-fi action at its best.

10 La Jete (1962)

IMDb Score: 8.2

La Jetée might be the best film on this list that you have never seen, though its unique presentation might not be for everyone. La Jetée is set in Paris in the aftermath of World War III. Scientists use prisoners to send back and forth to our past and present, but only one subject can withstand the trip mentally. Will he be our savior or collateral damage?

Thematically, La Jetée is ambitious and moving, posing questions like: are our pasts ever as good as we remember them? Are the answers to our current problems in advancement or simply better utilizing our existing resources and situations? The more impressive feat is its bold creative choice in visual style and its ability to do all of this in under half an hour confidently.

READ NEXT: Oscar Winners 2023: Meet the Winners

Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

10 Underrated Time Travel Movies from the 1980s

April 3, 2024 by Billy Oduory

Billy Oduory with ten underrated time travel movies from the 1980s…

With timeless blockbusters like Back to the Future setting the highest standards for 1980s sci-fi, many great films from the decade that didn’t hit similar heights in theatres failed to receive the credit they deserved. The creativity and innovation that went into 1980s sci-fi still transformed the whole movie industry and time travel films were not left behind. Films like The Final Countdown and Timerider , which weren’t instant hits when they were released, have continued to gain popularity in recent years as more people now appreciate the charm of 20th-century creativity.

With the surge in demand for classic gems from the decade, these underrated 80s time travel films have received the credits they deserve in public forums such as IMDB. For a modern audience wishing to travel back in time, the attraction from the past has to be something more than a typical time travel narrative, which is why these films have earned a cultic following for their eccentric stories and impressive cinematography that makes them feel like they were way ahead of their time…

Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann (1982)

While testing a new bike, Lyle Swann (Fred Ward), a dirtbike racer, strays into the field of a time travel experiment in the desert and is thrust back in time, finding himself in November 1877. The stubborn rider doesn’t realize the change in his surroundings until he is set upon by a gang of outlaws who would really love to lay their hands on the nice ride from the future. As Swann Grapples with his new reality, he finds refuge in the friendly town of San Marcos and now has to find a way to save the town from the outlaws and survive long enough for the scientists to come to his rescue.

Directed by William Dear, Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann has everything fans would expect from a classic Western, while still telling the interesting story of a time traveler. Despite its modest rating, the film boasts of impressive action sequences and a charismatic performance by Fred Ward as he brings life to the character. The blend of romance, crime, and sci-fi complements the intricately written film turning it into a worthy cult classic.

My Science Project (1985)

Michael Harlan (John Stockwell) has nothing to submit for his final science project, so he breaks into a government aircraft boneyard and steals a strange-looking globe hoping to use it to impress his teachers. However, when he plugs the globe into a power source, he discovers that it has strange abilities including sucking the power grid dry and causing time travel. His project, which unleashes chaos on the school and his hometown, turns out to be a piece of alien technology. This is a coming-of-age comedy with a touch of Sci-Fi that transcends the traditional premise of time travel films to tell the human story.

Directed by Jonathan R. Betuel, My Science Project offers a humorous take on time travel. The film’s quirky premise and endearing characters make it an enjoyable watch for audiences of all ages, which explains its enduring popularity. With its blend of adventure, humor, and nostalgia for 1980s high school culture, the film offers a delightful trip down memory lane.

Trancers (1984)

Serial killers still make the most dreaded villains in TV and films, but a serial killer traveling through time takes the idea of dark comedy and time travel to a whole new level which explains why Trancers is now a whole franchise. The serial killer, in this case, is Martin Whistler (Michael Stefani) a 23rd-century criminal mastermind who discovers a way to turn people into senseless killers known as Trancers, whom he wants to use to destroy humanity. When his evil plans are thwarted by the relentless detective Jack Deth (Tim Thomerson) the serial killer uses a special drug to travel back in time to 1985 to continue his reign of terror, but Jack Deth won’t let him off that easily.

Directed by Charles Band, Trancers brings zombies and time travel into its action-packed storyline, making a simple-sounding storyline interesting. Moreover, despite its modest IMDb rating, the film has gained a cult following over the years, appreciated for its imaginative storyline and entertaining performances. With its blend of gritty noir elements, futuristic dystopia, and time travel shenanigans, the film offers a unique and enjoyable experience for viewers craving a dose of 1980s nostalgia.

Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

Starring a young Nicolas Cage and Kathleen Turner, Peggy Sue Got Married is the comedic tale of the second chance at a better life for 43-year-old Peggy Sue who is planning to divorce her cheating husbands but feels trapped and regrets the decisions she made in her teenage years. While attending her high school reunion party, Peggy collapses and finds herself transported back in time to her senior year of high school with the chance to relive her past and make better choices all over again.

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, this charming romantic comedy offers a whimsical take on the time travel genre. Peggy Sue Got Married features one of Cage and Turner’s best performances in a romantic comedy. With its nostalgic 1950s setting, witty dialogue, and heartfelt exploration of regret and second chances, the film offers a delightful blend of humor and sentimentality that a modern classics fan will enjoy.

The Final Countdown (1980)

Filmed on the real-life aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, The Final Countdown tells the story of sailors and a civilian observer on the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that gets sucked back in time to December 7, 1941, just a day before the Pearl Harbor attack, while on a training exercise. After discovering the Japanese fleet planning to attack the US fleet, the commanders and the sailors are torn between changing history by preventing the most devastating attack on US soil in WWII or letting history take its course.

Being Don Taylor’s last film, The Final Countdown was a great way to sign out for the talented director as it features an epic combination of action and historical drama. Its impressive special effects and suspenseful storyline keep viewers hooked as they present the thrill of an epic war film as well as a travel drama. The film explores the ethical dilemmas and the consequences of altering history.

The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988)

The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey follows a group of villagers from 14th-century England who, while tunneling through the earth on a mission to make a sacrifice and save the world from the Black Death, inadvertently find themselves transported to modern-day New Zealand. Struggling to comprehend their new surroundings, the villagers embark on a quest to find a way back home, all this time, relying on the visions of a “gifted boy” called Connor (Bruce Lyons).

It is a visually stunning film that seamlessly blends historical drama with elements of fantasy and science fiction, making it feel way ahead of its time while retaining the charm of black-and-white cinema. The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey won multiple awards in Australia and New Zealand for its thought-provoking storyline and eccentric performances by the cast and is only now receiving global recognition as seen in its improving IMDB ratings.

Flight of the Navigator (1986)

While walking through the woods to pick up his little brother on July 4, 1978, 12-year-old David Freeman stumbles into a canyon and disappears, only to reappear eight years later, having not aged a single day. An experiment by NASA doctors reveals that David was abducted by aliens who took him to a strange planet and used him in part of a scientific experiment on humans. David’s time with the aliens turns out to have more consequences on the future of humanity than previously thought and his adventures with the aliens are far from over.

Directed by Randal Kleiser, Flight of the Navigator has become a cult classic over the years with Disney announcing that its remake is in the works. It was one of the very first Hollywood films to use CGI resulting in impressive visual effects that stand out from other 1980s Sci-Fi films. With its heartwarming themes of friendship and self-discovery, the film remains a beloved favorite among classic film fans.

Time Bandits (1981)

Time Bandits is a Terry Gilliam cult classic that has earned a top spot in the fantasy comedy genre over the years because of its innovative approach to telling a time travel story. The subject of the film is a young history nerd called Kevin who gets caught up with a group of time-traveling dwarves who have stolen a time-space map from their boss known as the Supreme Being. Kevin gets the chance to relive some of his best moments in history including the Napoleonic Wars and the Titanic and also meet legends like Robin Hood and King Agamemnon. However, his fun trip threatens to ruin his life back in 1981 as the stolen map catches the interest of a villain known as Evil.

Time Bandits is one of the best Terry Gilliam films and fans continue to enjoy its witty humor and innovative storytelling despite its moderate IMDB ratings. With its blend of adventure, satire, and philosophical undertones, the film offers a thought-provoking exploration of themes such as greed, mortality, and the nature of reality that still captivates a modern audience.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Directed by Leonard Nimoy, The Voyage Home is one of the most overlooked Star Trek films as far as ratings go, but it features one of the most captivating storylines with unconventional humor that many people are beginning to appreciate. The film follows the crew of the USS Enterprise as they travel back in time to 20th-century Earth to save the planet from an alien probe. This film holds a special place in history as it was dedicated to the crew of The Challenger Space Shuttle.

Environmentalism is at the center of the film’s message as the main story rotates around preventing the villains from contacting Humpback whales which are extinct in the year 2286 when the movie is set. Its modern-sounding themes and engaging storyline make it a standout entry in the series.

Somewhere in Time (1980)

The idea of a romantic relationship that transcends time itself is one of the few things that time travel films and that is exactly what Somewhere in Time brings to life. The film follows Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) who becomes obsessed with the photo of the actress Elise McKenna (Jane Seymour) while residing at The Grand Hotel in Mackinac Island, Michigan. Collier believes that the woman is the love of his life and he must find a way to go back in time to 1912 to be with her. With the help of an old pocket watch and a little self-hypnosis, Collier manages to manifest himself back in time to meet the actress, but their romance isn’t as straightforward as he imagined.

Also starring Christopher Plummer, Somewhere in Time is a timeless romantic classic in which the chemistry between Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve is intoxicating. Seymour later admitted that she fell in love with Reeve on the film set, although they didn’t end up together as is the case with their characters. With its timeless themes of love, longing, and destiny, the film continues to captivate audiences decades after its initial release.

SEE ALSO: 10 Most Underrated Sci-Fi Movies of the 1980s

What 80s time travel movies are worthy of a spot on this list? Let us know on our socials @FlickeringMyth …

Billy Oduory

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Den of Geek

10 Underrated Time Travel Movies

We would say forget the Back to the Future movies, but we included one in here anyway.

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Time travel could be the coolest plot device in the entire circular history of science fiction. Covering dinosaurs to UFOs and everything in between, without it we wouldn’t have Star Trek , Doctor Who , The Terminator , Bill And Ted , or half of all the greatest genre films and TV shows ever made.

But not all time travel movies are created equal. Some are universally loved ( Back To The Future , Donnie Darko ), but others pretty much overlooked altogether liked they’ve slipped between the cracks of a time travel paradox.

If we ever get our hands on a time machine, we’ll use it to go back and drum up support for some of the best time travel movies that didn’t get the credit they deserved. So if you still don’t think Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime is as good as Looper , we’re probably still living in the darkest timeline…

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)

Director Mamoru Hosoda graduated from Digimon: The Movie to this underrated anime classic. The story of a high school girl who stumbles on the power of time travel, it’s mostly all about how much fun a teenager can have with the concept. Instead of using it to go back and stop wars and meet dinosaurs, she uses it to retake her exams and fix an awkward fling – choosing to relive the same 24-hours, Groundhog Day style, until she gets her life right. There’s more to it than that though, and there’s a nice buried message about how you can’t stay a kid forever.

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Watch The Girl Who Leapt Through Time on Amazon

Sound Of My Voice (2012)

Brit Marling was the indie darling of 2011’s Sundance because she had two quirky sci-fis out at the same time. One, Another Earth , got just enough love to go cult, but the other, Sound Of My Voice , came and went without fanfare. Of the two, it’s Marling’s lesser known film that arguably stands up better after a few years in the wilderness – making for one of the most interesting and original takes on the time travel flick so far. Marling plays a cult leader who claims to be from the future and the film follows two documentary directors who set out to expose her. It’s understated and low-fi and very Sundance, but it finds a great new way to come at the genre.

Watch Sound Of My Voice on Amazon

Meet The Robinsons (2007)

Sandwiched between lesser-liked Disney features Chicken Little and Bolt , Meet The Robinsons arrived at a time when the Mouse House was, quite frankly, a bit lousy. Made during Disney’s acquisition of Pixar, the film was half finished when John Lasseter became the chief creative officer, and he reportedly scrapped most of the film and made director Stephen Anderson go back to the drawing board (literally). The result was uneven, at best, but the film has more creative fun with the space-time continuum than most animations that have tried, and the film has a freewheeling, zany approach to storytelling that feels more Looney Tunes than Disney.

Watch Meet The Robinsons on Amazon

Back To The Future Part III (1990)

No one’s favorite Back To The Future movie, Part III was made back-to-back with Part II , and it probably ranks as the world’s most owned, least watched film thanks to the trilogy boxset (alongside Alien 3 , Indy 4 , and Rocky 5 …). In retrospect though, the film is possibly better than Part II (which looks a bit ridiculous now that we’re past 2015), and it stands-up as a fun, retro time-travel adventure in its own right. More B-movie than blockbuster, the film doesn’t try quite as hard as the others but it’s an approach that actually pays off – making it a lighter, brighter sequel than its predecessor. It’s got a great train set piece too.

Watch Back To The Future Part III on Amazon

Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime (1968)

Possibly the best movie about time travel that doesn’t have a gun or a robot or a DeLorean in it, Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime comes from the master of cinematic time hopping – Alain Resnais. Following up more ambiguous experiments with narrative memory like Hiroshima Mon Amour , Last Year At Marienbad , and Muriel , the French master tackled sci-fi head on with the story of a man who volunteers to test a time machine. The experiment goes wrong (obviously) and he’s left skipping through random episodes of his own life. Stan Lee loved it (working with Resnais on two unmade movies), Michel Gondry loved it (citing it as a big influence on Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind ), but it’s still not considered a classic for some reason.

Watch Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime on Amazon

Predestination (2014)

There are only ever two kinds of time travel movies. There are those that take the time to really try and make it all make sense, following each paradox and closing every loophole (see: Primer ), and then there are those that just try to run fast enough so no one notices (see: Edge Of Tomorrow ). The interesting thing about Predestination is that it manages to do both at once – somehow coming off cerebral and dumb at the same time. Similar to Looper in lots of ways, Ethan Hawke does a great job of holding everything together and it’s worth watching as a reminder that The Spierig Brothers actually made a decent film before Jigsaw and Winchester .

Watch Predestination on Amazon Prime

The Amazing Mr. Blunden (1972)

Possibly because it was directed by the same bloke who made the lovely tea-time classic The Railway Children , Lionel Jeffries’ The Amazing Mr. Blunden used to be considered a family film. Bleached of hope in an early ’70s Worzel Gummidge palette, the film makes for a surprisingly chilling ghost story – like a version of Tom’s Midnight Garden with more children burning to death in a house fire. Mixing Henry James horror with a time-skipping kids’ sci-fi story, the film is one of the great cross-overs that manages to fall between the cracks of a dozen different genres. It also ends with the promise of a sequel that we’ve now been waiting almost 50 years for – so watching it now feels like an endlessly looping time-machine in itself.

Watch The Amazing Mr. Blunden on Amazon

Timecrimes (2007)

Nacho Vigalondo ( V/H/S: Viral , Colossal ) made his debut with this ridiculously complicated thriller. The set-up is weird enough – a bloke uses a pair of binoculars to perv on a topless woman, then he gets attacked by man covered in pink bandages before stumbling into a time machine, skipping back an hour – but it gets weirder as the narrative starts tying itself in space-time knots. Sold as horror but surprisingly funny, Vigalondo’s film is perhaps best viewed not as a time travel movie but as an allegory about marriage that’s disturbing but also rather sweet.

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Watch TimeCrimes on Amazon

Time After Time (1979)

There’s no good reason at all why Time After Time isn’t considered a classic. It won a load of awards, it starred Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen, and it’s about HG Wells chasing Jack The Ripper through ’70s San Francisco. Taking liberties with Wells’ legacy and Jack’s infamy, and throwing a sweet love story in for good measure, it’s a terrific fish out of water time-jumper that runs its murder mystery like an antique clock (looks great but doesn’t really work), and looks a bit like a lavish episode of Doctor Who . What’s not to love?

Watch Time After Time on Amazon

Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

The last few years have seen several attempts to quirk-up the genre, ranging from rom-coms like About Time and The Time Traveller’s Wife , to alternate takes like Project Almanac and Midnight In Paris – but the one that managed to feel the most original didn’t really get the credit it deserved. Essentially a mumblecore movie with a time machine, Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass deadpan their way through Colin Trevorrow’s slick little indie to make one of the most endearing, smart and gently overwhelming time travel movies of the modern era. And all it’s really remembered for now is for being the movie that Trevorrow made before Jurassic World .

Watch Safety Not Guaranteed on Amazon

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65’s twist makes the dino-fighting movie just a little more interesting

Adam Driver explains his character, and why he was thinking more about Alien than Jurassic Park

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Adam Driver’s Mills holds up a 3D hologram of his ship while he navigates the prehistoric jungles of Earth in 65

Is a twist a twist if it twists right in the first five minutes of a movie? According to Sony Pictures, yes — which is why marketing for 65 has emphasized the part where Adam Driver fights dinosaurs on a prehistoric planet Earth rather than answering the question of how he got there in the first place. But the truth left me absolutely giddy.

“After a cataclysmic crash on an unknown planet,” reads Sony’s carefully worded plot description for 65 , “pilot Mills (Adam Driver) quickly discovers he’s actually stranded on Earth… 65 million years ago.”

But here is the thing: Mills does not discover that he’s actually stranded on Earth 65 million years ago!

[ Ed. note: The following interview contains spoilers for 65 .]

That’s because Mills has never been to Earth, or even heard of the planet. There is no time travel in 65 ; the pilot’s crash was simply a work accident during a routine shipping mission across the galaxy, coordinated by beings from another planet. Driver isn’t “human” — he’s an alien!

Finding an organic way back to the time of the dinosaurs was a naturally tricky endeavor, according to writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, and even more so when they landed on the idea that Mills would arrive on Earth from an entirely different civilization.

“We needed it to feel grounded,” Beck says of the challenge. “There were wild ideas that were left on the page, like Adam speaking another language, or different facial modifications [to make him look more alien]. But we needed to find a blend where we didn’t lose the audience in the first five minutes. We were always pressure-testing.”

The duo spent a good portion of preproduction on 65 weighing world-building options with production designer Kevin Ishioka. The questions ranged from basic — Has this civilization embraced digital technology, or do they rely on analog? — to the fantastical. At one point, Beck and Woods considered a design of Mills’ galactic freighter that would have been made entirely out of rock, unlike anything the average moviegoer might immediately detect as a spaceship.

“We talked a lot about how the technology in the film should both be at times futuristic — meaning more advanced than our technology — and at other times regressed,” Woods says. “We wanted to run that line between futuristic and retro, a hybrid of ancient and future. That was the benchmark for us.”

Mills (Driver) holds his hand up to Koa (Arianna Greenblatt) telling her to wait to go out a door while he clutches his gun. Koa holds up a finger to say “shh” in 65.

The opening scenes of the film, set on an alien beach speckled with spiraling vertical rock formations, only give us traces of a larger world established in the far reaches of space. The focus is more on Mills’ soul-searching: The only reason he took his shipping job was to earn enough money for a medication that might or might not save his terminally ill daughter. When it all goes wrong (thanks to an ill-timed chunk of space rock that sends his ship spiraling down to Earth, a precursor of a much bigger meteor headed toward the planet), Mills’ fight for survival is immediately pressurized by a need to get home to his child, and to protect another survivor, a young girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), who has also been stranded in the Cretaceous Era.

“We try to show more than explain,” Driver tells Polygon, “but you know what the relationship means to him in his unwillingness to talk, when he’s faced with someone who, in every detail, reminds him of his past.”

Mills isn’t a conventional hero. While Jurassic Park comes up as an obvious sci-fi touchstone for the film, Driver compares Mills to Harry Dean Stanton in Alien . He’s just a blue-collar guy punching a time clock. “It could almost be considered the equivalent to a truck driver. It’s not a planet where being a pilot is foreign to them. There isn’t some kind of hierarchical thing [because he’s an alien]. This is what he does.”

While 65 does get pulpy, Beck and Woods also cite Alien as a way of rooting the potentially far-fetched setup in something real. While they created a new planet and sculpted a world where aliens like Mills ship cryogenically frozen people as cargo, they ultimately take him to a familiar planet, where he faces creatures the audience knows a great deal about already. That meant respecting the known science about dinosaurs while also diving into science fiction.

“We had a Venn diagram, where one circle was all about science,” Woods says, “And then in the other Venn diagram circle, we had Ridley Scott’s Alien , one of the scariest movies ever made. And so we just wanted to kind of combine interesting science and also something that’s frightening.”

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Adam Driver’s new film 65 blasts dinosaurs into extinction. What’s not to love?

This time-travelling sci-fi thriller has massive flop written all over it. Or it could be the greatest piece of cinema ever created

L et’s cast our minds back to early February. This is when Moonfall , Roland Emmerich’s latest sci-fi disaster film, was released to a near-deafening shrug of apathy from the general public. Moonfall cost almost $150m to make, but in the months since its release has only managed to recoup $67m. It is currently the 13th biggest flop in the entire history of cinema (almost certainly).

Moonfall was a film about the moon threatening to plummet out of the sky and crash into Earth. And yet, somehow, the film failed to find an audience. I am telling you this because soon there will be a film about Adam Driver accidentally going back in time and shooting a load of dinosaurs with some sort of space gun. And, by God, we must protect this film with our lives.

The film is called 65 (because dinosaurs lived on Earth until 65 million years ago) and nobody has high hopes for it; not least because many scientists now believe that dinosaurs actually became extinct 66 million years ago, so by rights this should really just be a film about Adam Driver accidentally going back in time and finding a bunch of million-year-old dinosaur corpses.

And yet the 65 trailer was released yesterday and, by God, try to stop yourself from rooting for it. The whole thing looks preposterous: the premise is hokey, the special effects look rubbish, and Adam Driver appears to be capital-A Acting with enough ferocious intensity to make Marriage Story look like Digby the Big Red Dog. But at the same time I sort of want to watch it a hundred times in a row with everyone I’ve ever met.

It helps that 65 has enormous pedigree. As well as Driver being on board, the film is being produced by Sam Raimi, has Danny Elfman as a composer and is written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. Beck and Woods, you’ll remember, wrote A Quiet Place . But they didn’t write A Quiet Place Part II , and given how that turned out you have to assume they were the ones who made the first film good.

So maybe 65, a film where – and let’s be clear – Adam Driver from Marriage Story goes back in time and blasts a ton of dinosaurs in the face with what to all intents and purposes is a laser gun, could beat the odds and become the best film that has ever been made. The trailer certainly suggests that this might be a possibility. It bristles with so much confidence that it doesn’t even bother to hide the plot’s biggest twist. Most trailers would hide the fact that, although he thinks he is on an alien planet, Adam Driver is actually on Earth. Of course they would. That would rob the film of its surprise, gaspworthy ending. But not 65. Within the first two minutes of the trailer, some text pops up onscreen and basically says “Nah, just messing, they’re on Earth”. And you really have to admire chutzpah of that magnitude.

It also helps that Adam Driver has a companion on his quest to, I don’t know, kill all of the dinosaurs in the world. The companion is one of those wide-eyed, near-mute children that sci-fi occasionally likes to fling at us. The child here only has a few lines in the trailer, and they mostly consist of her repeating the last word of whatever Adam Driver has just said to her, which makes her sound a bit like an irreparably traumatised Beastie Boy. Anyway, she barely does anything, which gives Adam Driver lots of opportunities to make the veins in his neck stick out, which is always a visual prompt to help the audience understand that he is doing good acting.

Plus, I really think I was right with that quest thing. The movie is called 65. Not 75. Not 103. It is named after the year when the dinosaurs were wiped from the face of the planet. Call me a crazy dreamer, but I am now convinced that 65 will be a Tarantino-style piece of revisionist history, where Adam Driver murders thousands of dinosaurs to the point of extinction.

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You’d go and see that, wouldn’t you? I would, multiple times. And this is why, while on paper it has “Moonfall-level flop” written all over it, we must all find it within ourselves to make 65 the hit it deserves to be.

Science fiction and fantasy films
Action and adventure films
Adam Driver
A Quiet Place

Screen Rant

65 is not a time travel movie (despite dinosaurs), clarifies adam driver.

65 movie star Adam Driver clarifies that there is no actual time travel in the action-packed sci-fi movie, even though there are dinosaurs.

65 star Adam Driver clarifies that there is no time travel in the movie, even though there are dinosaurs. After playing Kylo Ren in the Star Wars sequel trilogy, Driver makes his return to the science fiction genre in the action-heavy 65 . Coming on the heels of the hugely successful Jurassic World trilogy, 65 tries to tap into the public’s enduring fascination with dinosaurs, by having a heroic Driver do battle with the prehistoric beasts.

Trailers for 65 may make it seem that the film involves a time travel element as well, but Driver just clarified that this is not so, telling Jimmy Fallon that his character does not actually go back in time in the film.

Driver makes his remarks at around 3:20 mark of the above video. Check out the actor’s comments in the space below:

There’s no time travel. It's a parallel universe that they're saying that existed 65 million years ago, and they find that they've crash landed on prehistoric Earth.

Related: Everything We Know About 65

Why 65 Might Be Shying Away From Time Travel

Driver’s explanation for how his astronaut character ends up in a world full of dinosaurs - without employing time travel - may sound like splitting hairs, there being little difference in a practical sense between going backward in time and ending up in a parallel universe. What’s interesting is the deliberate effort being made to let audiences know that 65 is not a time travel movie.

It’s clear from 65 ’s marketing approach that producers want to emphasize the film’s action elements, and downplay the actual science fiction details behind the story. The worry could be that, if potential viewers think time travel is involved, they'll suspect the movie's story is very complicated and potentially confusing, as time travel movies can sometimes become. Driver’s insistence in his Fallon appearance that there’s no time travel in 65 seems like part of an effort to brand the film as a fun PG-13 action movie with dinosaurs, and not a super-complex and possibly even overly scary science fiction film that will require a lot of thinking.

It remains to be seen if audiences get the message, and go out with the kids to see Driver battle dinosaurs. But 65 may have an uphill battle in several ways, not just because audiences are worried about time travel being involved. The title could also be an issue, as it’s not very memorable. It’s also arguable that Driver himself is not a real box office draw, despite having Star Wars on his resume . 65 hits theaters on March 10.

More: 65 Might Be A Risk For Adam Driver (But The Role Makes Sense)

Source: The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

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Chronological List of Dinosaur Movies

Movies or TV
IMDb Rating
In Theaters
Release Year

1. The Primitive Man (1914)

32 min | Short, Adventure, Drama

A primitive tribe are attacked by apemen and menaced by various prehistoric monsters.

Director: D.W. Griffith | Stars: Robert Harron , Mae Marsh , William J. Butler , Wilfred Lucas

2. The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy (1915)

5 min | Comedy, Short, Animation

Three cavemen court Miss Araminta Rockface. She favors the one who apparently slew the Missing Link ... but a dinosaur did the deed.

Director: Willis H. O'Brien

3. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

Approved | 80 min | Horror, Sci-Fi

A ferocious dinosaur awakened by an Arctic atomic test terrorizes the North Atlantic and, ultimately, New York City.

Director: Eugène Lourié | Stars: Paul Hubschmid , Paula Raymond , Cecil Kellaway , Kenneth Tobey

Votes: 8,704 | Gross: $5.00M

4. The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956)

Approved | 79 min | Horror, Romance, Sci-Fi

An American cowboy living in Mexico discovers his cattle are being eaten by a giant prehistoric dinosaur.

Directors: Edward Nassour , Ismael Rodríguez | Stars: Guy Madison , Patricia Medina , Carlos Rivas , Mario Navarro

Votes: 1,874

5. The Animal World (1956)

Approved | 82 min | Documentary, Animation, History

A documentary showcasing the world's many different animal species, both past and present.

Director: Irwin Allen | Stars: Theodore von Eltz , John Storm

6. The Giant Behemoth (1959)

Not Rated | 80 min | Horror, Sci-Fi

Marine atomic tests cause changes in the ocean's ecosystem resulting in dangerous blobs of radiation and the resurrection of a dormant dinosaur that threatens London.

Director: Eugène Lourié | Stars: Gene Evans , André Morell , John Turner , Leigh Madison

Votes: 2,898

7. Creature of Destruction (1968)

Unrated | 80 min | Horror, Sci-Fi

A hypnotist is able to predict murders by a terrifying sea monster. In reality, he causes the murders through his lovely assistant, who is the reincarnation of the monster.

Director: Larry Buchanan | Stars: Les Tremayne , Pat Delaney , Aron Kincaid , Neil Fletcher

8. Destroy All Monsters (1968)

G | 88 min | Action, Adventure, Horror

At the end of the 20th century, all of Earth's monsters have been safely rounded up and sent to Monsterland for scientific study. Chaos erupts when a race of she-aliens known as the Kilaaks unleashes the monsters on the world.

Directors: Ishirô Honda , Jun Fukuda | Stars: Akira Kubo , Jun Tazaki , Yukiko Kobayashi , Yoshio Tsuchiya

Votes: 7,511

9. Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969)

Not Rated | 2 min | Animation, Short, Comedy

Bambi is contentedly nibbling the grass, seemingly unaware of his impending encounter with Godzilla. What will happen when the two finally meet?

Director: Marv Newland

Votes: 6,463

10. The Crater Lake Monster (1977)

PG | 85 min | Adventure, Crime, Fantasy

A meteor that crashed into Oregon's Crater Lake unearths a dinosaur egg. The heat from the meteor causes the egg to hatch, and the emerging dinosaur takes to snacking on the locals.

Director: William R. Stromberg | Stars: Richard Cardella , Glen Roberts , Mark Siegel , Bob Hyman

Votes: 1,684

11. The Last Dinosaur (1977)

Not Rated | 106 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

A wealthy big game hunter and his group become trapped in prehistoric times where they are stalked by a ferocious dinosaur.

Directors: Alexander Grasshoff , Tsugunobu Kotani | Stars: Richard Boone , Joan Van Ark , Steven Keats , Luther Rackley

12. Caveman (1981)

PG | 91 min | Comedy, Romance

A caveman seeks revenge on a much larger competitor for the hand of a beautiful cavewoman.

Director: Carl Gottlieb | Stars: Ringo Starr , Dennis Quaid , Shelley Long , Jack Gilford

Votes: 8,582 | Gross: $15.97M

13. WarGames (1983)

PG | 114 min | Action, Drama, Sci-Fi

A young man finds a back door into a military central computer in which reality is confused with game-playing, possibly starting World War III.

Director: John Badham | Stars: Matthew Broderick , Ally Sheedy , John Wood , Dabney Coleman

Votes: 110,397 | Gross: $79.57M

14. Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (1985)

PG | 95 min | Adventure, Family, Sci-Fi

A paleontologist and her husband discover a mother and baby brontosaurus in Africa, and try to protect them from a group of hunters intent on capturing the dinosaurs.

Director: Bill Norton | Stars: William Katt , Sean Young , Patrick McGoohan , Julian Fellowes

Votes: 3,499 | Gross: $14.97M

15. Dinosaur! (1985 TV Movie)

60 min | Documentary

Everything you want to know about dinosaurs.

Director: Robert Guenette | Stars: Christopher Reeve , Robert Bakker , Philip Currie , John Horner

16. Dennis the Menace (1987 TV Movie)

G | 118 min | Family, Comedy

The lives of young Dennis Mitchell, his family, and friends are turned upside down after he finds a dinosaur bone in his backyard and it catches of the attention of a famous paleontologist.

Director: Doug Rogers | Stars: William Windom , Jim Jansen , Patricia Estrin , Patsy Garrett

17. Adventures in Dinosaur City (1991)

PG | 88 min | Adventure, Family, Fantasy

A scientist's kids are sucked into a TV screen and wind up in the Stone Age with cavemen and dinosaurs.

Director: Brett Thompson | Stars: Marc Martorana , Tony Doyle , R.A. Mihailoff , Don Barnes

Votes: 1,237

18. Carnosaur (1993)

R | 83 min | Horror, Sci-Fi

A genetically manipulated and very hungry dinosaur escapes from a bioengineering company and wreaks havoc on the local desert town. A security guard and a girl environmentalist try to stop both it and the company's doomsday bioweapon.

Directors: Adam Simon , Darren Patrick Moloney | Stars: Diane Ladd , Raphael Sbarge , Jennifer Runyon , Harrison Page

Votes: 4,351 | Gross: $1.75M

19. Carnosaur 2 (1995)

R | 83 min | Action, Horror, Sci-Fi

A team of scientists go to a nuclear mining facility to investigate a possible meltdown and instead find a large amount of cloned dinosaurs.

Director: Louis Morneau | Stars: John Savage , Cliff De Young , Don Stroud , Rick Dean

Votes: 2,238

20. Carnosaur 3: Primal Species (1996)

R | 85 min | Action, Horror, Sci-Fi

International terrorists get a surprise when their cargo turns out to contain living dinosaurs. The army commando team now have to think fast, if they want to prevent the extinction of the human species, instead of the reptiles.

Director: Jonathan Winfrey | Stars: Rob Camilletti , Stephen Lee , Cyril O'Reilly , Scott Valentine

Votes: 2,062

21. Barney's Great Adventure (1998)

G | 76 min | Adventure, Comedy, Drama

A talking purple dinosaur leads a group of children on a hunt for a large missing egg.

Director: Steve Gomer | Stars: George Hearn , Shirley Douglas , Trevor Morgan , Alan Fawcett

Votes: 3,635 | Gross: $11.14M

22. Dinosaur (2000)

PG | 82 min | Animation, Adventure, Drama

An orphaned dinosaur raised by lemurs joins an arduous trek to a sanctuary after a meteorite shower destroys his family home.

Directors: Eric Leighton , Ralph Zondag | Stars: D.B. Sweeney , Julianna Margulies , Samuel E. Wright , Alfre Woodard

Votes: 67,018 | Gross: $137.75M

23. The Dinosaur Hunter (2000 TV Movie)

82 min | Adventure, Drama

A 13-year-old girl and her older brother live on a farm where paleontologists search for fossils.

Director: Rick Stevenson | Stars: Wendy Anderson , Russell Badger , Alan Bratt , Joely Collins

24. Dinosaur Hunters (1996 TV Movie)

Documentary

More than 80 million years ago, the Oviraptor, a strange bird-like dinosaur, walked the sandy banks of an oasis in what is now the "Gobi in Mongolia." A creature that measured some 8 feet ... See full summary »

Stars: Michael Carroll , Glen Gould , Roy Chapman Andrews , Mark Norell

25. The Dinosaur Hunters (2002 TV Movie)

Not Rated | 120 min | Biography, Drama

One man who kept asking questions was Gideon Mantell, the amateur paleontologist who, in the early 19th century, fought to get the British scientific establishment to accept Britain had ... See full summary »

Director: Andrew Piddington | Stars: Henry Ian Cusick , Paul Brightwell , Michelle Bunyan , Alan Cox

26. Dinocroc (2004)

R | 90 min | Action, Adventure, Comedy

After an African dinosaur ancestor of the crocodile is found, Dr. Campbell uses its DNA to create prototypes at Paula Kennedy's Gereco lab.

Director: Kevin O'Neill | Stars: Costas Mandylor , Charles Napier , Bruce Weitz , Matt Borlenghi

Votes: 2,018

27. Anonymous Rex (2004 TV Movie)

Unrated | 89 min | Action, Comedy, Sci-Fi

Failed TV pilot about an alternate present day reality where a dinosaur society secretly co-exists with humans using futuristic cloaking technology. Two dinosaur private detectives investigate a murder connected to a strange dinosaur cult.

Director: Julian Jarrold | Stars: Sam Trammell , Daniel Baldwin , Stephanie Lemelin , Tamara Gorski

28. Tyrannosaurus Azteca (2007)

Not Rated | 86 min | Action, Adventure, Comedy

A band of 16th century conquistadors must fight for their lives when they realize they're going to be served as sacrifices to a god-like T-Rex.

Director: Brian Trenchard-Smith | Stars: Ian Ziering , Marco Sanchez , Kalani Queypo , Dichen Lachman

Votes: 1,080

29. Dinosaur Hunters! (2008)

15 min | Short

A class of second graders go to the dinosaur museum. One curious little girl thinks she sees something and... the chase is on! In her search for a little green dinosaur, that teases and ... See full summary »

Director: John Arthur Little | Stars: Jack Horner , Elizabeth Little

30. 100 Million BC (2008 Video)

R | 85 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

A scientist leads a team of Navy SEALs back in time to the Cretaceous Period to rescue the first team he sent back during the 1940s. Things go wildly when he accidentally brings a giant dinosaur back into Los Angeles.

Director: Griff Furst | Stars: Michael Gross , Christopher Atkins , Greg Evigan , Marie Westbrook

Votes: 4,771

31. Dinocroc vs. Supergator (2010 TV Movie)

Not Rated | 87 min | Action, Adventure, Comedy

Created in the laboratories of a biotech corporation, two ravenous mega-reptiles level everything in their way. Now, three defenders must try to save the day. Who shall live and who shall die in the battle between Dinocroc and Supergator?

Director: Jim Wynorski | Stars: David Carradine , Rib Hillis , Amy Holt , John Callahan

Votes: 2,215

32. Adhisaya Ulagam (2012)

Adventure, Sci-Fi

Director: Shakthi Scott | Stars: Livingston , Sreelakshmy N. Nair , Mannan Prithiv Raj , Anandha Kannan

33. Back to the Jurassic (2012)

PG | 86 min | Animation, Adventure, Comedy

Three kids who travel back in time to 65 million years ago, where they are taken in by a dinosaur.

Directors: Yoon-suk Choi , John Kafka | Stars: Melanie Griffith , Jane Lynch , William Baldwin , Stephen Baldwin

Votes: 1,673

34. Cowboys vs Dinosaurs (2015 TV Movie)

Not Rated | 89 min | Action, Adventure, Horror

After an accidental explosion at a local mine, dinosaurs emerge from the rubble to terrorize a small western town. Now, a group of gunslingers must defend their home if anyone is going to survive in a battle of cowboys versus dinosaurs.

Director: Ari Novak | Stars: Eric Roberts , Rib Hillis , Casey Fitzgerald , Vernon Wells

Votes: 1,635

35. Dinosaur! (2009)

2 min | Animation, Short, Action

Lava People, talking skyscrapers, smiling suns, and oh yeah, a very destructive dinosaur.

Directors: Stephen Spector , Courtney Smith , Sindy Wilson | Star: Kenny Farino

36. Dinosaur (1998)

Short, Adventure

A short film setting up the dinosaur attraction ride at Walt Disney's Animal Kingdom.

Director: Jerry Rees

37. Dinosaur (I) (2011)

77 min | Animation

Directors: Jason Stamp , The Tilford Brothers

38. Dinosaur (1975)

67 min | Drama

While a near-future Britain is paralysed by a general strike, an experimental theatre group continue touring.

Director: Tony Bicât | Stars: Ann Engel , Will Knightley , Denis Lawson , Stephen Whittaker

39. Dinosaur (1980)

14 min | Animation, Short

Director: Will Vinton | Star: Michele Mariana

40. Dinosaur (1993)

Animation, Short

Director: Sarah Watt

41. Dinosaur (2006)

21 min | Short, Crime, Drama

Director: James Branscome | Stars: Ron Barr , James Branscome , Aaron Curtis , James DeHaven

42. Dinosaur (II) (2011)

14 min | Short, Drama, Mystery

Seth's search for his missing sister uncovers a haunting secret from the past.

Director: Jonathan Frey | Stars: Rachael Bean , Jacob McManus , Nathan Templet

43. Dinosaur (2011 Video)

16 min | Short, Comedy

A sexually frustrated dinosaur combats his primal desires when he meets a wholesome young lady who could change his self-centered ways.

Director: Clayton Williamson | Stars: W. Scott Parker III , Shelley Bassett , June Dare , Laura DeBar

44. Dinosaur (2013)

21 min | Short, Comedy, Drama

Government employee Bu Mansour strives to change his job title before his retirement.

Director: Meqdad Al-Kout

45. Magic in the Water (1995)

PG | 101 min | Adventure, Family, Fantasy

Two siblings find out about a mythical aquatic monster and try to a save a remote Canadian lake from being used as a dump site for toxic waste.

Director: Rick Stevenson | Stars: Mark Harmon , Harley Jane Kozak , Joshua Jackson , Sarah Wayne

Votes: 2,117 | Gross: $2.64M

46. Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)

Not Rated | 12 min | Animation, Short, Comedy

The cartoonist, Winsor McCay, brings the Dinosaurs back to life in the figure of his latest creation, Gertie the Dinosaur.

Director: Winsor McCay | Stars: Winsor McCay , George McManus , Roy L. McCardell , Thomas A. 'Tad' Dorgan

Votes: 3,644

47. The Dinosaur Project (2012)

PG-13 | 83 min | Action, Adventure, Drama

A British expedition formed by the lead researcher Jonathan Marchant, his assistant, a doctor and a TV crew, travels to Congo to seek evidence of a dinosaur.

Director: Sid Bennett | Stars: Richard Dillane , Peter Brooke , Matt Kane , Natasha Loring

Votes: 5,842

48. A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (1990)

Not Rated | 82 min | Fantasy, Horror, Sci-Fi

In a post-Armageddon world, a young woman finds herself in a fight for survival against mutant cavemen, dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals.

Director: Brett Piper | Stars: Paul Guzzi , Linda Corwin , Alex Pirnie , Mark Deshaies

Votes: 1,786

49. A Plastic Toy Dinosaur (2006)

10 min | Short, Drama

Morgan, a 9 year old boy is picked up by his absentee father, Rod for his weekly visit. By the end of the day, Morgan has realised that his dad is just as fragile and immature as himself, ... See full summary »

Director: Benjamin Bee | Stars: Benjamin Bee , Penelope Granycome , Dan Mersh , Ainsley Mitchell

50. March of the Dinosaurs (2011 TV Movie)

87 min | Documentary, Animation, Drama

Set 70 million years ago in the Cretaceous period in North America, this animated documentation/drama follows the journey of a young Edmontosaurus named Scar and his herd as they migrate ... See full summary »

Director: Matthew Thompson | Stars: Stephen Fry , Simon Kerr

51. Massacre in Dinosaur Valley (1985)

Unrated | 88 min | Action, Adventure, Horror

A small plane carrying fossil hunters crashes in the Amazon jungle, and the survivors must battle their way through cannibals, wild animals, and slave traders.

Director: Michele Massimo Tarantini | Stars: Michael Sopkiw , Suzane Carvalho , Milton Rodríguez , Marta Anderson

Votes: 2,407

52. The Dinosaur Hunter (2000 TV Movie)

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1 The Undead (1957)

2 Detention (2011)

3 65 (2023)

4 Synchronic (2019)

5 Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)

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