Ars Technica rates 20 time travel movies by entertainment and scientific plausibility.
What modern science has to say about time travel can be summed up thusly: You can travel to the future, but you probably can’t travel to the past, although to be honest, we’re not really sure.
Their list includes a personal favorite of mine: “Time After Time” (1979), starring Malcolm McDowell as time-traveling H.G. Wells, Mary Steenburgen as his plucky feminist 1970s galpal and David Warner as Jack the Ripper.
The IMDB trivia page for “Time After Time” does not disappoint.
All four of the real H.G. Wells’ children were still alive at the time of this film’s release.
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Malcolm McDowell listened to recordings of H.G. Wells to prepare for the role. According to him, Wells’ voice was high-pitched and Cockney-accented, so he decided not to imitate
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The movie’s title inspired Cyndi Lauper’s song “Time After Time”, when in 1983 she browsed through a copy of TV Guide for “imaginary song titles”.
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A deleted scene featured Wells meeting a punk who was playing extremely loud boom-box music on a bus in San Francisco. [Director] Nicholas Meyer later reused this idea in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986).
Much of the action of “Time After Time” takes place in the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, as do a few scenes in Mel Brooks’ “High Anxiety.” I stayed in the same hotel in 2017; it hadn’t changed much, other than becoming deliciously dark and gloomy. A monument to 70s futurism.
One quibble with the Ars Technica list. Authors Jennifer Ouellette and Sean M. Carroll rightly praise the first Christoper Reeve “Superman,” including Gene Hackman’s “marvelous selection of outrageous wigs,” but add:
We’re knocking off a point for the cheesy “Read My Mind” spoken song as Superman takes Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) on a romantic flight over Metropolis, which has aged poorly.
No, that scene did not “age poorly.” It was always terrible. It was cringe in 1978 and it is cringe today.
Now I want to see “Superman” again, to enjoy Hackman, Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine hamming it up as villains.