The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Alternate Timelines concerns itself with alternate possibilities of how the present may have transpired. These differ from Alternate History Films, which are concerned itself with alternate outcomes of historical events. Alternate Timelines take place on a personal level and tell how the events of an individual’s life may have transpired differently had a crucial event been changed or they made a different decision at some point in the past.
There are also various stories that show individual pasts changed as a result of time travel. Also popular particularly on tv have been Mirror Universe stories that show dark and very different versions of familiar characters.
In the 2020s, the Multiverse idea has gained a good deal of traction – for effective purposes, the multiverse is no more than an Alternate Timeline that is regarded as a physical place and the universe is regarded as having an infinitely possible number of such timelines. In the late 2010s, theidea of the multiverse has been co-opted by the superhero film where it essentially means a different take on established characters.
The third of the films devoted to Marvel’s miniature superhero. This ventures into multiverse themes works well when it comes to introducing the MCU’s big new super-villain who ended up never happening
Passable B-budget 1990s direct-to-video sf/action film about robots and humans warring across time that develops out an interesting plot about a changed timeline
Excellent low-key time travel film where Judy Greer is faced with the choice of eliminating the drunk driver who killed her husband from the timeline – only to end up with unexpected results
This was a huge hit at the time and has become one of the most indisputable pop culture artifacts of its era. The film takes a clever time travel plot and infuses it with an effortless energy to prove a considerable winner
The first of the Back to the Future sequels has a whiplash ingenuity that propels us through several different scenarios, including a trip to the future, a dark alternate present and requiring Michael J. Fox to duck unseen in and around the margins of the first film
Third of the Back to the Future films, which takes everything back in time to the Old West. Probably the slightest of the trilogy, this nevertheless goes out with a rousing farewell
Luigi Cozzi’s return to screens after 26 years, a head-scratchingly bizarre effort overloaded with ideas about parallel worlds, cosmic journeys and homage to the early cinema of Georges Melies and others
Low-budget but not uninteresting film that throws in a mind-bending mix of aliens, dream and alternate realities
Ben Wheatley has gained a cult following in recent years with films like Kill List and High Rise. Here he sets out to make a deliberately low-tech multiverse film that becomes a real head-scratcher
This was dismissed at the time because of its star Ashton Kutcher but is a surprisingly good film in which Kutcher finds the ability to travel back in time and alter his past
The Butterfly Effect was not a film set up for a sequel but we get one here anyway with a different person flipping back in time to change his rather dull and uninteresting life
A South Korean film that remakes The Caller about a girl who finds she can make phone calls across time to another woman only to find that the caller is a psychopath who begins to wreak havoc with her timeline
A horror version of Frequency where Rachelle Lefevre has phone conversations across time with a disturbed woman who then starts causing people to disappear and altering the timeline. Cleverly told and with some chilling twists
Another cheap Disney made-for-video-release sequel. This at least offers the novelty of an alternate retelling of Cinderella but everything transpires predictably
The third of J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield films. This is set on a space station thing and has an alternate timeline plot but seems disinterested in little more than creating a bizarre effect every few minutes
Fascinating conceptual SF film about a dinner party where people find they are dealing with multiple alternate versions of themselves where minute choices have been made differently. The film twists and turns into an immensely satisfyingly pretzel
Modest and clever venture on the alternate worlds theme where an average student is dragged into a war for the multiverse after meeting a strange woman at a party
The first sequel to Vincenzo Natali’s fine conceptual puzzlebox film. This expands out on the idea, having a cube that bends through time and space, and has a certain fascination if not as much as the original did
In his third cinematic outing, Deadpool gets into the multiverse game, creating a hilarious team-up with Wolverine and a crossover with an assortment of other cancelled Marvel franchises
Alex Garland directed-written tv mini-series that grasps at big ideas about the meaning of it all concerning a computer that can track every particle and predict past and future. This emerges as one of the finest SF work of the last few years
Extraordinary anime where the members of an after school club secretly harbour great powers. From there, this expands out with reality-bending scope
We’ve all heard the theory that we might be living in The Matrix. This asks the question of what happens when it is announced that the simulation is being shut down
Robert Redford plays a scientist who finds proof of the existence of the afterlife only to then face a worldwide rash of suicides. From the director of the fascinatingly weird The One I Love
Doctor Strange was one of the better MCU films. Here Sam Raimi takes over in the director’s chair. This readily delves into multiverse themes but requires a major crash course in a plethora of Marvel tv series to follow
A thoroughly overrated cult classic. A baffling mixture of precognition, time travel, sinister talking bunnies and 1980s satire. What this doesn’t do is ever fall together into a coherent explanation about what is going on
The rarity of a summer blockbuster with smarts – think Groundhog Day reworked by way of Battle Los Angeles. The timeloop idea is dealt with in clever ways making for an action film driven by an original sf story
A multiverse comedy in which Michelle Yeoh is propelled through an hilarious series of alternate selves. One of the most mind-spinning films of recent viewing. Also the first SF film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture
A film made by a 17 year-old from Norway. This has more ideas – mystery mass disappearances, doppelgangers from alternate timelines – than it is capable of coherently relaying
Brett Ratner conducts a likeable variation on It’s a Wonderful Life with banker Nicolas Cage suddenly finding himself in an alternate life as a regular working class man with wife and kids
Brian De Palma makes a return to the classic psycho-thrillers where he made his name, shouting virtuoso directorial flourish from the rafters and pulling off an amazingly contrived plot
Despite a poor box-office performance and a troubled production behind the scenes, it is a surprise what a good film this is, easily outstripping the last half-dozen MCU films put together
Intelligent and well written film where freak weather conditions allow a son to communicate with his late father by radio across thirty years in time. Where the film starts to get interesting is when this creates unexpected changes in the present
The parallel worlds/alternate timelines theme is one rich in possibilities but this Australian film is one of the least imaginative treatments, serving up only tired good/bad double plots
The eighteenth Godzilla film and one of the best of the modern era. This has the most conceptually audacious plot of any Godzilla film and overflows with wild ideas involving time travel and changing the timeline
A Canadian film about a gay man returning home and revisiting his childhood after ten years away that ends up in a weird series of parallel realities
Happy Death Day seemed a gimmicky marriage between Groundhog Day and a slasher film. This sequel is a far better film that places some funny and quite clever spins on the previous film
Released for the fiftieth anniversary of the Manson Killings, this details the attacks on Sharon Tate by the Manson Family. The film expands on the claim that Tate had a precognitive dream about what was going to happen
An ingenious mockumentary about the development of a time travel machine. This takes place as a ‘documentary’ discussing the invention but the cleverness is in seeing how small details keep changing in the background
Why we needed a sequel to Hot Tub Time Machine is a big question. Essentially, Back to the Future Part II meets The Hangover, all this does is wind the original’s amiable coarseness up by a factor of ten
South Korean film that replays the same story three times with slight differences, all featuring Isabelle Huppert as a different woman. Told with a rather charming sense of humour and a playful meta-fiction
TV mini-series that adapts six less well known short stories by H.G. Wells into an anthology with Wells as the central character. A couple of good stories, some that never hit the mark
An interesting film shot during Covid lockdown, all filmed on an IPhone, about a woman caught in a timeloop where she keeps repeating through various scenarios
An alternate world take on DC Comics continuity where Superman snaps and creates a totalitarian police state and the other DC superheroes come together to stop him
Sentimental Frank Capra film that had become a Christmas classic where an angel shows depressed everyman James Stewart the alternate world that would happen if he had never been born
The last few years have seen the slasher film conduct some odd conceptual crosshatches – this offers a mash-up between a slasher film and It’s a Wonderful Life
An animated film adaptation of Crisis on Infinite Earths, one of the classic DC Comics titles of all time. With superhero films now obsessed with multiverses, this seems the perfect time to bring it to the screen
The third and final part of the adaptation of DC Comics’ classic title Crisis on Infinite Earths featuring an epic battle to prevent the destruction of the multiverse
The second part of the epic three film animated adaptation of the classic DC Comics title Crisis on Infinite Earths concerning a battle across the DC multiverse
Second of the Bruce Timm animated films based on DC’s Justice League, this has been construed as a Mirror Universe take that pits the Justice League up against villainous versions of themselves
An alternate world take on DC Comics characters, who are much more morally ambiguous – Superman is General Zod’s son and Batman’s role is taken by Man-Bat and is an actual vampire
A strong, intelligent DC Universe animated film set in an alternate timeline where the histories of various familiar DC characters have turned out radically different
B-budget action film in which C. Thomas Howell is caught up in a chase when an escaped criminal from an alternate timeline abducts his wife.
Dramatised film based on the popular conspiracy theory that people are living in an alternate timeline where their memories have been edited and that we are all living in a simulation a la The Matrix
An Australian variant on Sliding Doors in which single woman Rachel Griffiths suddenly finds herself in an alternate timeline where she is now married and has kids
An extremely clever romantic comedy where Kaley Cuoco repeatedly returns back through time to replay her one perfect day, a date with Pete Davidson
Anime based on an autobiographical manga that leaps off into a variety of styles and comes filled with madcap surrealistic visuals
Intelligent and absorbing thriller where a freak storm allows a woman to communicate with the past only to inadvertently create a new timeline where her life is very different
A variant on It’s a Wonderful Life where James Belushi gets to live the life he never did due to missing a key baseball homerun
Jaco Van Dormael film that reaches for epic ideas in a story about multiple life pathways and a babble of ideas taken from physics but fails to assemble them in a way that makes much sense
Solid time travel film about a man who struggles to find a way back to his love as her ex keeps changing the timeline so she doesn’t leave him
A batshit crazy film involving Nostradamus who is a present-day cop, a time travelling assassin trying to bring about the Biblical Apocalypse at The Millennium, plus alternate timelines and a psychic FBI agent
Promising idea of an alternate world-hopping film from James Wong, this spends too much time copying moves from The Matrix and lets most of its possibilities pass by
From Isaac Ezban in his English-language debut, a cleverly and pleasingly contorted film where a group of friends discover a mirror that leads to a parallel timeline
A variation on the multiverse film where Danielle Deadwyler enters a forest portal and returns to realities where the details of her life vary in minute but increasingly alarming ways
Smart and fascinating venture into the alternate universe hopping theme that suggests something of what the underwhelming Sliders should have been. Originally made as the pilot for a tv series, this comes with much intriguing backstory set-up for a potential series
Brazilian-made variant on the alternate timelines film showing three very different outcomes of the lives of a man and a woman after a date
A zero expectation film that turns out to be surprisingly good. Falling somewhere between Primer and Chronicle, this does a reasonable job of showing its time travel device in action and the unintended consequences
An Argentinean film where the four members of a girl rock band are forced to deal with a zombie outbreak
One of the rare cinematic ventures into alternate history, a British film adapted from a story by John Wyndham. This holds up as a fair and reasonable alternate history outing, driven by a strong and original romantic story
BBC tv play adaptation of a short story by John Wyndham that also furnished the earlier film Quest for Love about a man finding himself in an alternate world. Despite this version being more faithful to Wyndham, the earlier film makes the central relationship work better
A strong and intelligent multiverse film filled with some great twists where a woman travels across multiple worlds to track down and kill different versions of the man who murdered her daughter
Unusual fantasy film where a woman is allowed to replay the last year again and tries to prevent it ending in her shooting her husband
Groundhog Day with drug addicts – a familiar timeloop scenario that makes for a reasonable story about redemption and reconciliation
Cheaply made video sequel to the Macaulay Culkin Richie Rich based on the popular comic-book character, this steals the basic plot of It’s a Wonderful Life
Tom Tykwer’s visually inventive variant on the alternate timelines theme with Franka Potente trying to replay events to save her boyfriend’s life
This is a wholly unnecessary sequel to Donnie Darko, featuring the same bafflingly inexplicable time-blurring things happening to his sister but without the same culty weirdness
Third of the Santa Clause films starring Tim Allen as Santa where his reality is upended by the evil Jack Frost
A comedy about a guy who obtains a time travel device and uses it to go back and try to prevent his girlfriend breaking up with him
Variant on the alternate world hopping theme where a bounty hunter finds the person he is pursuing is an alternate world criminal. The film’s budget is way too low to do any justice to either the theme or the setting after the collapse of civilisation
A unique film about a seamstress who is wound up in a drug deal gone wrong and improvises solutions with her needle and thread. Like Run Lola Run, this rewinds to offer very different versions of events
The fourth of the Shrek films. By this point, the freshness and originality of the first film has been buried under animated film formula, while the plot is a tired rehash of It’s a Wonderful Life
Popular Gwyneth Paltrow hit that spawned a series of films that follow a woman’s alternate life pathways
The second film from Duncan Jones, this places Jake Gyllenhaal through a Groundhog Day scenario as he is forced to relive the same eight minutes in order to find who planted a bomb on a train
The animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse proved an unexpected success. This sequel builds on that ups the artistic quality of the original to something quite extraordinary
Sony, the holders of the Spider-Man copyright, squeeze more out of the property with a madcap animated offering that mixes up a host of alternate takes on Spider-Man in what visually resembles an explosion at a pop art exhibition
Sony’s Spider-Man franchise ingeniously competes with Marvel’s shared universe by bringing all their previous incarnations of Spider-Man together
J.J. Abrams revives the Star Trek franchise by recasting it with younger faces and rewriting continuity. But in the appeal to a hipper, sexier vibe, it feels a long way from Gene Roddenberry’s creation – nowhere in evidence is the original’s concern with galactic politics and social issues of the day
I had mixed feelings about J.J. Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek This time around the actors seem more at home in the characters and the plot works a good deal better (for the most part), while Abrams creates a hurtling effects spectacle that is the most action-oriented of the Trek films
An ambitious film reminiscent of Twelve Monkeys, this has a time traveller venturing into the past and a conceptual jigsaw as he intersects with and has to hide in the margins of events in his own timeline
Tales from the Hood was the novelty of an African-American made horror anthology. 23 years later the principal talents (including producer Spike Lee) reunite for a sequel
Here the less-than-serious Teen Titans Go! conduct an Into the Spider-Verse-type crossover with their serious counterparts from the multiverse
A hodgepodge of competing elements – an aging Arnold Schwarzenegger, a soft reboot, alternate timelines, reintroduction of the familiar, twists to the familiar – that make no sense on a narrative level, least of all come anywhere near what James Cameron delivered back in the first two films
South Korean film that borrows the premise of the film Frequency in having two characters separated across twenty years have clairvoyant dreams of the other’s life and combining forces to stop a killer
Film featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme as a temporal police officer. While you expect another time travel action film, this has quite a deal more sophistication in the scripting department than you expect
Sequel to Timecop with more of an action emphasis as Jason Scott Lee replacing Jean-Claude Van Damme trying to stop a criminal who is erasing agents from the timeline.
A time travel film produced by Christopher Landon that has a number of similarities to Totally Killer in which a girl travels back in time to 2003 to prevent her sister being murdered by a serial killer
Multiverse films are all the in-thing in superhero films right now. This anime is a treatment of multiverse themes far away from superheroics that works beautifully in its sophistication of ideas
Predating Sliding Doors, this hard-boiled Hong Kong gangster film from Wong Kar-wai did the whole alternate timelines theme first
A Blumhouse production that ends up being a smart conceptual mash-up between Back to the Future and Halloween
An impressive line-up of genre names came together for this big event mini-series that sets out to offer a conclusive explanation for the Bermuda Triangle in a plot that juggles an entertaining stew of wild ideas involving timewarps, alternate timelines and government cover-ups