The Best Time Travel Movies That Aren’t From Major Franchises

I expect to get a lot of grief for this one, and that’s understandable. With its RottenTomatoes ranking currently sitting at 55% fresh, Deja Vu is not generally considered a very good movie. Nor am I going to argue that it is.

What it does have, however, is some very clever ideas about how time travel could be used. The story follows an ATF agent, Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington), tasked with investigating a violent domestic terrorist attack in New Orleans.

Soon, Carlin is recruited by a secretive government task force that reveals something amazing: they have created a “time window” that allows them to see any events, but only as they occurred exactly four days, six hours, three minutes, 45 seconds, and 14.5 nanoseconds in the past. With this device, they hope to learn who planned the attack and prevent another one.

Things get even more complicated when Doug discovers that the time window can do more than simply show the past: inanimate objects can pass through it, potentially allowing them to alter the past.

Doug then begins pursuing the culprit in the present by tracking him through the past, eventually leading to a climax that, like many time travel stories, wraps back inward on itself and swallows its own tail.

Sadly, the produced movie isn’t nearly as good as the script by Terry Rossio and Bill Marsilii, but some of the ideas make it well worth at least one watch.