If you had the means to travel in time, where would you go? The past, or the future? For so long, filmmakers have wondered this same question, with more time travel movies than you can count. At least some of them happen to be - ahem, timeless classics. While time travel has existed in the human imagination for centuries, with examples found in Hindu and Islamic mythologies, our modern understanding of time travel begins with early science fiction tales.
Stories like The Year 2440 by French author Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, and The Time Machine by H.G. Wells are some of the earliest and most popular uses of time travel in sci-fi.
It should be no surprise that as soon as humans invented moving pictures, time travel became a recurring genre. (This is not to be confused with time loop movies, in which stories involve a set and finite time frame that "loop" back and start all over again.) Whether it's to prevent catastrophes or just fall in love, filmmakers have obsessed over time travel as a story device to explore what it really means to be human.
With so many time travel movies to choose from, here are 32 of the greatest time travel movies ever made. 32. The Time Machine (1960) It should be no surprise that the first feature film adaptation of H.
G. Wells' seminal science fiction novella The Time Machine also qualifies as one of the best time travel movies ever made. Rod Taylor stars as a scientist inventor, also named "H.
George Wells," whos.