41 film time travel

41 Movie Explained (2012 Film Plot And Ending Analysis)

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Hi, this is Barry, and welcome to my site. 41 is a 2012 time-travel movie written and directed by Glenn Triggs made with a teeny tiny budget . The plot is centred on a man whose life gets turned upside down when he lands up at a motel to discover a hole in the bathroom floor that takes him back through time. A big thank you to many of my readers for recommending this movie to me. There’s a lot going on in this film, so I’ve created a timeline diagram to help with the plot-walkthrough. Here’s the plot analysis and the ending of the 2012 time-travel movie 41 explained, spoilers ahead.

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41 Movie: Full Film

Here are links to the key aspects of the movie:

• – Timeline Diagram
• – Timeline-1 (Prime Timeline)
• – Timeline-2
• – Timeline-3
• – Timeline-4
• – Timeline-5
• – How is Patient X a Lawyer in that diner scene?
• – Timeline-6
• – Ending Explained
• – Who is the manager at Heathscape motel?
• – Is Lauren saved, or is she dead?

Before we begin, we need to establish the rules of time travel in the movie 41. When one goes back in time, they leave their own timeline and land up in the past by 12 hours in one of many parallel universes (a.k.a timelines). This is similar to the time travel in Avengers: Endgame  and  Primer’s time travel logic . What does this imply? It means that Aidan can’t go back in time to change his own past; he can never save his  Lauren. He can only alter and affect the past events of other timelines. What’s more? Every timeline has visits from more than one Aidan at various points in time. I know this sounds confusing, so let’s go through the events one timeline at a time.

41 Movie: Timeline Diagram

41 Movie: Timeline-1 Explained (Prime Timeline)

This is the prime timeline where the movie begins. This is the Aidan the film follows from the beginning to the ending of the movie 41; we’ll call him Aidan-1. This does not mean that Timeline-1 is the one to initiate the time-travel mess. It is merely one of the countless timelines caught in the web of interlocked timelines. The numbering from 1 is just for convenience. It’s essential to know that there are other Aidan’s in Timeline-1 that the plot doesn’t follow. They are from other undisclosed timelines:

• Aidan-a, who shows up and says, “Don’t go to the Heathscape motel”. He appears to be here to stop the accident but is the one who causes it in Timeline-1.
• Aidan-b, the old manager of the motel. He appears to have gone to the past to save his grandfather but failed. Why failed? Remember, the grandmother is alone in Timeline-1.
• There could also be others – Aidan-c, who is taken into custody, and Aidan-d, who breaks Aidan-c out and leaves a hacksaw for him. Though this is not shown in the film, it is very likely that these events happen in Timeline-1 just as they do in the other timelines.

Timeline-1’s Main Events

• Aidan-1’s day begins well enough with his philosophy exam. 
• Aidan-1 is met by his doppelganger (Aidan-a) warning him to not go to the Heathscape motel. 
• Aidan-1 goes to the hospital to spend time with Grandma-1. 
• Aidan-1 gets a call from his friend Nick-1 who asks for his brother’s middle name. Aidan-1 responds correctly and hangs up. At this point (not shown), Nick-1 is sitting with another Aidan (perhaps Aidan-a) who is claiming to be a time traveller.
• Aidan-1 goes to the motel and meets his ex-girlfriend, Lauren-1.
• Lauren-1 and Aidan-1 head to a diner. We hear someone drop plates. This is caused by the other Aidan (possibly Aidan-a) but is not shown on screen.
• Aidan-1 offers Lauren-1 a lift home, and they meet with an accident. We are shown that the person on the road is another Aidan, but only for a fraction of a second (again, this is probably Aidan-a).
• Aidan-1 is at the hospital, and Lauren-1 dies. 
• A set of cops (cops-1) tell him to stay in the hospital as he’s being charged with murder.
• A patient tells Aidan-1 that he needs to go to room 41 of the Heathscape motel and find a hole in the bathroom floor. This is not shown, but this man was earlier at the motel and happened to see another Aidan (Aidan-a) magically appear from the bathroom. After that, he investigates the bathroom and finally cuts his wrists and is admitted (Aidan-a makes the 911 call). We’ll call this chap Patient-X1.
• Aidan-1 goes to the motel, finds the hole in room 41 and enters it. He travels back in time and leaves Timeline-1, and goes to Timeline-2.

Just to make a point here, Timeline-1’s people would have suddenly had their Aidan-1 disappear on them. All they’d know is he ran away from the hospital and went missing. And would be experienced by every parallel universe as long as Aidan from that universe uses room 41’s bathroom floor portal.

41 Movie: Timeline-2 Explained

• Aidan-1 arrives in Timeline-2 12 hours earlier than he left Timeline-1.
• Aidan-1 exits the bathroom and runs into Patient-X2, jumping on the bed. Patient-X2 has not yet met an Aidan yet.
• Aidan-1 leaves the room to see Aidan-2 and Lauren-2 heading out. Aidan-1 follows them.
• At the diner, Aidan-1 runs into his professor, Wertz-2, who tells him about a meeting he has with other professors to discuss philosophy.
• Aidan-1 knocks over a bunch of plates. This event tells us that Timeline-1 also had another Aidan (Aidan-a) who broke the plates.
• Aidan-1 runs to the spot of the accident and waves his hands desperately. Lauren-2 sees him and pulls at the steering wheel, causing the accident.
• Aidan-1 returns to the motel in disbelief. In the room, Patient-X2 is lying with his wrists slit, and Aidan-1 calls 911. This is how we know that in Timeline-1, another Aidan (Aidan-a) saved Patient-X1.
• Aidan-1 enters the hole in the bathroom floor and leaves Timeline-2, and goes to Timeline-3 12 hours prior.

41 Movie: Timeline-3 Explained

• Aidan-1 hoes home, takes a nap and talks to Nick-3 and Jess-3 about his time-travel episodes. Aidan-1 asks Nick-3 to call their Aidan (Aidan-3).
• Nick-3 calls, Aidan-3 picks up. Nick-3 asks what his brother’s middle name is and gets the correct response. This is how we know that in Timeline-1, the other Aidan (Aidan-a) was with Nick-1 when Aidan-1 receives the call at the hospital.
• Aidan-3 goes to the site of the accident to see another Aidan (Aidan-e) waiving his hands. Aidan-1 pushes Aidan-e out of the way and punches him in the face. I find it odd that a person could smack himself from a completely different parallel universe yet feel the pain.
• The accident occurs anyway. We don’t know why. Perhaps another Aidan (Aidan-f) came to that spot and waved as Aidan-1 was beating up Aidan-e.
• Aidan-1 goes over to the car, takes dead Lauren-3 and heads to the motel. He tries to take her with him through the hole. Aidan-1 leaves Timeline-3 and goes to Timeline-4 12 hours prior.

41 Movie: Timeline-4 Explained

• Aidan-1 arrives in Timeline-4, but Lauren-3’s body didn’t make it. It looks the dead don’t travel through timelines, or Lauren-3’s body was sent to a different unknown Timeline.
• Aidan-1 goes over to his professor’s house, Wertz-4. Here he learns that he is lost among the infinite parallel universes. And neither can he hope to go back to his own Timeline-1, nor can he save his  Lauren-1. Wertz-4 advises that any jump back in time should be made for the right reasons.
• Disappointed, Aidan-1 wanders the city and is caught by cops-4.
• At the station, Aidan-1 tries to tell the truth. He is broken out by an Aidan from another timeline, Aidan-g.
• Finding a strategically placed hacksaw, Aidan-1 cuts himself free and makes a run for it.
• Aidan-1 loses cops-4 and breaks into a garage to saw the remainder of the handcuff. As he picks the hacksaw, Aidan-1 realizes that another Aidan from another timeline helped him get free.
• Knowing he needs to do the same in his following timeline, Aidan-1 takes the saw to the motel. Aidan-1 leaves Timeline-4 and goes to Timeline-5 12 hours prior.

41 Movie: Timeline-5 Explained

• Aidan-1 triggers the alarm at the station and leaves the hacksaw under the trashcan. He does this as he knows some Aidan (Aidan-h) is held captive by the cops-5 in this timeline.

How is Patient-X a Lawyer in that diner scene?

• Aidan-1 goes to a diner where he sees Patient-X5, who’s not lost his mind and claims to be a lawyer. Patient-X5 says that he had enrolled for the war in his youth, but something made him change his mind. While we’re not shown this Patient-X from some timeline has arrived in the past of Timeline-5 and altered a critical moment causing a cascading effect on Patient-X5’s life. Instead of going to war and losing his mind, he is now a reputed lawyer.
• Aidan-1 gets a call from the hospital and heads over to meet Grandma-5. Looks like she’s fading and is going to die soon. She sorrowfully remembers how a golf ball caused her husband to drown in 1957 and has missed him ever since. Aidan-1 realizes that in at least one timeline, he can save his grandfather.
• Aidan-1 heads back to the motel and leaves Timeline-5, and goes to Timeline-6 12 hours prior.

41 Movie: Timeline-6 Explained

• Aidan-1 runs into Patient-X, who is not from Timeline-6. How do we know? This Patient-X seems to know about time travel and recognizes Aidan-1. It appears he has no recollection was what day it is. 
• The hotel manager shows up, and Aidan-1 and Patient-X run into the bathroom. Patient-X confirms to Aidan-1 that it is possible to change a timeline if one influences the right moments.
• Patient-X uses the hole and disappears to an unknown timeline.
• Aidan-1 leaves Timeline-6 and goes to Timeline-7 12 hours prior.

41 Movie: Timeline-7.8.9.10.11…… Explained

Aidan-1 repeatedly uses the hole to keep going backwards in time through various timelines. He takes breaks to revisit his breakup and then the earlier unforgettable moments of his relationship with Lauren. Remember, Aidan-1 is traversing through multiple timelines here, one per each jump backwards in time.

41 Movie: Ending Explained: Timeline-N

After countless trips in and out of the hole ( about 40,150 times, okay, I counted ), Aidan-1 goes back to the year 1957 in Timeline-N, a day before Grandpa-N drowned and meets him. To ensure Grandpa-N doesn’t swim over to the golf ball and drown, Aidan-1 gifts him a golf ball but tells him not to open the present just yet. When Grandpa-N strikes his ball into the lake, he decides to go swim and get it. Upon feeling his pocket, he realizes Aidan-1 has gifted him a golf ball. Content, he walks away home. Grandpa-N doesn’t die and lives happily with Grandma-N. In the ending of the movie 41, we are shown that in Timeline-N, Grandpa-N is by the bedside of Grandma-N.

Who is the manager at Heathscape motel?

At the end of the movie 41, it is revealed that the old motel manager is Aidan. In this timeline (Timeline-N), Aidan-1 has was able to save his grandfather. This is an exceptional timeline. If you notice, the grandmother was all alone in all other timelines even though those timelines had an old manager Aidan. Perhaps the golf ball gift trick didn’t work in alternate timelines, or the other Aidans took a different approach to save the grandfather and failed.

Is Lauren saved, or is she dead?

While the 41 movie ending shows Aidan-N and Lauren-N deciding to walk instead of taking the car, this didn’t happen in many of the other timelines. In Timeline-N, old Aidan-1 meets a young Aidan-N to tell him to go to the Heathscape motel. When Aidan-N is contemplating dropping Lauren-N back home, he looks up to see the manager, old Aidan-1. Aidan-N doesn’t know why the manager called him to the motel, but he considers this to be a moment of divine intervention. Perhaps, to spend a longer time with Lauren-N, Aidan-N offers to walk her home. She agrees, and the two leave. Old Aidan-1 smiles happily as he’s understood how to influence circumstances to change the events. 

So yes, this Lauren-N has been saved, and this Aidan-N may not travel through time. But this happy ending is limited to a small set of timelines where an Aidan could make the right impact. Sadly, the remaining majority of the universes will have Lauren dying and Aidan disappearing.

What are your thoughts on the movie 41? Drop a comment below, let’s discuss!

Barry is a technologist who helps start-ups build successful products. His love for movies and production has led him to write his well-received film explanation and analysis articles to help everyone appreciate the films better. He’s regularly available for a chat conversation on his website and consults on storyboarding from time to time. Click to browse all his film articles

41 Review – A Pretentious And Laborious Time Travel Movie

• Published on 23 April 2021
• by The ScreenSlut

41 tries to answer deep philosophical questions that arise from the existence of time travel , but unfortunately, much like the acting in this, the plot is amateurish at best. Rather than being the clever time travel movie they had hoped, it is more like a student project that goes on for far too long.

41 starts off with a narration that ponders the questions of life and how much we take for granted. We then switch to a philosophy class, in which the big topic of what happens after you die is being debated. Aidan, our protagonist, (played Chris Gibson ) is leaving the class when he runs into someone who looks exactly like him and warns him to not go to Heathscape Motel. However, after a tragic accident, with the lure of being able to stop it from happening, he rushes to the hotel to find a portal that allows him to go back to yesterday. 

I was intrigued by this as most time travel movies deal with a bigger timeline than today and yesterday, so I was hoping that we would have an intriguing time mystery. But it feels a very shallow attempt at being clever. With the voice-over at the beginning and the meta discussion, it is quite clear that this is what they were going for, a cerebral time travel film. But it lacks credible acting, dialogue and canon to actually achieve that. 

Rather than adding to the movie, this meta discussion of the movie, just ends up pointing out the flaws and all the things that 41 lacks. The tragic accident that prompts Aidan to go into time travel mode is something we have all seen before. If they had managed to take a new spin on it, this could be forgiven, but it does not go beyond the very basics. With a story that has proclaimed that it is not relying on any twists and special effects, it is only on the strength of the story that it can be judged.

41 manages to be a culmination of poor choices. I do not expect perfect acting in a low budget independent movie, but I expect it to be fairly tolerable. None of the scenes in this feel organic at all, as all the conversation is very stilted. In some scenes, it feels like the actors aren’t even trying to act and yet in other scenes, the actors over exaggerate every facial expression. This can be seen most clearly in the scenes involving the philosophy discussion and the police.

The philosophy scenes are where they decide to go meta talking directly about the film, but our protagonist says he’s writing a novel to sidestep weird questions. It would have been possible to add some nuance to this and flesh out any plot canon. But instead they go over very basic tenets of time travel, that anyone who has ever watched a movie involving time travel would be very familiar with. The experts in this after school discussion try so hard to act clever and profound, but their dialogue is incredibly moronic. There is no new ground covered here, and that sums up why 41 fails as a movie.

Then there are the police, who seem like caricatures of themselves. They are questioning Aidan regarding the accident, which they believe to be a crime, though nothing explains why they come to this conclusion. They try to act hard and menacing, but it just comes off as comical. Clearly added to create some friction in the plot, but it just leaves the audience perplexed.

However, even at this point, I was willing to give it a chance, if the ending had paid off. There is much emphasis on using this time travel for important reasons. But when Aidan devises a plan to change events (which ignores the rules they had set out in the meta discussion), it is just the same thing he was trying to do but with a different person in a different time.

There is no grand scheme to all of this, except self-indulgence even if he does end up saving someone. Which is what I feel is very much sums up, what 41 is like. Rather than being the clever time travel movie it thought it was, it comes across as pretentious, smug and shallow. 

Even without taking those flaws into consideration, the ending has to be the most convoluted way to solve a time travel paradox. There are many ways that this time travel dilemma could have been avoided, yet we go around in circles avoiding the obvious solution.

In fact, what is most frustrating is that Aidan is the cause of all the issues that happen and he repeats his mistakes over and over. 41 should have really been a 30 minute short, rather than the laborious 80 minutes it takes to make its point. Plus the motel, which is the epicenter of it all, could have no way to feature in its conclusion, as there is no way it is more than 50 years old. 

41 is full of glaring inconsistencies, bad dialogue and even worse acting, that makes this sci-fi movie a herculean struggle to finish. 

41 is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.

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2012 Directed by Glenn Triggs

Time travels with you

A young man discovers a hole in the floor of a local motel that leads to yesterday.

Chris Gibson Dafna Kronental David Macrae Shane Lee Keith Gordon Nick Antoniades Menik Gooneratne Glen Hancox Robert Plazek Warwick Leeson Matt Young Lauren Wade Anne Cordiner Toby Pierpoint Peter Bright Bethia de Groot Gordon Boyd Stephanie Lillis Jessica Miller Elliot Cyngler Rose Lewis Zachary Hare Clara Francesca Pagone Charlotte McDonald Alan Jacobs Don Bridges

Director Director

Glenn Triggs

Assistant Director Asst. Director

Fiona Eloise Bulle

Producers Producers

Glenn Triggs Fiona Eloise Bulle

Writer Writer

Casting casting.

Jessica Miller Glenn Triggs Bethia de Groot Stephanie Lillis

Editor Editor

Cinematography cinematography, composer composer.

Heath Brown

Makeup Makeup

Adrian Straton

Dark Epic Films

Alternative Title

41 The Movie

Science Fiction Drama

Humanity and the world around us Surreal and thought-provoking visions of life and death Show All…

Releases by Date

20 jul 2012, 09 aug 2013, 29 nov 2014, 21 jul 2015, releases by country.

• Premiere Made In Melbourne Film Festival
• Premiere Las Vegas Film Festival
• Premiere Rhode Island International Film Festival
• Digital PG-13 Internet Release

80 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by CGS ★★

If you're going to do a story with time travel in it, I think you have two options if you don't want to confuse or annoy the viewer:

1. You either nail the time logic ( Primer , Timecrimes )

2. You use time travel poetically and you don't even worry about the logic ( The Terminator , Somewhere in Time )

41 tries to have it both ways and therefore fails.

But I think my biggest gripe was that there's NO way that motel is over 50 years old.

Review by Alex Jackson ★½ 1

If I could go back in time to yesterday, I wouldn’t watch this film

Review by porksweats ★★½

this movie could have been 41 minutes and much better, I did like how they approached time travel though that was neat

Review by park618 ½ 3

Just slash your tires dude

Review by Max Wagner ★★½

How many times did Aidan crawl out of the hole while some dude was takin a shit, and had to go “FUCK FUCK SORRY YOU DIDNT SEE ANYTHING IM GOING BACK IN THE HOLE NOW”

Review by Brandon Williams ★★★

A micro-budget SF time travel adventure... where have I seen that before 🤔. While certainly not Primer, did build a reasonably complex narrative. It has one of the more impactful last acts of mini budget SF I've seen. No waterworks, but sparked emotion. So if you choose this one, make sure to hang in there.

Admit I had to restart the film once because after a heavy pasta dinner, the first act was slow enough that I fell asleep. Only made it about 20 mins in. After a nice long nap and a Starbucks doubleshot, I grinded on through the second act. While more interesting, it still hadn't hooked me. Once past the ridiculous cop characters at the 50 min…

Review by Dina ▪️🔹 ★★★

Watched on a road trip. Time travel, so interesting premise but overall felt empty /flat.

Review by Ben “秃头” Jones ★★★½

Time travel films are always difficult to pull off. It either requires a sound internal logic that manages to tie together all the lose ends or you have something less science based and go with a fantastical idea of what you want time travel to be and let others worry about how it all works.

However, where 41 fails is that it tries to appease both, and whilst this works in short bursts, it ultimately falls apart because of the lack of consistency.

Despite this, what 41 does have is a lot of heart. Whilst the film changes gears several times, it's not until the final reel that it really hits it's stride, revealing the consequence in a moment of…

Review by Bram Christiaens ★½

It was a good try, but there were too many holes in his logic. Either he didn't see Timecrimes or he didn't pay attention.

Review by Rolf ★★★½

A philosophy student meets his Doppelgänger who tells him not to got to a certain place. Of course he still does which sets in motion a time travel scenario... Imagine TIMECRIMES without the crime angle. 41 uses the same premise creating many timelines which our protagonist learns to deal with until he literally finds his way. It uses all the elements which make the genre so much fun and really leaves you thinking after it's finished. It's no PRIMER though and never loses sight of its emotional core which keeps the audience close by. Made for a tiny budget in Australia 41 is clearly a passion project which may lack cinematic grandeur and struggles a bit with its cast but as so very often with this genre, it's the story that counts and I'm very happy with what I got.

Make or Break Scene: Revealing the identity of a character in the end.

MVT: The story.

Score: 7/ 10

Review by Matt White ★½

His grandmother is in a “nursing home” laying on a fucking folding table. Wtf?

Review by dklenci ★½

don't typically like to dunk on more underground stuff but this is the most bland time travel movie i've ever seen

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41 is Low Budget Time Travel Brilliance

There was a moment in the movie 41 when I thought to myself, I’ve never enjoyed a more thoroughly awful movie so much before. Yes, I realize that sentence doesn’t even make sense. But, like 41, this sentence is a perfect Gordian knot that better explains the low low budget, Australian, indie time travel flick than I ever could outright. I think the best way to put it plainly is this, sometimes it is more important to investigate an idea, than to nail its particulars. The acting here is poor. The sets and the casting, nonexistent. The directing is mediocre at best. The lot of it is best seen as an nearly acceptable senior class project. But it is the big ideas behind this little film that could, that propel it to us today. It is the insightful resolutions and mindjob twists that are really worth our trouble and our time.

Here on THiNC. we pride ourselves on looking for under valued films within the mainstream cinema world to discuss and unpack together. We look for movies that the box office has passed over because it is in this slush pile that we find independent film makers that are the least beholden to formula and Hollywood expectation. By daring to make the movie 41, we see things that aren’t generally done in film. And that is the exciting bit. If you are trying to decide if it is worth your time, I’d most liken it to Timecrimes , Diverge , or actually, maybe Anti Matter would be more apropos? Here, regardless have a trailer…

So you can see for yourself, really really low production quality. And yet, it’s here. On this page… being promoted by me, for you to see! It’s got to have something more going on here. GOT TO. So, why don’t we dig in and see what we can see under the hood of this little car, shall we? But from here on out be spoilers. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, you can watch the movie right here:

The Movie 41 Deep Dive Walkthrough

The movie starts out with our protagonist, Aidan, arriving to tell himself a warning. Yes, you heard me correctly. Aidan shows up, and tells Aidan, not to go to the Heathscape Hotel. Now, remember, this is a SPOILER FILLED discussion. And that being the case, I figure, heck, let’s blow this thing up right out of the gates and start with this complicated little diagram I created of the entirety of the movie and the directions through time Aidan moved.

And granted, sans context, this diagram is complicated to take in. But after I flipped back through some of the timelines and infographics I created in the past, I figured I needed to do one for this movie too. For instance, Timecrimes , or my diagram Live Die Repeat maybe, or Mr. Nobody’s shattered timeline , or this Dark intrigue poster I threw together, or maybe some Upstream Color goodness? You get the idea. But yeah, I figured I might as well throw some paint at this movie’s timeline as well. If anyone knows Glenn Triggs, and can entice him to come out of hiding for an interview – maybe this interview will inform him what kind of nutter I am, and that he should actually steer clear? Alright, let’s dive into the timeline.

41 Movie Timeline Aidan#1

As the movie kicks off, Aidan heads to university, and then afterwards he has the surreal encounter to meet himself. Aidan’s other self tells him, “Do not… NOT, go to the Heathscape Motel. Afterwards, he goes and visits with his grandmother – and while there he gets a call from himself and his brother in timeline 3 asking what his brother’s middle name is.

After visiting with his grandmother, he heads to the Heathscape Motel, completely disregarding his own advice. He sees his ex-girlfriend, Lauren, whom he broke up with several years ago. They have dinner, hear something crash (A2), and then Aidan offers to give her a ride home. And during the drive, Aidan crashes and kills Lauren. Aidan heads to the hospital where he meets Patient X who tells him he needs to get to the Heathscape Motel, room 41 specifically. So he breaks out of the hospital, heads to the hotel and breaks into the room through the window. He finds the hole in the bathroom Patient X told him about, and he goes in.

41 Movie Timeline Aidan#2

When Aidan comes out of the hotel room and onto the balcony, he sees A1 about to invite Lauren to dinner. Aidan2 follows the two of them to the cafe and watches from afar. The person next to Aidan2 tells him that his paper was extraordinary this time, and that he should join his physics discussion club. PAPER? What paper? Anyway, in his excitement he bumps into a waitress and causes things to crash – which A1 hears. Aidan2 runs to the spot on the road A1 and Lauren crashes, but ends up being the cause for the crash. Aidan2 runs back to the hotel room 41, and sees that Patient X is there on the bed, having attempted suicide.

41 Movie Timeline Aidan#3

Aidan3 heads to his brother’s house, and he attempts to tell his brother that he has jumped in time. To prove it, he has his brother call his own phone, and Aidan1 picks up. Aidan’s brother asks him what his brother’s middle name is, he answers South, and then hangs up. After this dinner, he runs out to the spot where the accident happens and Aidan3 tackles Aidan2, attempting to save Lauren from getting killed in the accident. But as they are lying in the grass, Aidan3 hears the car crash anyway. Aidan3 heads back to the time portal with Lauren’s body (but she just disappears – can someone explain this logic to me? Like all of it. Why did he take her in the first place? Why did she disappear? Did he just leave her in the hole? Gah.)

41 Movie Timeline Aidan#4

The beginning of the 4th timeline is this weird science/physics discussion group Aidan was invited to. It is funny in that Aidan poses a hypothetical question to this group as a fictional play, asking for help on how to solve this literary conundrum (but the girlfriend keeps dying!). But all I could think about was Glenn Triggs, asking his fictional characters for help with the sticking points in this conundrum filled plot! hahah. Regardless, the question for Aidan that is on the table is simple enough – how does he change Lauren’s fate? Nothing is working. And the big take away from this conversation, that literally changes Aidan’s perspective on what to do next, is that he needs to change the person, not the event. Or that was my take away anyway.

After he leaves the physics discussion group, he is captured by the agents that had originally told him not to leave the hospital. And when Aidan4 tells them about the time portal and about his not having anything to do with the accident, the agents ask him why he doesn’t break himself out if this is true. Voila, just like that, the fire alarm goes off. But it wasn’t another Aidan that pulled the alarm, rather it was Patient X (which is significant from a narrative standpoint, in that it would require one more detail that we would have had to clean up later, as we’ll see in a second). And in kicking over the trashcan nearby, Aidan sees a hacksaw that allows Aidan to saw off his handcuffs and flee. (I knew IMMEDIATELY that Aidan5 was going to have put that there for Aidan4…)

41 Movie Timeline Aidan#5

Aidan jumps backwards in time, and places the hacksaw under the trashcan for his previous timeline, then heads off to the diner. He meets Patient X there, but this time X seems fairly well adjusted and normal. Aidan begins to think that there is significance in the change that X was able to make, and that things aren’t determined… but, in fact, may actually be changeable, which is always the push and pull of time travel movies. You think they are about time travel, and about love. But no. They are actually a metanarrative discussing freewill and determinism. I digress though, because right now, Aidan is more concerned about saving Lauren, not with having a philosophical discussion. And so he heads back to room 41 and finds Patient X there, but this time, a raving lunatic. The two are chased by the owner of the motel.

And I’m going to pause right here a second and discuss this guy. The owner. Right? Now, tell me… the very first time that Aidan walks into the the motel, and meets Lauren. Remember that? Did you, or did you not, IMMEDIATELY guess who the motel owner was? Right, all those of you that guessed correctly, please raise your hands. Interesting. All those who didn’t? OK, and how many of you would like me to finish the timeline so that we can actually talk about what it all means. OH! hahah. OK, I’m going already. Geeze. What I meant to say was, AidanX was chasing Aidan5, and Aidan starts traveling back and back, and further back in time.

41 Movie Timeline Aidan#6

Into the hole, out of the hole… and he stops at the point where Aidan and Lauren broke up. (Speaking of which, Aidan mentions that they broke up “several years ago,” and in order to go, let’s say, 3 years back, he would have had to jump into that hole, and back out again, two thousand one hundred ninety times! Aidan’s calves and biceps should be ripped! hahah.)

Now, we see Aidan arguing with Lauren, and eventually walking away. But then we see Aidan crawl out of Lauren’s closet (which isn’t creepy at all), and we cut away. But soon after this scene, we start to notice Aidan1 (otherwise known as Aidan) and Lauren continuing their relationship when it shouldn’t actually be continuing. But with Aidan and Lauren back together again, Aidan6 has nothing to do in this time – and so he heads back to the motel.

41 Movie Timeline Aidan#7

Aidan, not content with his calves and biceps workout to go back in time three years, decides to go back in time 74 years. (Not to be anal retentive, but that would literally be over 50,000 entrances and exits. And that doesn’t count for sleeping, eating, breaks, interruptions by guests staying in the hotel room…which, we see that there are plenty of. We also don’t see any embarrassing wait times for individuals sitting on the toilet. If we account for that, sleep, food, and other things, I’m guessing his trip back in time probably took him well over 2 months to pull off. And that’s with things going well! Hahahah. So funny. He could bike across the United States faster!)

Regardless, our tired, but intrepid hero arrives in 1941! And what does he do? He meets his grandfather and then saves him from the infamous death-via-golf ball story his grandmother loves to tell anyone who will listen. And with that?!? There is only one last thing for Aidan7 to figure out. And that is, what the heck should he do with himself? He can’t hang out with Lauren, she’s with Aidan1 (though I would have stolen her and taken her back in time with me. With the knowledge of where the stock market goes, and even a rudimentary knowledge of sports he would soon be a billionaire!) and so he eventually takes over as the manager of the Heathscape Hotel. Right? We’ve covered this before. And with that, the movie ends with Aiden and Lauren deciding to walk instead of drive… but it also wouldn’t have been a huge deal because they weren’t broken up. They’d just choose not to drive, as opposed to driving on that fateful day.

The Ending of the Movie 41 Explained

There is a very clear, and unambiguous answer to what happens at the end of the movie. I sort of explained what happened above. But not really how the times flow at the end. And even the movie doesn’t discuss all of the various issues and problems still outstanding.

So, as I said above, the glitch of this film is that any top level change refused to allow Lauren to survive. All summarized by the phrase, “Don’t go to the Heathscape Motel.” But nothing Aidan does allows her to survive. Not going to the spot to warn himself. Not taking himself out, and keep him from trying to warn them. And so he realized, the only real solution was to not have separated in the first place. By not ever separating, he keeps himself from stumbling upon her at the hotel. Which, in turn, 100% totally changes the line of the original (white timeline above) storyline. Which solves the key point of the movie – which was, how does Aidan save his lost love of his life.

The second large question that faces us as we come to the end is – what the heck happens to the extra Aidan? Well, as we discussed, he becomes the hotel manager and waits his entire life in order to see himself avoid the pitfalls he originally caused. But, that isn’t the right question to ask. The right question to ask is, where did ALL of the Aidan’s go? Here, let me pull a diagram I created for Primer that will explain the problem:

Whenever someone walks into a time machine, they come out, backwards in time. And the logic would say, as long as the you of the future gets into that time machine, you have one long line of you, even if there are two of you standing in one room at the same time. But there is nothing forcing your future you to get in the hole. Sure, they did once, but they might not. Heck, you could walk up to the hole with a backhoe and fill it with 12 stories of fill dirt. And then there would always be two of you. Which, (again, relying on my trusty Primer post diagrams again) would look something like this:

Which, was a very very important detail for Primer, but wasn’t really discussed much in this movie. There could be piles and piles of Aidan’s at the end of the movie, to be honest.

But What Does It All Mean?

As the movie ends, we are given the following quote:

“We are not really here that long, and for the majority of us, we only get one chance, at all of this.”

Doesn’t it feel like we are shown the amount of work necessary to correct a simple mistake – which was Aidan’s breaking up with the girl of his dreams? And couple that with the fact that we only get one chance at this life, maybe we shouldn’t be too proud to ask forgiveness and apologize? Maybe it is in our best interest to regularly consider the long term impacts of our choices. Yes, your decision between Taco Bell and McDonald’s probably doesn’t matter much (minus the fact that you should have chosen NEITHER). But it could be that your pigheadedness with your spouse, or daughter, your parent, over some issue that ultimately didn’t matter is really going to have lasting impacts throughout your life. Could this be the message of 41?

In the making of 41 documentary , Glenn Triggs talks about how he saw the movie as if the world existed in a multiverse where any possibility could actually happen, but maybe not actually to you. So, you make a mistake with your spouse, and the next thing you know, you are divorced and on the street. But in the next universe over it could be that that mistake didn’t actually happen. And the old Aidan signifies this universe where the mistake happened – but the young Aidan, the one that ends up with Lauren is signifying this other multiverse universe where the mistake never happened.

Which, is interesting, because with Primer , Shane Carruth’s story had nothing to do with time travel. It was all about what would make a strong relationship fall apart? What level of power would corrupt that kind of friendship? And here we have a time travel movie talking about mistakes and our short time on earth. About how we need to be super careful with the people that we love and the choices that we make in this short amount of time that we have.

Edited by, CY

Where to watch 41

Thanks for the suggestion, as always. Just watched. Thoroughly enjoyed.

Regarding the critiques of acting and directing, for example, perhaps we need to re-THiNC the rating scale. Yes, this movies lacks all of that, but packs every missing aspect into the mindjobness. The end result is an overall score that’s lacking for a movie that exactly what a lot of us are looking for here.

Thanks again.

Sure, it wasn’t the best movie I have brought you all… but I’m sorry, they can’t all be Primer! hahah.

@Taylor, and yet you took the time and effort to break the movie down for us, what with the infographics and all, such drive and dedication!

I found this movie amazingly touching; the ending was like an opposite version of a “dark sucker punch,” as I was CERTAIN that Aidan was destined to become Patient X – which is what I am sure was the author’s intent, what with the grandmother constantly going on about her husband (or was it Aidan’s father?) being bald and whatnot. So no, I certainly cannot raise my hand when it comes to the motel manager’s identity – I had no clue. I often can spot “plot twists” a mile away, but this one got me – and I’m so glad it did. Very powerful for an old cynic like me.

So, if you look at this NOT as a time travel movie, but as a parallel-universe traveling movie: All the universes exist, but they are offset by 1 day. Going into the hole just gets you to the next universe over, whose events occur 1 day later. Some Aidens enter a universe where the “local” Aiden hasn’t left yet, and sometimes Aiden enters one where Aiden already left. Ultimately, you end up with an infinite number of parallel universes where: some have no Aidens, some with 1 Aiden, and some with several Aidens. As for why he put the girlfriend in the hole (realizing she was already dead), once he closed the lid, and reopened it, the body would be gone. The “body” would never open the lid to exit, so the body would have shifted to an inaccessible place and never be a problem again.

In 41 Movie Timeline Aiden #2: When he goes to the diner and the person tells him he did a great job on ‘the paper’, it’s his University professor – commenting on how great his final exam was (from the start of the film). He mentions it again in the meeting with the other two professors in the apartment.

In 41 Movie Timeline Aiden #3: He takes Lauren’s body to the portal and she disappears. Because she’s dead. She can’t re-emerge 12 hours earlier because she wasn’t dead 12 hours earlier. She was alive and already living in that timeline.

Not sure if you will see this but I think you made a mistake unless its me that is mistaken but when goes back in time to when Aiden and the GF broke up, what we see isn’t them not breaking up but more so Aiden going back in time and thus we are seeing the earlier version of the relationship. When Old Aiden at the end tells Young Aiden to go to the hotel, I’m pretty sure that Aiden is still broken up with the GF. The decision to walk vs drive at the end was just a different decision that this Aiden made. At least that was my take on it, I really enjoyed this film and enjoyed reading your take on it.

Yeah, could be. I should ask the writer director… get his take, see if I screwed up or if it as a different earlier decision…

Fun fact: the exterior diner shots are of the Olympia Diner in Newington, Connecticut. Which completely messed up the movie for me since it’s supposed to take place in Australia

How many times did old Aidan have to witness the accident before he managed to prevent it? We see him at the beginning of the movie but Aidan and Lauren still crash. So I’m guessing he would have gone back to try something else, right? It seems that preventing the grandfather’s death and giving young Aidan a father figure growing up wasn’t enough to prevent the accident, so old Aidan had to keep tweaking the past. At the beginning of the movie Aidan asks Lauren if she still lives around there (near the hotel), and she says no, she moved away actually. But by the end of the movie Aidan is able to walk her home from the hotel. Did old Aidan finally figure out how to keep Lauren from moving? Was that just one of the tweaks he had to make?

So what do you think Lauren was about to say right before the accident that was so important?

Every no budget film should be this well done. One time where the concept really did carry the film to a successful conclusion despite lacking slickness.

I caught this film on Amazon Prime. I collect films, especially films with this sort of plot line; and, even when the film hasn’t been commercially released on DVD, the creator sometimes has promotional DVDs lying around that he’s willing to part with. I’ve had some luck in the past. Trouble is, it’s hard to find contact info for Glenn Trigg or Dark Epic Films.

Hey there Ann… Was that a question? I think maybe you are in hopes of getting a screener or DVD for this film but can’t get in contact with Glenn? Yes? No?

I happen to have Glenn’s email address I think. Can’t remember if we chatted over on Twitter, or via email, or phone. Ah, email. I see that I have his email address. If you’d like me to ask him a question on your behalf?

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A reader wrote to comment on another film, and in our conversation I asked if there were any movies he particularly would like me to attempt to find and analyze.  He mentioned this one.  Oddly, my feeling immediately was that I had heard it mentioned before, but a thorough search of my notes could find no reference to it.

To his credit, though, he informed me that I could catch the movie on YouTube .  Don't let that fool you--it's a full-length motion picture, clocking at an hour twenty-one minutes and change.  It is not some short you can watch while waiting for your coffee to finish brewing.

I have not, to my recollection, watched a movie on YouTube previously.  The quality was not very good.  I do not know whether that was a problem with the original movie, or with the YouTube copy, or with my own equipment, but sometimes the images pixelated, and sometimes the dialogue was difficult to follow.  This latter was slightly complicated by the fact that it is an Australian film, and the accents of the characters are sometimes rather thick.  If there is a way to get subtitles on a YouTube movie, I did not find it.  Still, most of it was reasonably clear, and the accents were problematic only because the technical quality made it a bit more difficult to hear what was being said sometimes.  Also, it seemed clearer the second time I viewed it, although that might be because having already seen it I knew what I expected.

It will become clear that the film does not work under fixed time theory, and it is something of a disaster under replacement theory, but in fairness to it, it claims within itself to be a multiple-dimension theory film.  Thus although we will show how it fails as a replacement theory film (because after all that's the way this site believes time travel would actually work if it ever really does), we will also consider how it fares under multiple dimension theory.  This is problematic, too, because it relies very much on an initial predestination paradox, and has several others built into it, some of which are inexplicable.  It seems to borrow tropes from other theories without recognizing that they won't fit the concepts of multiple dimensions in the way they are used.  That will appear as we proceed.

There are two fundamental ways of handling multiple dimension theory.

Maybe in this universe, Hitler won the second world war; or maybe it's something really strange, like Ringo was a really good drummer.

However, for time travel stories, it is essential that all parallel universes are exactly identical until a time traveler interferes, creating changes in one of them.  This is a major problem of the theory, as we have elsewhere noted :  If you change a parallel universe, it is longer identical to yours, but presumably in any parallel universe in which you did not make the change your parallel counterpart will travel to another universe and change it, and suddenly half of all universes are different from the other half.  If we take this story as a parallel universe story of this sort, that problem faces us repeatedly.

The other fundamental way of handling multiple dimensions can be distinguished as divergent dimensions .  This version maintains that there is initially only one universe, but when someone travels to a moment in the past it creates a divergent timeline, in essence a new universe which branches from the original one at the point of arrival and develops as its own world thereafter.  This has other problems, notably the issue of the conservation of mass and energy (how did we manage to create another universe ex nihilo ) and the issue of what happens if the same traveler makes the same trip (does he merge with himself, or are there two of him), again discussed elsewhere .

These both also suffer from the problem that multiple dimension theory is not really time travel, but creates an illusion of time travel.  The traveler has left his home and will never return, and finds that in the new world a different version of him already exists.  He thus does not have a place in the new universe, but is missing from the old one.

The film takes some of these problems into account, but does not fully pursue them.

Our time travel begins paradoxically.  The main character, Aidan, is headed home to his apartment when he is confronted by someone who tells him to stay away from the East Gate Motel.  The entirely predictable result of this is, of course, that he goes to the East Gate Motel, trying to figure out why someone would warn him away from it; but the confrontation is more complicated than that.  The problem is that the person who warns him appears in every way to be himself.

There is a degree to which this makes perfect sense.  His visit to the motel is going to reconnect him with Lauren, the ex-girlfriend, and he is going to give her a ride home but on the way get into a major automotive accident in which he is rendered unconscious and she is killed.  In the aftermath her family is going to push to press charges against him, thinking that somehow he caused the accident intentionally, possibly as the murder-suicide plan of a depressed ex, and the police warn him that he will be arrested if he leaves the hospital.  When he subsequently discovers that he can travel back in time, it is obvious that he would want to prevent the accident, and the obvious way is to warn himself away from the motel.

The problem is, he never does.

The time travel takes him back half a day, and we see him do it scores of times.  Yet on none of those trips does he go tell himself not to visit the East Gate Motel.  There is a sense in which that makes sense--after all, he knows that he would not have visited the East Gate Motel had it not been that he told himself not to do so, so that's a mistake he is not going to make.  From a replacement theory perspective, if he prompts himself he undoes the prompting, and so never prompts himself.  We have a twelve-hour infinity loop, and that story ends.

That, though, introduces the other side of the same problem.  Had he not told himself not to go there, he would not have gone there.  Everything happens because some version of him arrived and told him not to go to that motel.

At one point, the film tries to sidestep this problem via Aidan's observation that he is not in the original universe because before he knew time travel was possible a time traveling version of himself visited him.  This does not solve the problem, though.  If all universes are identical initially and Aidan in this universe would not have gone to the East Gate Motel had another version of himself not arrived to tell him to (or not to) do so, then that would hold in every identical universe, and no version of Aidan would ever have gone to the East Gate Motel.  If, however, there is a universe in which this got started by some version of Aidan going to that motel without being prompted by the arrival of a dimension traveler, then the parallel universes are not identical, and given that a very small difference like that can have occurred at a point that is critical to finding the dimensional portal, it must be that the supposedly parallel universes have by now fractured into a nearly infinite number of variant versions.  Parallel dimension theory makes it impossible for there to have been an original cause in one universe that does not apply in every other, and so the predestination paradox that starts the entire sequence fails.  Right at the beginning, the story cannot begin.

Aidan goes to the motel and encounters Lauren, whom he has not seen in long enough that he did not know she worked there.  He apparently walked out on her some months ago, in a bitter breakup, but she is willing to let him buy her dinner and catch up a bit, wants to know how his grandmother is, and then agrees to let him drive her home.  That, as we noted, sets up the accident.

In another misplaced trope, the first time we see Aidan and Lauren talking in the diner we hear a dish crash.  The second visit to the diner has a time traveling Aidan spying on himself, and he bumps into the waiter causing the plate to drop that we heard crash.  That's a fixed time trope.  This is not a fixed time story, but a multiple dimension story.  The first time Aidan has this conversation with Lauren, he is not being watched by himself, and there is no crashed dish.  There would be another world in which that happened, but it would be a different Aidan talking to a different Lauren--and we know that there is a different Aidan in a different world, because in the end they choose a different action.

There is an incongruity here.  Aidan apparently rides his bicycle to school, locking it to the fence outside the school property.  (I guess Australian colleges don't have bicycle racks?  Or is the bicycle more likely to be stolen from the rack on campus where there is security than it is from outside the fence along a public road?).  He then visits his gran, and from there we see him walk to the motel.  He surveys it, goes inside, then takes Lauren to the diner, and when they leave they return to the motel, get in his car, and he drives her away.  First, if he has a car, why does he bike to school?  There might be a reasonable answer to that, but not to this:  if he walked to the motel and has not been there in long enough that he doesn't know his ex-girlfriend has been working there for a while, why is his car in the parking lot?  Or did he actually offer to drive her home to her house in her car?  Do they do that in Australia?

The accident is a mystery; the police do not know why the driver lost control of the car and hit a pole.  When we first see the accident, we are looking at the passengers from the dash; the second time we see them it is through the front window.  Lauren is just about to say something important (we never learn what) to Aidan when she interrupts herself to yell a warning, "Look out!", and he swerves and that's all she wrote until he awakens in the hospital trying to find out what happened to her.

It then gets complicated, as they pull another trope from fixed time theory.  When he has traveled to the past and realizes that he just saw Lauren get into his car, he races, on foot, across town.  I don't know whether he is just an incredibly fast runner or whether Australian towns have particularly convoluted road routes for cars, but several times he manages to outrun people in vehicles.  This time he winds up in the road waving his arms for them to stop.  As he does so, they see him, swerve to avoid hitting him, and crash.  In other words, he causes the accident he was trying to prevent.

That's not impossible, if we assume that the accident had some other cause and he disrupted that original cause.  He apparently did not remember being the cause of the accident, presumably because immediately upon awakening he could not remember the events of the accident well; but that does not explain how he got to be the cause of the accident.

It is further complicated as he travels back yet again, and at the last moment realizes that he is about to cause the accident he is trying to prevent, and races across town on foot yet again (at times it is reminiscent of Run, Lola, Run , but if the point of that film was to have a lot of footage of a buxom girl running, that point is lost when she's replaced by a somewhat geeky guy).  He reaches the accident scene in time to see himself waving to stop the car, and immediately tackles his self, pushing him off the road and punching him to render him unconscious.

The problem is that the accident happens anyway--a trope from movies like The Time Machine , where they pretend you can't change the past but are changing it even while they debate the matter.  It seems as if the car accident happens whether or not Aidan is standing in the road waving his arms to cause it.  We don't know why it happens; it seems fated to do so--but that makes no sense.  If Aidan caused the accident by trying to prevent it, then it did not happen until he tried to prevent it, but he could not have known to prevent it had he not caused it.  If Aidan did not cause the accident, then it is not unreasonable to imagine that he could prevent it by flagging down the car before it happens.

There is another bit of nonsense in these scenes:  after punching his other self in the jaw, Aidan rubs his jaw.  That seems like the sort of problem that destroyed Looper , in which injuries inflicted on the younger version of a person immediately appeared as scars on the elder.  They don't make an issue of it, but Looper is an effort at a replacement theory story (only one history of the universe, but it is mutable) and it made little sense there.  It makes even less sense in a multiple dimension theory story--the version of Aidan that Aidan hit is not the past version of the Aidan who hit him, but a parallel self from another dimension.  The Aidan doing the punching was never punched--if he was, he would not know that his waving his hands would cause the accident, because his memory of that event would be that he was knocked out of the road when he was trying to prevent it.

The IMDB credits for this film list a character as "Patient X", and there is one character, Aidan's hospital roommate, who seems to qualify for this designation.  The layout of the hospital room seems incongruous and inefficient, but was probably done that way to make camera angles comfortable during their conversation there.

That conversation gives us another predestination paradox:  it smacks of fixed time.  The patient, who seems crazy and has both wrists bandaged, knows that Aidan has traveled to the past because he, the patient, already saw Aidan arrive earlier in the day.  Yet this Aidan has never found the hole in the bathroom floor and so never traveled to the past.  Therefore he never arrived in the past.

Of course, we're working on the theory that there are an infinite number of parallel universes out there, so it would make sense that some other version of Aidan from some other universe came out of the hole earlier in the day.  The problem, though, is figuring out how, if all the universes are the same, any version of Aidan ever found the hole in the floor.  As we saw already, he has no reason to go to the motel if he does not arrive to tell himself not to go, and he will not arrive to tell himself not to go unless he went, so that will never happen.  Further, the only reason he checks the floor in the bathroom of room 41 is that Patient X tells him there's a hole there and that he has to enter it, and the only way Patient X can know this is if he has seen Aidan either enter or exit the hole.  Note that when Aidan goes to get a room at the motel, he is given room 11, not room 41; he has to break into room 41 to investigate the bathroom.  Indeed, the only reason he checks into the motel at all is that Patient X has told him he must go down the rabbit hole.

Thus there can be no universe in which Patient X tells Aidan where to find the portal unless in some universe Aidan finds the portal, and no way for Aidan to find the portal unless Patient X tells him.  We have another impossibility.  An infinite number of identical universes does not solve this for us.

This situation becomes more confused.  Aidan finds the portal as Patient X told him, and uses it, emerging earlier in the day to find Patient X jumping on the bed holding a knife.  Aidan leaves and then returns.  He finds that Patient X has cut his wrists with the knife, and he calls emergency services for an ambulance before again vanishing into the hole in the bathroom.  This causes Patient X to be hospitalized as Aidan's roommate.  In order for Patient X to be in the hospital, he must cut himself in the hotel room, and Aidan must find him in time to call the ambulance.  If Aidan did not make the trip to the past, Patient X never reaches the hospital and so never tells Aidan to travel to the past.  Our impossibility is complicated.

Patient X gives us more problems over time.  His particular form of insanity seems to include that he correctly surmises facts about the future.  Most notably, we have the sequence that Aidan saw him in the hospital with his wrists bandaged, then saw him jumping on the bed with the knife, then found him with his wrists slashed and called an ambulance, then later again encountered him jumping on the bed with the knife.  This time he tries to warn him, and Patient X goes into a strange line about whether this is the first time they met here or the second, and says (reminiscent of the error in The Time Machine , in which the Morlock claims Hartdeggen can't save Emma because it would create a paradox so he is prevented from doing so) that Aidan can't prevent him from cutting himself because were he to do so he would never meet in the hospital and would never be here.  That, though, is not multiple dimension theory--the entire point of multiple dimension theory is that the other version of you in this world is not your past self but someone else, and that means the Patient X jumping on the bed the second time is not the same Patient X as either the one he met in the hospital or the one who cut his wrists.  They are in different universes.

Aidan shares an apartment with Nick and Jess.  We first meet them when he returns from meeting his temporal duplicate , and he attempts to explain to them what happened.  They are waiting by his bedside when he awakens following the accident.  Then they appear in one other scene, conversing with him while he is trying to persuade them that he is a temporal duplicate.

At this point it is getting difficult to know what is happening without a scorecard, and they have not provided one.  We are not certain whether this is the Aidan who warned Aidan, or whether this is the Aidan who was warned now having made another trip to the past.  What is more interesting, though, is that Aidan appears to have taken a lesson from Primer , observing one of their mistakes and using it to his advantage.  He deactivates his cellular phone, places it on the table, and tells Nick to call him.  Nick does, and reaches Aidan--the Aidan for whom this is the original universe--visiting his gran.  Because the phone Nick can see is deactivated, the system finds the other identical phone.  Of course, Nick thinks it a trick, but can't determine how it could be done.

There is a simple way it could be done.  Aidan needs to find someone who can sound like him and pass for him, and give him his phone, then get an identical phone to put on the table.  Nick probably would not be able to tell that this was not Aidan's phone, so the difficult part really is whether someone else can pass for Aidan that way.  But Nick doesn't think of that, and Aidan isn't actually doing that, so it's kind of moot.

More than anything else, though, this encounter demonstrates to us that the multiple universes are becoming extremely varied, all from the travels of the multiple versions of a single traveler--and that raises another question for us.

It is not always simple to distinguish varying versions of multiple dimension theory simply from observation, but there are some clues here that may help.

When Aidan is being questioned by the police, he makes the statement, I'm not the only one out there.

Every time any version of Aidan travels to the past, he leaves that universe--that version of him is gone.  There is some other universe in which he has arrived.  He duplicates himself for as long as he is in that universe--forever, effectively, unless he again departs.

If the concept is one of divergent dimensions, there is initially only one universe, which we will call U1.  There is likewise only one Aidan, A1.  When he travels to the past, his impact is to "change the past" such that at the moment of his arrival a new universe, U2, is created, in which there is another Aidan, A2, whose life to this moment is the same as that of the other Aidan to this moment.  That entire universe is identical to U1 except to the degree that it is altered by the presence and actions of Aidan within it.

Aidan can never leave U1 again, because he left it and will never return.  However, there are now two Aidans in U2, and either or both of them can leave.  If A1 leaves again, he creates U3; if A2 leaves instead, he creates U3.  However, U3, under divergent dimension theory, is peculiar, because it is a copy not of U1 but of U2--the universe that is different because A1 arrived.  If A2 leaves U2 and creates U3, then A3 is already there, and A1 arrives on schedule.  But if A1 leaves U2 and creates U3, then A3 is there and A1 arrives from U2 but also (because U3 is a perfect copy of U2) arrives on schedule from U1.  We thus have A1(a) (coming directly from U1) and A1(b) (coming originally from U1 by way of U2) in U3.

Note that if A1 has already left U2 and created U3, and then A2 leaves from U2, A2 does not land in U3 with A1, because the universe he creates, U4, is another identical copy of U2 from which he leaves, not a copy of U3.  That universe will contain A4, A2, and another duplicate, A1(c), who came directly from U1.  The number of Aidans keeps increasing, and they are not all in the same universe, but there are copies of copies:  Since A1 created the first divergent universe and there is no other Aidan to leave universe 1, every universe is a copy (of a copy of a copy of a copy...) of universe 2, incorporating the arrival of A1.  That arrival cannot be erased; it is part of every universe after the first.

Also, significantly, since every universe created by the departure of any version of Aidan is a duplicate of the universe from which he departed, once we see the arrival of any version of Aidan in any universe through which our Aidan travels, that version of Aidan must arrive in every subsequent universe to which he travels--his arrival is duplicated along with all the rest of the history of the departure universe.  That means that when Aidan leaves the first time we see him leave, inspired by the arrival of his doppelganger, every universe to which he travels, every universe he subsequently creates, must have the arrival of that same Aidan on that same mission.  However, that Aidan is conspicuously absent from the final version of history when someone else arrives to the same point in time and space and tells Aidan not that he should stay away from the motel but that he must go there.  Divergent dimension theory breaks down at this point, because the film fails to recognize the complete duplication of each version of history.

Some will take an alternate view, to the effect that there is an original baseline history and any time traveler creating a new history does so not from the universe he knows but from that baseline history.  There are many problems with that, but the most glaring would be that ultimately there can only be two Aidans in any history--the original one who never left, and the one whose arrival created this divergence.  There cannot then be "others" out there, only one other, and only one knows that there is more than one of him unless he has already contacted the other.  That is not consistent with what we see in this film, either, particularly as old Aidan (still ahead) exists in every universe we see, which would preclude the possibility of any younger version of Aidan arriving in that universe.

With parallel dimension theory, the number of universes is vast.  It might be infinite, but that's not particularly relevant.  What matters is that it is fixed--and so is the number of Aidans.  The other issues are the arrival points of the various Aidans, and the fact that all universes are identical except to the degree that they are diversified by the arrivals of time travelers.

To illustrate, A1 leaves U1 and arrives in U2.  Presumably (because as we noted it is necessary for some version of Aidan to travel to the past without prompting from some other version of Aidan who already did so) whatever happened in his universe caused him to find that hole in the bathroom floor of room 41 at the East Gate Motel.  That, though, means, given that every universe is identical, that either every Aidan in every universe is going to find that same hole at the same time in the same way, or the actions of A1 have been such in U2 that A2 does not find that hole.

(There is the possibility that the actions of A1 are such that A2 finds the hole at a different time because of different causes, but that is a distinct problem.)

If A1 changes nothing that prevents A2 from finding the hole the same way at the same time, then all the universes are still the same except probably U1 (from which A1 departed but to which no Aidan arrived).  However, if A1's arrival in U2 prevents A2 from departing, then no Aidan arrives in U3--which means that A3 will leave U3 and arrive in U4, preventing A4 from leaving for U5, allowing A5 to leave for U6.  The result is that our vast collection of universes has now been divided into two groups, in one group of which Aidan left and was gone thereafter, and in the other of which Aidan arrived and thereafter there were two of him.  The vast collection of universes is no longer coherent; there are two different kinds.

That, though, inherently assumes that there is a fixed relationship between these universes, that for any universe X the same traveler departing in the same way at the same time would find himself in universe X+1.  What if the relationships are random?

Let's just keep the example simple:  assume four universes.  In each universe, events have led to Aidan's departure.  Each of the four Aidans will go to a different universe from his universe of origin, which means one chance in three of any one of them landing in any particular universe other than his own.  If I'm doing the math right (and don't hold me to it--I tackled it four times before I found a method that I thought was getting me what I needed), The odds of each of them landing in a different universe are only about one in thirteen (12 cases in 156 possibles, once you exclude all those in which a traveler goes to his own universe), and thus only one chance in thirteen that we get one traveler arriving in each universe when one departs from each universe.  The most likely outcome at just over four in ten (64 cases) has two arriving in one universe and none in one of the other three; This is closely followed (56 cases, better than seven in twenty) by two in each of two universes, with none in the other two, and even the odds of three in the same universe and one in another are better than all even (24 cases, about three in twenty).

The disparities worsen as the number of universes increases.  Given the vast number of parallel universes assumed, that means that many universes would have dozens, possibly hundreds, of Aidans arriving from the same departure time, and other universes would have none at all, with most universes having a very few but not many having exactly one.

This is complicated by the fact that the mode of transport takes Aidan from and to exactly the same geographical coordinates--multiple Aidans would be emerging from the same hole at the same moment.  The bathroom in some worlds will be very crowded.

Based on this, it seems unlikely that we are looking at an original cosmos of many parallel universes, and more likely that this is a divergent dimension scenario in which the arrival of Aidan creates a new universe branching from the one from which he departed.  Yet it does not appear that divergent theory works either.

In Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure , the intrepid duo several times use the future to change the past.  (They do this again in their Bogus Journey , but that's not a new idea anymore then.)  Of course, the Bill & Ted films do not work in multiple dimension theory--they only work in fixed time or replacement theory, because in multiple dimension theory you cannot change events in your own past, and therefore they could not have gone back and planted the keys where they could find them because those keys would not be in that universe.

That seems to be the mistake made here.

Aidan has been arrested, and made the comment to the police that he is not the only one of him out there.  Another version of him meanwhile is working to set him free.  He hides a hacksaw under a trash can near a lightpole outside the police station, and then calls in what is probably a bomb scare so that the police will have to evacuate their own building.  The Aidan in custody thus is removed from the building where they had been interrogating him and handcuffed to that light pole along with another prisoner while officers attempted to deal with the bomb scare.  Aidan knocks over the trashcan, and finds the hacksaw, maneuvers to pull it to himself, saws through the chain on his cuffs to escape the pole, and flees leaving the hacksaw behind.  Evading the police, he goes apparently to his own workshop (we have never previously seen it), finds an identical hacksaw, and saws the cuffs themselves to remove them completely.  He then takes the hacksaw with him back to earlier in the day, goes to the parking lot where he would later be cuffed, and hides the hacksaw under the trashcan.

Rewind a bit.  During his interrogation, Aidan has told the police that he found a way to travel through time; that was why there was more than one of him out there.  One of them asks why, if he can travel in time, he doesn't help himself escape.  When the alarm sounds, he says, "Thanks for the idea."  It thus appears that he looks for the hacksaw because while he was in custody he devised this plan to free himself.  It is, of course, a fixed time trope:  he cannot free himself if he is not freed, and he cannot be freed if he does not free himself.  We have a fairly obvious predestination paradox (yes, another one) but with another complication.

The only reason for Aidan to hide a hacksaw under the trashcan is that he knows he is going to be handcuffed to that specific pole.  That means he must have been handcuffed to that specific pole at some time when there was no hacksaw under the trashcan.  If so, though, he did not find the hacksaw and escape, and did not thereafter retrieve the hacksaw and take it to hide under the trashcan.

The only solution that works is that some version of Aidan knew that some version of Aidan was going to be chained to that pole, and that the trashcan would be tipped when the police were not watching.  That almost certainly has to be a version of Aidan that was chained to the pole.  He must later have escaped some other way, and then picked up the hacksaw and taken it back to hide under the trashcan, hoping that somehow it would wind up where his other self could get it.  Note, too, that he must have taken the hacksaw from some point in the future and carried it back to the past:  had he traveled to the past and then picked up the hacksaw to take to the park, when his doppelganger reached the workshop the hacksaw would already have been removed.  All of this is layers of complication; we cannot begin to guess how Aidan managed to escape the police without the hacksaw and then think to hide the hacksaw there in any version of events in which he did not start by finding the hacksaw under the trashcan.

Aidan might eventually devise a plan to free himself, but it would take several passes through the situation to get the details right, and until he does he is going to have to escape some other way.

Aidan learns that he actually can change the world when he meets a well-dressed lawyer in that same diner, whom he recognizes as being his hospital roommate, "Patient X".  He asks a few awkward questions and discovers that there was a point in the man's life when he was about to go to war, and then something interrupted and he didn't go.  This, Aidan concludes, is the change.

At first it seems as if perhaps this is one of those "every possible universe exists" stories, and we have only now encountered a noticeable difference between this universe and all the others we have seen.  (After all, if "every possible universe exists" you must exist in hundreds that differ from each other solely by what I ate for dinner.)  However, not long thereafter we learn that the other Patient X is also in this universe, and he believes that he is responsible for his doppelganger's life because he did something that prevented the doppelganger from going to the war.  He says that the way to change someone's life is to remove him from the situation so he never faces that choice.

There is a flaw at this point, but it's probably an unavoidable one:  for X to be a successful lawyer, he will have had to have spent quite a few years in study and work to reach this point; that means that Patient X must have traveled back quite a few years to effect the change in Lawyer X' life, and since you cannot travel forward in time, Patient X must be quite a few years older than Lawyer X.  That's not easy to do convincingly in live actor movies, and they fail to make the effort (no makeup is used to age or youthen the actor in either role).

It does raise the question of motivation.  Patient X does not in any way himself benefit from having steered his doppelganger's life into becoming Lawyer X.  Similarly, Aidan can create a world in which Lauren is not killed in the crash and possibly his doppelganger manages to reunite with her, but the Lauren he knew is still dead and he lives in a world in which he has no place, can claim no identity, and will probably always be alone.  He is in effect the brother that never actually existed in this world , and although it might make him feel a bit better to believe that there is a universe in which Lauren lives, it is not his universe; he's a stranger there himself.  The film recognizes this during the philosophy discussion and Aidan's insigful observation is, "That sucks."

However, it tells him that there are ways to change events, and he decides he should do that.

There is an unexplained sequence of events that leave us wondering what Aidan was doing, or trying to do, but which also tells us something about that hole in the floor.

After failing to prevent the crash, one of the Aidans who has already come from the future removes Lauren's dead body from the vehicle and carries it to the motel.  It then appears that he put her body into the hole in the floor and followed her down.  We next see him emerge; we do not again see Lauren.  However, as he emerges, he reaches back into the hole as if he is trying to grab something--as perhaps you would do if you had a suitcase in such a situation, climbing through the hole yourself and then reaching back to grab the handle of the bag you left behind.  The problem is, the suitcase can't be there, or more accurately, his hand can't go wherever the suitcase is.

It is unclear exactly how, or when, the hole works.  We know that if he enters it entirely and exits entirely, he is twelve hours in the past.  Apparently, though, he can stick his hand into the hole without the hand traveling into the past, or if it does he can draw it back to the future if he has not followed it.  However, the suitcase, if it actually "is" anywhere, is in the corridor leading from twelve hours in the future to what is now a moment ago (just before he emerged), and if he reaches into the hole he cannot reach it.  Anything you drop in that hole that you do not recover before exiting it is gone forever.

It also raises another issue, one that we considered briefly in connection with Primer .  Aidan enters the hole at two in the afternoon and emerges at two in the morning.  He looks around, and at five after two in the morning he enters the hole--but he is already in that hole, traveling back from eleven hours fifty-five minutes in the future, and will not emerge until five minutes ago.  Does he encounter himself?

The answer in this case seems to be that he is never really "in" the hole, as in a static place like the various incarnations of Wells' time machine ( H. G. Well's The Time Machine , Time After Time , The Time Machine ).  He rather must leap from point to point, crossing time (and the dimensions) in an instant.  He is not really "in the hole" at all, but passing through a doorway from one point to another.

It is an interesting design that would probably work, from a metaphysical perspective, if it weren't buried in a film that has so many other problems.

It is at one point stated that every time Aidan passes into and out of the hole he travels back twelve hours.  For most of the movie, that's not such a big issue.  However, it becomes an issue as the film moves toward its climax.

We might estimate that it takes perhaps twenty to thirty seconds to climb into the hole and out again.  It is also exercise, something less strenuous than pullups perhaps but more strenuous than stair climbing.  If one trip takes him back twelve hours, it would take seven hundred thirty trips to travel back a full year. Assuming that he can, from his perspective, make three trips in a minute (twenty seconds apiece), that's minimally two hundred forty-three and a third minutes, or four hours plus two hundred seconds, of climbing into and out of the hole in the floor to travel back one year.

Aidan travels back to the time when his grandparents were newlyweds.  Conservatively that's forty years; it's probably closer to fifty and it could be sixty--at one point there is mention of a picture Lauren gave Gran for her eightieth birthday--but forty is sufficient to illustrate the problem.  That means that he went through the process twenty-nine thousand two hundred times, and it took minimally one hundred sixty-two hours at three trips per minute.

Obviously he did not do that in one stretch.  For one thing, he would be exhausted probably before he finished the first hour.  This would slow his progress, so that it would take longer.  He would have to eat, rest, sleep.  If he sleeps for eight hours, he loses two thirds of a trip, and that's that much more he has to do to get back that far.  We also see events along the way, as if he stopped for some sightseeing, and while he seems to be a fast runner in good shape, that's going to interrupt him for several hours.

It's also curious what he might have eaten.  He's not making money along the way, so he can't replace any he spends.  If he's using plastic, there will be a date before which it is not valid.  Even if he's carrying a lot of cash, it's probably date-stamped sometime within a few years, most of it within the decade, and before that time it's going to be perceived as counterfeit.  Unlike Richard Collier , Aidan did not prepare for his trip by obtaining antique currency.  Checking my own pockets in January 2016, the earliest date on my four bills is 2009, and among my nine coins I have a quarter from 2004, one from 1996, and a 1991 penny.  Odds are not good that he's carrying old money.  Nor can he, before a reasonable date, pass himself off as himself to beg help from friends or family along the way; he will appear too old.

This is not an impossible trip to the past, but it is a very difficult one, and one which Aidan probably would have had great trouble making.

It also leaves him stranded in the past.  The only way to move to the future is to live through the years--which he does, and we'll come back to that shortly.

To show us that Aidan is traveling back a long time, they keep flashing the room (which he probably does not see every time, since there is little reason for him to leave the bathroom and return after every trip).  It makes sense that the room would change.  It would probably alternate between day and night, since he probably is there sometime after midnight and sometime after noon (the two times when the bathroom is unlikely to be occupied in a hotel room).  It also makes sense that at night the room is sometimes occupied and sometimes vacant, and by day it is rarely occupied but sometimes made up and sometimes in process of being cleaned and changed.  It is also certainly true that over the years the decor would change.  Sensibilities for what makes a nice hotel room in two thousand are probably significantly different from the same attitudes in nineteen seventy.  However, watching the rapid montage of the room is a bit confusing.  At first I thought they kept changing the decor, but on closer examination they have rather attempted to make it appear as if they changed it by sometimes inverting the bedspread--it has a brightly-colored quilt-like pattern on one side and a white lining on the other, but when the lining side is up you can see the bright quilt pattern on the edge.  It probably was not really intended to be reversible, but they reverse it.

And over the course of what we said has to be at least forty years they never change the curtains and always have that same bedspread.

Let us suppose that the hotel manager decides to put plaid curtains in room 41.  Since hotels spend a lot on decor, he is going to install durable curtains, and they are going to last a number of years.  Eventually, though, he is going to replace them, and when he does it is unlikely that they will be saved to be reused (although not impossible).  He does not change the curtains, or the bedspread, or the carpet, every day, or even every month--but he does change them sometimes.

If every universe is the same, the decor is the same in all of them at the same time, and it changes at the same time.  But they probably don't invert the bedspread.

It is obvious why the filmmakers did it.  They were attempting to create a flipbook feeling of running through thousands of trips, seeing the room a bit differently each time, changing the decor by flipping the spread.  Bravo--except that the room would not be different each time.  As with the mannequin in H. G. Wells' The Time Machine it would change a bit at a time and then stay that way, and we would see night and day flash against a decor that then abruptly changed to a new decor and stayed that way for a while as night and day flashed past it.  We would of course see occupied and unoccupied rooms, rooms being changed and rooms ready, but the decor would stay the same.  The filmmakers intended for us to see an identical room showing the passage of time; what they actually showed us was that all the universes are a little bit different, and if they can be different in little things like the bedspread they can also be different in big things like whether King John ever signed Magna Carta or Emperor Constantine ever made Christianity the recognized religion of the western world.  Either the worlds are identical, or they are entirely different.

This is the more complicated for our divergent dimension theorist, because each time Aidan emerges he is creating a new universe that diverges from the one he just left twelve hours earlier.  The bedspread is not going to change twice in twenty-four hours in a motel room.  The room in which he emerges is identical to what the room he left would have been twelve hours before he left it.  Rapid changes in decor are inconsistent with divergent dimensions; with parallel dimensions, they indicate variation, and thus not uniformity.  They goofed.

Or maybe the maid just doesn't know which side of the bedspread is the top so she puts it on upside down some days.

It is still strange that the motel room never changes over all those years, and indeed the motel itself seems not to have changed.  Of course, that could be a budget issue; we can't demand too much from independent films.

That raises another issue incidentally.

In order for Aidan to travel back to when his grandparents were newlyweds, he had to make over twenty-nine thousand trips back half a day.  He enters and exits that hole each time, and each time he is in a new universe--a universe which differs from all previous universes solely in the fact that he emerged from that hole at that moment.  Assuming a rapid turnaround, that is the only difference, and that difference will be included in the next universe, in which he again exits twelve hours earlier.  However, if this is divergent dimension theory, he must create one new universe with every twelve hour hop, and that means over twenty-nine thousand universes are created before he creates the one in which he saves his grandfather and stays in the past to become old Aidan (whom we will address again in a moment).

That, though, means that in these twenty-nine thousand universes (and in any other universes diverging from them, which will happen exponentially because every time he creates a new universe from an earlier point in time, every version of him that departed from the previous universe will depart from this new one and in turn create new universes) Aidan never reached that moment in the past, and so does not exist as old Aidan, the hotel manager.  Those universes are very different from the ones we see.  However, as he says to the philosophy discussion group, he is not the first version of himself to do this.  There are already perhaps billions of diverging universes all of which exist so that he can have reached the point in the past at which he saves his grandfather and becomes the hotel owner.

More than once, Aidan's Gran comments that she wishes his grandfather were there, and more than once she mentions that he drowned because of a golf ball.  When Aidan is talking with Lauren at the diner and she asks about his Gran, he jokes that you can't talk with her for more than a few minutes without her mentioning that golf ball.

When he is talking to his philosophy professor about traveling to the past, the professor suggests that if he ever does get to change the past, he should make sure he changes the important things.

Ultimately he travels back to when his grandparents were newlyweds, and wanders into the woods by a body of water where a young man, his grandfather, is about to hit a golfball into it.  He interrupts the process, and they become involved in conversation, and the golfball is pocketed, not hit.  It is hit the next day, but before Grandfather (Wyatt?) goes into the water to pursue it, he realizes that the gift Aidan gave him the day before is a golf ball, so he does not need to chase the one he just lost.

For what it's worth, I take it to be a river.  This is just one of those things you learn with wilderness skills:  lakes and ponds are perfectly level, but the surface of a river angles downhill.  In the scenes looking across the water, it appears to be slightly higher on the left edge of the screen than on the right, so I conclude either it is a river flowing from left to right, or the camera is sitting on uneven ground, and the actors are leaning to the left to compensate.

We are then privileged to see that in this world, Grandfather is sitting by Gran's bed as she lies dying.  Aidan gave her her wish.  He doesn't know it, though.  He might one day know it, but at the moment he has no way of reaching the future except by growing old--which he apparently decides to do in this dimension, and tampers with a few other things along the way.  No one else knows it either, because in any universe in which Grandfather does not die, no one knows he would have.

The point is that he changed the world for the better for the person who most mattered to him.  So despite all the trouble time travel caused for him, it did ultimately do something good for him, even though he is the only one who will ever know.

There is another predestination paradox here.  In the future, after Aidan has confronted himself, he asks Gran whether there's any mental illness in the family, and concludes ultimately that it's not all in his head.  She tells him, "Isn't everything just in your head?"  Then when he's in the past, a similar conversation reverses their roles, and he says to her, "Isn't everything all just in your head?"  It appears that he got the quote from her which she got from him.  That's not a big deal in fixed time, because of course things don't really happen sequentially--they happen all at once, causation is an illusion, and we perceive them sequentially.  It's not a big deal in replacement theory, because it's simple enough to suppose that one or the other of them (probably Gran) heard the expression from someone else at some point in their lives and so introduced it to the loop from the other source.  However, in multiple dimension theory it is a trope out of place:  Aidan is not saying it to the younger version of the woman who said it to him, but to a woman who will never know him in the future, but will instead meet a different person living his life in this world.  It looks like a loop, but again it is not a loop but a chain, in which each person who repeats the statement is delivering it to someone else.  That's actually less interesting than a predestination paradox.  It suggests that the writers were borrowing tropes from other time travel stories without really understanding them.

In another trope taken from fixed time stories, we discover as we reach the end of the film that after he traveled to the past Aidan stayed in the past and ultimately became the manager (owner?) of the East Gate Motel.  He was the one who put Aidan in room 11 (not room 41); he gave Lauren the job.  He did not attempt to warn them about the accident.

As an incidental, he does not seem to be quite old enough.  Aidan visited his grandparents when they were newlyweds--maybe not newlyweds, but it seems they had not yet had their first child, and the appearance of their circumstance puts them in the world of people who married young and had children early.  What we know of them and what we know of Aidan suggests that when he meets them in the past he is about their age, possibly even older than they are.  If we give them the benefit of the doubt, we might argue that he is not more than ten years younger than they are, and it appears he becomes friends with them along the way putting him solidly in their generation.  Yet his grandmother seems much older than the hotel manager, probably twenty years (we know she is past eighty, he is probably still some years shy of seventy), and that does not fit the observations.  It is a small thing, though, and it may be that Gran is not as old as she looks, old Aidan is older, and there is more of an age difference between them than appears when they are in the past.

In this universe, though, he goes to tell his younger self that he needs to go to the East Gate Motel.  That is exactly opposite from the message his younger time traveling self gave to him.  Yet it has the same effect--absent the aspect of having seen someone who looks like himself, because the motel manager does not look much like him (at least, when we first meet the motel manager we are not in the least suspicious that it might be him).  That, though, gives us another problem, and it's a significant one.

Our first Aidan lives in a world in which his grandfather is gone.  He travels to the past to create a world in which his grandfather never drowned chasing a golf ball ruining grandmother's life, and succeeds, and then as he ages he becomes the manager of the motel in which the time travel hole in the floor is located.

However, our Aidan lives in a world in which that elderly Aidan is the manager of the motel, and the only way he can be there is if he previously traveled to the past, and the only reason he would have done that was to prevent his grandfather from chasing the golf ball--and we know that if he attempts to do that, he succeeds.  Therefore, any universe in which old Aidan is the manager of the hotel must be a universe in which young Aidan arrived in the past and saved his grandfather, a universe in which his grandfather is sitting beside his grandmother's bed and there is no story about a golf ball.  Further, since there is no story about a golf ball, there is no possibility that the Aidan of that world would travel back to save his grandfather.  The events are mutually exclusive; they cannot exist in the same universe.

Certainly they could if this were fixed time, and if it were replacement theory there might be a convoluted way of solving it (probably involving old Aidan regaling young Aidan with the story of his life and why young Aidan needs to travel to the past to save his grandfather--but that's not a likely scenario).  In multiple dimension theory, though, any universe in which old Aidan manages the hotel is a universe in which Grandfather is sitting at Gran's bedside and there never was a golf ball story; and any universe in which a lonely Gran wishes that grandfather were here and tells the golf ball story is a world in which Aidan never arrived in the past and never became old Aidan, manager of the East Gate Motel.  The world in which we started cannot exist.

So we end in an impossibility.

It seems to be one of those movies that attempts to do something no one can figure out, in the hope that in trying to figure it out fans will say it's difficult and deep.  It's not really either, just a temporal impossibility that creates a pastiche of incompatible tropes from other time travel movies.  It just does not work, ultimately.

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Top 100 Time Travel Movies

Best Films about time travel.

• Movies or TV
• IMDb Rating
• In Theaters
• Release Year

1. Back to the Future (1985)

PG | 116 min | Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi

Marty McFly, a 17-year-old high school student, is accidentally sent 30 years into the past in a time-traveling DeLorean invented by his close friend, the maverick scientist Doc Brown.

Director: Robert Zemeckis | Stars: Michael J. Fox , Christopher Lloyd , Lea Thompson , Crispin Glover

Votes: 1,303,316 | Gross: $210.61M

2. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

R | 137 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

A cyborg, identical to the one who failed to kill Sarah Connor, must now protect her ten year old son John from an even more advanced and powerful cyborg.

Director: James Cameron | Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger , Linda Hamilton , Edward Furlong , Robert Patrick

Votes: 1,171,298 | Gross: $204.84M

3. The Terminator (1984)

R | 107 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

A human soldier is sent from 2029 to 1984 to stop an almost indestructible cyborg killing machine, sent from the same year, which has been programmed to execute a young woman whose unborn son is the key to humanity's future salvation.

Director: James Cameron | Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger , Linda Hamilton , Michael Biehn , Paul Winfield

Votes: 922,007 | Gross: $38.40M

4. The Butterfly Effect (2004)

R | 113 min | Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Evan Treborn suffers blackouts during significant events of his life. As he grows up, he finds a way to remember these lost memories and a supernatural way to alter his life by reading his journal.

Directors: Eric Bress , J. Mackye Gruber | Stars: Ashton Kutcher , Amy Smart , Melora Walters , Elden Henson

Votes: 520,228 | Gross: $57.94M

5. Back to the Future Part II (1989)

PG | 108 min | Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi

After visiting 2015, Marty McFly must repeat his visit to 1955 to prevent disastrous changes to 1985...without interfering with his first trip.

Director: Robert Zemeckis | Stars: Michael J. Fox , Christopher Lloyd , Lea Thompson , Tom Wilson

Votes: 571,277 | Gross: $118.50M

6. 12 Monkeys (1995)

R | 129 min | Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

In a future world devastated by disease, a convict is sent back in time to gather information about the man-made virus that wiped out most of the human population on the planet.

Director: Terry Gilliam | Stars: Bruce Willis , Madeleine Stowe , Brad Pitt , Joseph Melito

Votes: 645,727 | Gross: $57.14M

7. Groundhog Day (1993)

PG | 101 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

A narcissistic, self-centered weatherman finds himself in a time loop on Groundhog Day.

Director: Harold Ramis | Stars: Bill Murray , Andie MacDowell , Chris Elliott , Stephen Tobolowsky

Votes: 683,447 | Gross: $70.91M

8. Avengers: Endgame (2019)

PG-13 | 181 min | Action, Adventure, Drama

After the devastating events of Avengers: Infinity War (2018), the universe is in ruins. With the help of remaining allies, the Avengers assemble once more in order to reverse Thanos' actions and restore balance to the universe.

Directors: Anthony Russo , Joe Russo | Stars: Robert Downey Jr. , Chris Evans , Mark Ruffalo , Chris Hemsworth

Votes: 1,261,150 | Gross: $858.37M

9. X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

PG-13 | 132 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

The X-Men send Wolverine to the past in a desperate effort to change history and prevent an event that results in doom for both humans and mutants.

Director: Bryan Singer | Stars: Patrick Stewart , Ian McKellen , Hugh Jackman , James McAvoy

Votes: 743,968 | Gross: $233.92M

10. Interstellar (2014)

PG-13 | 169 min | Adventure, Drama, Sci-Fi

When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.

Director: Christopher Nolan | Stars: Matthew McConaughey , Anne Hathaway , Jessica Chastain , Mackenzie Foy

Votes: 2,089,888 | Gross: $188.02M

11. Predestination (I) (2014)

R | 97 min | Action, Drama, Sci-Fi

As his last assignment, a temporal agent is tasked to travel back in time and prevent a bomb attack in New York in 1975. The hunt, however, turns out to be beyond the bounds of possibility.

Directors: Michael Spierig , Peter Spierig | Stars: Ethan Hawke , Sarah Snook , Noah Taylor , Madeleine West

Votes: 304,024 | Gross: $0.07M

12. Mirage (2018)

TV-MA | 128 min | Drama, Fantasy, Mystery

Two storms separated by 25 years. A woman murdered. A daughter missed. Only 72 hours to discover the truth.

Director: Oriol Paulo | Stars: Adriana Ugarte , Chino Darín , Javier Gutiérrez , Álvaro Morte

Votes: 64,011

13. Palm Springs (2020)

R | 90 min | Comedy, Fantasy, Mystery

Stuck in a time loop, two wedding guests develop a budding romance while living the same day over and over again.

Director: Max Barbakow | Stars: Andy Samberg , Cristin Milioti , J.K. Simmons , Peter Gallagher

Votes: 181,917

14. Midnight in Paris (2011)

PG-13 | 94 min | Comedy, Fantasy, Romance

While on a trip to Paris with his fiancée's family, a nostalgic screenwriter finds himself mysteriously going back to the 1920s every day at midnight.

Director: Woody Allen | Stars: Owen Wilson , Rachel McAdams , Kathy Bates , Kurt Fuller

Votes: 449,216 | Gross: $56.82M

15. Timecrimes (2007)

R | 92 min | Horror, Mystery, Sci-Fi

A man accidentally gets into a time machine and travels back in time nearly an hour. Finding himself will be the first of a series of disasters of unforeseeable consequences.

Director: Nacho Vigalondo | Stars: Karra Elejalde , Candela Fernández , Bárbara Goenaga , Nacho Vigalondo

Votes: 68,654 | Gross: $0.04M

16. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

PG-13 | 113 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

A soldier fighting aliens gets to relive the same day over and over again, the day restarting every time he dies.

Director: Doug Liman | Stars: Tom Cruise , Emily Blunt , Bill Paxton , Brendan Gleeson

Votes: 734,804 | Gross: $100.21M

17. About Time (I) (2013)

R | 123 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

At the age of 21, Tim discovers he can travel in time and change what happens and has happened in his own life. His decision to make his world a better place by getting a girlfriend turns out not to be as easy as you might think.

Director: Richard Curtis | Stars: Domhnall Gleeson , Rachel McAdams , Bill Nighy , Lydia Wilson

Votes: 384,829 | Gross: $15.32M

18. The Time Traveler's Wife (2009)

PG-13 | 107 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

Henry DeTamble, a librarian, possesses a unique gene that lets him involuntarily travel through time. His wife, Claire Abshire, finds it difficult to cope with it.

Director: Robert Schwentke | Stars: Eric Bana , Rachel McAdams , Ron Livingston , Michelle Nolden

Votes: 157,726 | Gross: $63.41M

19. Back to the Future Part III (1990)

PG | 118 min | Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi

Stranded in 1955, Marty McFly learns about the death of Doc Brown in 1885 and must travel back in time to save him. With no fuel readily available for the DeLorean, the two must figure how to escape the Old West before Emmett is murdered.

Director: Robert Zemeckis | Stars: Michael J. Fox , Christopher Lloyd , Mary Steenburgen , Tom Wilson

Votes: 479,801 | Gross: $87.73M

20. Time Sweep (2016)

Not Rated | 103 min | Drama

Franco loses his investigative journalist girlfriend Julia in a traffic accident and he'll do anything to get her back...

Director: Victor Postiglione | Stars: Luis Luque , Guillermo Pfening , María Nela Sinisterra

21. Star Trek (2009)

PG-13 | 127 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

The brash James T. Kirk tries to live up to his father's legacy with Mr. Spock keeping him in check as a vengeful Romulan from the future creates black holes to destroy the Federation one planet at a time.

Director: J.J. Abrams | Stars: Chris Pine , Zachary Quinto , Simon Pegg , Leonard Nimoy

Votes: 619,691 | Gross: $257.73M

22. Flight of the Navigator (1986)

PG | 90 min | Adventure, Comedy, Family

In 1978, a boy travels eight years into the future and has an adventure with an intelligent, wisecracking alien ship.

Director: Randal Kleiser | Stars: Joey Cramer , Paul Reubens , Cliff De Young , Veronica Cartwright

Votes: 51,591 | Gross: $18.56M

23. Rewind (1999)

94 min | Comedy

A single guy has a video recorder that when re-winded it rewinds his life too. One night He invites to dinner some friends and records the party and keeps rewinding the camera every time something goes wrong with unpredictable results.

Director: Nicolás Muñoz Avia | Stars: Daniel Guzmán , María Adánez , Enrique Simón , Paz Gómez

24. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

PG-13 | 127 min | Adventure, Drama, Family

When Jacob (Asa Butterfield) discovers clues to a mystery that stretches across time, he finds Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. But the danger deepens after he gets to know the residents and learns about their special powers.

Director: Tim Burton | Stars: Eva Green , Asa Butterfield , Samuel L. Jackson , Judi Dench

Votes: 187,774 | Gross: $87.24M

25. Men in Black³ (2012)

PG-13 | 106 min | Action, Adventure, Comedy

Agent J travels in time to M.I.B.'s early days in 1969 to stop an alien from assassinating his friend Agent K and changing history.

Director: Barry Sonnenfeld | Stars: Will Smith , Tommy Lee Jones , Josh Brolin , Jemaine Clement

Votes: 386,263 | Gross: $179.02M

26. Source Code (2011)

PG-13 | 93 min | Action, Drama, Mystery

A soldier wakes up in someone else's body and discovers he's part of an experimental government program to find the bomber of a commuter train within 8 minutes.

Director: Duncan Jones | Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal , Michelle Monaghan , Vera Farmiga , Jeffrey Wright

Votes: 548,769 | Gross: $54.71M

27. The Time Machine (1960)

G | 103 min | Adventure, Romance, Sci-Fi

A man's vision for a utopian society is disillusioned when travelling forward into time reveals a dark and dangerous society.

Director: George Pal | Stars: Rod Taylor , Alan Young , Yvette Mimieux , Sebastian Cabot

Votes: 44,736

28. Idiocracy (2006)

R | 84 min | Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi

Corporal Joe Bauers, a decisively average American, is selected as a guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program. He is forgotten and left to awaken to a future so incredibly moronic that he's easily the most intelligent person alive.

Director: Mike Judge | Stars: Luke Wilson , Maya Rudolph , Dax Shepard , Terry Crews

Votes: 181,373 | Gross: $0.44M

29. 12 Dates of Christmas (2011 TV Movie)

PG | 90 min | Comedy, Family, Fantasy

A story that follows Kate, a young woman who after a horrible blind date on Christmas Eve, wakes up to find she is re-living that same day and date all over again.

Director: James Hayman | Stars: Laura Miyata , Vijay Mehta , Amy Smart , Audrey Dwyer

Votes: 8,311

30. 12:01 (1993 TV Movie)

PG-13 | 92 min | Comedy, Sci-Fi, Thriller

A man likes a woman at work. He sees her get murdered. He gets drunk and zapped at 12:01AM. Next morning she's back and everything is exactly like the day before. The time loops gives him chances to save her.

Director: Jack Sholder | Stars: Helen Slater , Jonathan Silverman , Nicolas Surovy , Robin Bartlett

Votes: 5,504

31. Time Lapse (2014)

Not Rated | 104 min | Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Three friends discover a mysterious machine that takes pictures twenty-four hours into the future, and conspire to use it for personal gain, until disturbing and dangerous images begin to develop.

Director: Bradley King | Stars: Danielle Panabaker , Matt O'Leary , George Finn , John Rhys-Davies

Votes: 49,035

32. Looper (2012)

R | 119 min | Action, Drama, Sci-Fi

In 2074, when the mob wants to get rid of someone, the target is sent into the past, where a hired gun awaits - someone like Joe - who one day learns the mob wants to 'close the loop' by sending back Joe's future self for assassination.

Director: Rian Johnson | Stars: Joseph Gordon-Levitt , Bruce Willis , Emily Blunt , Paul Dano

Votes: 602,132 | Gross: $66.49M

33. The Lake House (2006)

PG | 99 min | Drama, Fantasy, Romance

A lonely doctor who once occupied an unusual lakeside house begins to exchange love letters with its former resident, a frustrated architect. They must try to unravel the mystery behind their extraordinary romance before it's too late.

Director: Alejandro Agresti | Stars: Keanu Reeves , Sandra Bullock , Christopher Plummer , Ebon Moss-Bachrach

Votes: 157,448 | Gross: $52.33M

34. Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel (2009)

PG-13 | 83 min | Comedy, Sci-Fi

While drinking at their local pub, three social outcasts attempt to navigate a time-travel conundrum.

Director: Gareth Carrivick | Stars: Chris O'Dowd , Marc Wootton , Dean Lennox Kelly , Anna Faris

Votes: 36,507

35. Frequency (2000)

PG-13 | 118 min | Crime, Drama, Mystery

An accidental cross-time radio link connects father and son across 30 years. The son tries to save his father's life, but then must fix the consequences.

Director: Gregory Hoblit | Stars: Dennis Quaid , Jim Caviezel , Shawn Doyle , Elizabeth Mitchell

Votes: 115,536 | Gross: $45.01M

36. Kate & Leopold (2001)

PG-13 | 118 min | Comedy, Fantasy, Romance

An English Duke from 1876 is inadvertently dragged to modern day New York where he falls for a plucky advertising executive.

Director: James Mangold | Stars: Meg Ryan , Hugh Jackman , Liev Schreiber , Breckin Meyer

Votes: 88,970 | Gross: $47.12M

37. Project Almanac (2015)

PG-13 | 106 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

A group of teens discovers secret plans for a time machine, and construct one. However, things start to get out of control.

Director: Dean Israelite | Stars: Amy Landecker , Sofia Black-D'Elia , Virginia Gardner , Jonny Weston

Votes: 84,121 | Gross: $22.35M

38. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

R | 86 min | Adventure, Comedy, Drama

Three magazine employees head out on an assignment to interview a guy who placed a classified advertisement seeking a companion for time travel.

Director: Colin Trevorrow | Stars: Aubrey Plaza , Mark Duplass , Jake Johnson , Karan Soni

Votes: 130,766 | Gross: $4.01M

39. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003)

R | 109 min | Action, Sci-Fi

A machine from a post-apocalyptic future travels back in time to protect a man and a woman from an advanced robotic assassin to ensure they both survive a nuclear attack.

Director: Jonathan Mostow | Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger , Nick Stahl , Kristanna Loken , Claire Danes

Votes: 418,004 | Gross: $150.37M

40. Terminator Salvation (2009)

PG-13 | 115 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

In 2018, a mysterious new weapon in the war against the machines, half-human and half-machine, comes to John Connor on the eve of a resistance attack on Skynet. But whose side is he on, and can he be trusted?

Director: McG | Stars: Christian Bale , Sam Worthington , Anton Yelchin , Moon Bloodgood

Votes: 376,819 | Gross: $125.32M

41. Primer (2004)

PG-13 | 77 min | Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Four friends/fledgling entrepreneurs, knowing that there's something bigger and more innovative than the different error-checking devices they've built, wrestle over their new invention.

Director: Shane Carruth | Stars: Shane Carruth , David Sullivan , Casey Gooden , Anand Upadhyaya

Votes: 113,926 | Gross: $0.42M

42. Synchronicity (IV) (2015)

R | 101 min | Drama, Mystery, Romance

A physicist who invents a time machine must travel back to the past to uncover the truth about his creation and the woman who is trying to steal it.

Director: Jacob Gentry | Stars: Chad McKnight , Brianne Davis , AJ Bowen , Scott Poythress

Votes: 11,316 | Gross: $0.00M

43. Donnie Darko (2001)

R | 113 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

After narrowly escaping a bizarre accident, a troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a man in a large rabbit suit who manipulates him to commit a series of crimes.

Director: Richard Kelly | Stars: Jake Gyllenhaal , Jena Malone , Mary McDonnell , Holmes Osborne

Votes: 848,358 | Gross: $1.48M

44. Time Trap (2017)

Not Rated | 87 min | Action, Adventure, Mystery

A professor enters a cave and goes missing. Some of his students come looking for him and get trapped in the cave as well.

Directors: Mark Dennis , Ben Foster | Stars: Reiley McClendon , Cassidy Gifford , Brianne Howey , Olivia Draguicevich

Votes: 43,293

45. Time Lapse (2014)

46. before i fall (2017).

PG-13 | 98 min | Drama, Fantasy, Mystery

February 12 is just another day in Sam's charmed life, until it turns out to be her last. Stuck reliving her last day over and over, Sam untangles the mystery around her death and discovers everything she's losing.

Director: Ry Russo-Young | Stars: Zoey Deutch , Halston Sage , Cynthy Wu , Medalion Rahimi

Votes: 56,716 | Gross: $12.24M

47. Time Trap (2017)

48. arq (2016).

TV-MA | 88 min | Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Trapped in a lab and stuck in a time loop, a disoriented couple fends off masked raiders while harboring a new energy source that could save humanity.

Director: Tony Elliott | Stars: Robbie Amell , Rachael Taylor , Shaun Benson , Gray Powell

Votes: 41,809

49. Time Bandits (1981)

PG | 110 min | Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy

A young boy accidentally joins a band of time travelling dwarves, as they jump from era to era looking for treasure to steal.

Director: Terry Gilliam | Stars: Sean Connery , Shelley Duvall , John Cleese , Katherine Helmond

Votes: 68,172 | Gross: $42.37M

50. Mr. Peabody & Sherman (2014)

PG | 92 min | Animation, Adventure, Comedy

Sherman, a young boy, misuses a time machine made by his scientist father Mr. Peabody and causes the world history to go haywire. It is now up to Mr. Peabody to rescue his son and the world.

Director: Rob Minkoff | Stars: Ty Burrell , Max Charles , Stephen Colbert , Leslie Mann

Votes: 77,588 | Gross: $111.51M

51. Shrek Forever After (2010)

PG | 93 min | Animation, Adventure, Comedy

Rumpelstiltskin tricks a mid-life crisis burdened Shrek into allowing himself to be erased from existence and cast in a dark alternate timeline where Rumpelstiltskin rules supreme.

Director: Mike Mitchell | Stars: Mike Myers , Cameron Diaz , Eddie Murphy , Antonio Banderas

Votes: 224,026 | Gross: $238.37M

52. Happy Death Day (2017)

PG-13 | 96 min | Comedy, Horror, Mystery

A college student must relive the day of her murder over and over again, in a loop that will end only when she discovers her killer's identity.

Director: Christopher Landon | Stars: Jessica Rothe , Israel Broussard , Ruby Modine , Charles Aitken

Votes: 162,205 | Gross: $55.68M

53. Timecop (1994)

R | 99 min | Action, Crime, Sci-Fi

Max Walker, an officer for a security agency that regulates time travel, must fend for his life against a shady politician who's intent on changing the past to control the future.

Director: Peter Hyams | Stars: Jean-Claude Van Damme , Mia Sara , Ron Silver , Bruce McGill

Votes: 64,040 | Gross: $44.85M

54. I'll Follow You Down (2013)

Not Rated | 89 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

After the disappearance of a young scientist on a business trip, his son and wife struggle to cope, only to make a bizarre discovery years later - one that may bring him home.

Director: Richie Mehta | Stars: John Paul Ruttan , Rufus Sewell , Gillian Anderson , Kiara Glasco

Votes: 8,053

55. Click (2006)

A workaholic architect finds a universal remote that allows him to fast-forward and rewind to different parts of his life. Complications arise when the remote starts to overrule his choices.

Director: Frank Coraci | Stars: Adam Sandler , Kate Beckinsale , Christopher Walken , David Hasselhoff

Votes: 355,959 | Gross: $137.36M

56. When We First Met (2018)

TV-14 | 97 min | Comedy, Fantasy, Romance

Noah meets Avery at a Halloween party and falls in love but gets friend-zoned. 3 years later, she's engaged to someone else. Noah returns in a time machine to fix things.

Director: Ari Sandel | Stars: Adam Devine , Alexandra Daddario , Shelley Hennig , Andrew Bachelor

Votes: 53,823

57. The Time Machine (2002)

PG-13 | 96 min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

Hoping to alter the events of the past, a 19th century inventor instead travels 800,000 years into the future, where he finds humankind divided into two warring races.

Director: Simon Wells | Stars: Guy Pearce , Yancey Arias , Mark Addy , Phyllida Law

Votes: 130,228 | Gross: $56.68M

58. The Jacket (2005)

R | 103 min | Drama, Fantasy, Mystery

A Gulf war veteran is wrongly sent to a mental institution for insane criminals, where he becomes the object of a doctor's experiments, and his life is completely affected by them.

Director: John Maybury | Stars: Adrien Brody , Keira Knightley , Daniel Craig , Kris Kristofferson

Votes: 119,149 | Gross: $6.30M

59. Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016)

PG | 113 min | Adventure, Family, Fantasy

Alice is appointed to save her beloved Mad Hatter from deadly grief by travelling back to the past, but this means fatally harming Time himself, the noble clockwork man with the device needed to save the Hatter's family from the Red Queen.

Director: James Bobin | Stars: Mia Wasikowska , Johnny Depp , Helena Bonham Carter , Anne Hathaway

Votes: 121,856 | Gross: $77.04M

60. Triangle (2009)

R | 99 min | Fantasy, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Five friends set sail and their yacht is overturned by a strange and sudden storm. A mysterious ship arrives to rescue them, and what happens next cannot be explained.

Director: Christopher Smith | Stars: Melissa George , Joshua McIvor , Jack Taylor , Michael Dorman

Votes: 129,378

61. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)

PG-13 | 95 min | Action, Adventure, Comedy

Dr. Evil is back and has invented a new time machine that allows him to go back to the 1960s and steal Austin Powers' mojo, inadvertently leaving him "shagless".

Director: Jay Roach | Stars: Mike Myers , Heather Graham , Michael York , Robert Wagner

Votes: 248,388 | Gross: $206.04M

62. Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

R | 99 min | Comedy, Sci-Fi

A malfunctioning time machine at a ski resort takes a man back to 1986 with his two friends and nephew, where they must relive a fateful night and not change anything to make sure the nephew is born.

Director: Steve Pink | Stars: John Cusack , Rob Corddry , Craig Robinson , Clark Duke

Votes: 186,121 | Gross: $50.29M

63. Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

PG-13 | 103 min | Comedy, Drama, Fantasy

Peggy Sue faints at a high school reunion. When she wakes up, she finds herself in her own past, just before she finished school.

Director: Francis Ford Coppola | Stars: Kathleen Turner , Nicolas Cage , Barry Miller , Catherine Hicks

Votes: 40,704 | Gross: $41.38M

64. Grand Tour: Disaster in Time (1991)

PG-13 | 99 min | Mystery, Sci-Fi

Before they can complete renovations on their new inn, Widower (Ben Wilson) and daughter (Hillary) are visited by a woman seeking immediate lodging for her strange group of travellers. Why ... See full summary  »

Director: David Twohy | Stars: Jeff Daniels , Ariana Richards , Emilia Crow , Jim Haynie

Votes: 3,085

65. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)

PG | 90 min | Adventure, Comedy, Music

Two rock-'n-rolling teens, on the verge of failing their class, set out on a quest to make the ultimate school history report after being presented with a time machine.

Director: Stephen Herek | Stars: Keanu Reeves , Alex Winter , George Carlin , Terry Camilleri

Votes: 141,401 | Gross: $40.49M

66. Time Freak (2018)

PG-13 | 104 min | Comedy, Drama, Romance

A genius teenage boy is in love with a girl who breaks up with him after a year. He invents a time machine and tries to fix the breakup repeatedly. He finally goes a year back with his friend to fix the bad days.

Director: Andrew Bowler | Stars: Asa Butterfield , Sophie Turner , Skyler Gisondo , Will Peltz

Votes: 9,806 | Gross: $0.01M

67. Naked (I) (2017)

TV-14 | 96 min | Comedy, Fantasy, Romance

Nervous about finally getting married, a guy is forced to relive the same nerve-wracking hours over and over again until he gets things right on his wedding day.

Director: Michael Tiddes | Stars: Marlon Wayans , Regina Hall , Dennis Haysbert , J.T. Jackson

Votes: 21,564

68. Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991)

PG | 93 min | Adventure, Comedy, Fantasy

A tyrant from the future creates evil android doubles of Bill and Ted and sends them back to eliminate the originals.

Director: Peter Hewitt | Stars: Keanu Reeves , Alex Winter , William Sadler , Joss Ackland

Votes: 80,930 | Gross: $38.04M

69. The Man from the Future (2011)

106 min | Comedy, Fantasy, Romance

Zero is a brilliant scientist. However, 20 years ago, he was publicly humiliated when he lost Helena, the love of his life. One day, an accidental experience with one of his inventions ... See full summary  »

Director: Cláudio Torres | Stars: Wagner Moura , Alinne Moraes , Maria Luísa Mendonça , Fernando Ceylão

Votes: 6,921

70. Somewhere in Time (1980)

PG | 103 min | Drama, Fantasy, Romance

A Chicago playwright uses self-hypnosis to travel back in time and meet the actress whose vintage portrait hangs in a grand hotel.

Director: Jeannot Szwarc | Stars: Christopher Reeve , Jane Seymour , Christopher Plummer , Teresa Wright

Votes: 32,418 | Gross: $9.71M

71. Deja Vu (2006)

PG-13 | 126 min | Action, Crime, Sci-Fi

After a ferry is bombed in New Orleans, an A.T.F. agent joins a unique investigation using experimental surveillance technology to find the bomber, but soon finds himself becoming obsessed with one of the victims.

Director: Tony Scott | Stars: Denzel Washington , Paula Patton , Jim Caviezel , Val Kilmer

Votes: 327,074 | Gross: $64.04M

72. Time Jumpers (2018)

Not Rated | 79 min | Sci-Fi

When a young man finds a time machine device, his life spins out of control.

Directors: Svend Ploug Johansen , Dominic Smith , April Wright | Stars: Samuel D. Evans , Taylor Gerard Hart , Kelli Vonshay Henderson , Mathilde Norholt

73. Time Changer (2002)

PG | 95 min | Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi

A Bible professor from 1890 comes forward in time to the present via a time machine and cannot believe the things that he sees!

Director: Rich Christiano | Stars: D. David Morin , Gavin MacLeod , Hal Linden , Jennifer O'Neill

Votes: 2,908 | Gross: $1.28M

74. Altered Hours (2016)

TV-MA | 101 min | Sci-Fi, Thriller

A young insomniac's black-market sleep aid sends his mind time-travelling one day into the future, where he's the suspect in the disappearance of a girl he hasn't met -- yet.

Director: Bruce Wemple | Stars: Ryan Munzert , Briana Pozner , Rick Montgomery Jr. , Thea McCartan

75. Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (2015)

R | 93 min | Comedy, Mystery, Sci-Fi

When Lou's shot in the groin, Nick and Jacob drag him in the Hot Tub Time Machine to go back in time and save Lou. The three end up 10 years in the future, where they need to go to find the shooter.

Director: Steve Pink | Stars: Rob Corddry , Craig Robinson , Clark Duke , Adam Scott

Votes: 41,562 | Gross: $12.28M

76. The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations (2009)

R | 90 min | Crime, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Sam Reide uses his power to time travel to solve the mystery of his girlfriend's death.

Director: Seth Grossman | Stars: Chris Carmack , Rachel Miner , Melissa Jones , Kevin Yon

Votes: 20,672

77. Freejack (1992)

R | 110 min | Action, Crime, Sci-Fi

Bounty hunters from the future transport a doomed race car driver to New York City in 2009, where his mind will be replaced with that of a dead billionaire.

Director: Geoff Murphy | Stars: Emilio Estevez , Mick Jagger , Rene Russo , Anthony Hopkins

Votes: 17,425 | Gross: $17.13M

78. Another Time (2018)

TV-MA | 89 min | Adventure, Comedy, Romance

Just because a journey leads you somewhere you didn't expect, doesn't mean you ended up in the wrong place.

Director: Thomas Hennessy | Stars: Justin Hartley , Chrishell Stause , James Kyson , Alan Pietruszewski

Votes: 1,119

79. The Butterfly Effect 2 (2006)

R | 92 min | Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Nick Larson discovers a supernatural way to alter his life and travel back in time to key moments in his life by looking at photographs.

Director: John R. Leonetti | Stars: Eric Lively , Erica Durance , Dustin Milligan , Gina Holden

Votes: 37,291

80. See You Yesterday (2019)

TV-MA | 84 min | Action, Adventure, Crime

Two Brooklyn teenage prodigies, C.J. Walker and Sebastian Thomas, build makeshift time machines to save C.J.'s brother, Calvin, from being wrongfully killed by a police officer.

Director: Stefon Bristol | Stars: Eden Duncan-Smith , Dante Crichlow , Astro , Marsha Stephanie Blake

Votes: 11,593

81. Curvature (2017)

90 min | Mystery, Sci-Fi, Thriller

An engineer travels back in time to stop herself from committing a murder.

Director: Diego Hallivis | Stars: Lyndsy Fonseca , Glenn Morshower , Alex Lanipekun , Noah Bean

Votes: 3,074

82. Paradox (III) (2016)

TV-MA | 90 min | Action, Drama, Sci-Fi

A time machine's tested first time by a man in the team traveling 1 hour into the future. He returns to warn them against killings in the next hour. Is it possible to change things in the "past"? Twist after twist follow.

Director: Michael Hurst | Stars: Zoë Bell , Malik Yoba , Adam Huss , Bjørn Alexander

Votes: 3,331

83. A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

PG | 109 min | Adventure, Drama, Family

After the disappearance of her scientist father, three peculiar beings send Meg, her brother, and her friend to space in order to find him.

Director: Ava DuVernay | Stars: Storm Reid , Oprah Winfrey , Reese Witherspoon , Mindy Kaling

Votes: 47,737 | Gross: $100.48M

84. Counter Clockwise (I) (2016)

Unrated | 91 min | Sci-Fi, Thriller

A scientist invents a time machine that transports him six months into the future.

Director: George Moïse | Stars: Michael Kopelow , Frank Simms , Kerry Knuppe , Alice Rietveld

85. S. Darko (2009)

R | 103 min | Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Donnie Darko's little sister Samantha and her best friend Corey are on a cross-country road trip, but soon find themselves entangled in a dangerous glitch in the time-space continuum.

Director: Chris Fisher | Stars: Daveigh Chase , Briana Evigan , James Lafferty , Ed Westwick

Votes: 14,457

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2007, Documentary/Biography, 1h 57m

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41   photos.

Nick O'Neill, an aspiring writer and actor, finishes writing a play just before his death in a Rhode Island club fire.

Genre: Documentary, Biography, Music

Original Language: English

Director: Christian de Rezendes

Producer: Christian de Rezendes , Christian O'Neill

Release Date (Streaming): Aug 9, 2016

Runtime: 1h 57m

Production Co: Breaking Branches Pictures

Cast & Crew

Nick O'Neill

Christian O'Neill

Gabby Sherba

Christian de Rezendes

Original Music

Co-Director

Michael Teoli

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