Flights to Guam! DeLoreans! Airborne telephone booths! Why can't the fictional scientists of movies and television invent a simple, practical way of sending people forward and backward through time that doesn't require all the complicated hassle? In honor of tonight's Lost finale, and the hilarious multitude of other time-traveling blockbusters coming to multiplexes over the next few weeks, we present the Ten Least Convenient Methods of Time Travel in Entertainment History.
1 The Butterfly Effect
In this 2004 Ashton Kutcher-produced sci-fi thriller, Kutcher's character is able to send himself back to any point in his life simply by reading his childhood journal. Near movie's end, though, he discovers that his every trip through time has caused him a tiny amount of irreversible brain damage -- and when you're already Ashton Kutcher, is that really something you can afford?
2 Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
The vehicle in which Bill Preston and Ted Logan traveled to the past to cheat on their history homework was a cramped phone booth (at least the TARDIS had some leg room), made of fragile glass and sharp metal. It was a PG-rated movie, so nothing ever went wrong -- but it certainly could have! Kidnapping Genghis Khan and Abraham Lincoln helped them graduate high school, but would it have been worth a sliced-off head?
3 Black Knight
Jamal Walker (Martin Lawrence), the hero of this terrible 2001 comedy, is a custodial worker at a crappy theme park named Medieval World. One day, while removing sludge from a toxic-looking moat surrounding the park's fake castle, he falls in and is beamed back to the Middle Ages, centuries before the invention of the shower.
4 Primer
The primitive time machines in this 2004 no-budget sci-fi adventure require users to lie down in an uncomfortable-looking box for hours on end. And since Primer is one of the few movies to take the worry of history-altering time paradoxes seriously, its characters had to repeatedly hole up in boring hotel rooms to avoid bumping into previous versions of themselves. Also, the side effects of this method include bleeding from one's ears, which seems fairly serious (plus difficult to explain to a doctor).
5 Terminator Series
Skynet's time-travel technology is advanced enough to transport any living being or robot forward and backward though time -- but not their clothes! So, members of the Resistance and various Terminators are required to make the embarrassing journey through timespace with their privates flapping dangerously in an electrical storm. And if their destination is pre-Judgment Day, they can expect to have to beat up a biker for his leather jacket or steal the pants off a hobo. Even for a well-endowed robot assassin this must be pretty embarrassing.
6 Life on Mars
In the well-trod genre of entertainment in which an everyday person suffers an accident causing him to be beamed into the past against his will, it's hard to think of a more unpleasant journey than Detective Sam Tyler's in this BBC series. While just minding his own business, listening to his iPod in the middle of a busy highway offramp, he's hit by a car and sent back to 1973.
7 Back to the Future Series
Given the obvious importance of keeping his brilliant discovery a secret from everyone except a local skateboarder, Doc Brown was only asking for trouble when he installed the flux capacitor in a DeLorean DMC-12, the least conspicuous vehicle outside of the Batmobile (only 9,000 were manufactured). Plus, who wants to drive one of those things around everywhere at 88 miles per hour -- do you know what repairing a dent would cost? (Hint: a lot!)
8 Lost, '316'
In order to travel back in time to 1977, the Lost islanders had to hop a plane from LAX to Guam (current price of a one-way ticket: $1,016.46) on a day's notice, deal with the complicated rigamarole of checking John Locke's corpse as luggage, survive an in-flight lightning strike, and wake up on the island without any recollection of how, specifically, they were put there. And what if by some fluke they'd landed safely in Guam? None of them had made hotel reservations.
9 Superman
To reverse time and the death of Lois Lane, Superman flies faster than the speed of light around earth, causing it to spin backward on its axis, inconveniencing not just himself but everyone on the entire planet. What's more, the physicists in this YouTube video claim this scientifically impossible, unlike the other methods on this list, which all seem pretty feasible.
