“I want to talk about the future.”
Keeping well in time with last week’s Back to the Future Day, Cineplex released a new supercut video called “We Don’t Need Roads,” which celebrates cinema’s long history with films about time travel.
With classic clips from films like Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future, Rian Johnson’s Looper, the Tom Cruised-led Edge of Tomorrow by Doug Liman, and Richard Curtis’s romantic comedy About Time, the supercut not only shows how film can transcend time and space, but genre as well. Stories about time travel get the extra bonus of extending their narrative’s limitations by pushing boundaries when it comes to an audience’s suspension of disbelief. When viewers walk into the theaters to watch a movie about time travel, they’ve got a little more leeway: They’re not so concerned with whether or not it’s landing in the realm of realism.
Supercuts such as this try to highlight what makes a genre so exciting in the first place, and time travel has succeeded by throwing characters into the past or future, having them shake things up a bit, and then trying to clean up the mess they’ve created, whether it be making sure a killer is never born or a date doesn’t go awry.
However, the video does probe the question about whether or not there will be a time travel film that touches on the success of Back to the Future. What other film of its kind has a day named after it?
