The best time travel movie ever made?

Rating: Null/10 (30 April 2001)

I'm serious!
This movie has lots of things going for it, but little noticed is that its treatment of time travel is superior, for two reasons.
First, it is realistic. I know that probably sounds ridiculous, but the majority of time travel movies fall into contradiction by permitting "changing the past." Only a very small number of movies ("Twelve Monkeys," and its French inspiration, "La Jetee," "The Terminator," "Time After Time," amongst them) avoid this error.
But second, these other movies preserve consistency at the cost of what will seem to fans of "changing the past" to be the main point of time travel. Each involves protagonists who think they can succeed in changing things, and such stories have Oedipal overtones when fate plays itself out. Bill and Ted show us that (consistent) time travel can be used quite deliberately in ways that are advantageous--the sequence with the car keys is simply brilliant! (Unfortunately, having introduced this device for problem-solving, the writers get a bit carried away with it...)