ANOTHER DAY IN PARADOX

Wormholes, parallel universes, the spacetime continuum… Could any of the time travel scenarios we see in film actually happen? Top physicist Professor Jim AlKhalili does the maths on some classic movies to tell Total Film what might be possible – and what’s definitely not…

- RICHARD EDWARDS

Time travel in movies always throws up big questions. Could you interfere with your own history? Do parallel universes exist? Is a DeLorean really the best car to build a time machine out of? Frankly, they are mysteries that could blow the average human mind, so Total Film has tracked down someone who really knows what he’s talking about to find out which movies get the science right – and wrong.

Professor Jim Al-Khalili is a top theoretical physicist, as well as being the host of BBC Radio 4’s The Life Scientific, and many a science documentary on BBC Four. He’s also watched plenty of time-travel films.

“I’m not one of these people who storms out of a cinema if the science is wrong,” he tells Total Film. “I appreciate it when they take some notice of the science, and you can always tell when movies have talked to a science consultant and listened to them. But there are other science fiction films where it’s just fun and not meant to be taken seriously. If it’s a good story, I can enjoy it. But if it’s an awful story as well as being a bad science premise like, I dunno, Hot Tub Time Machine, that’s just a waste of my life!”

PLANET OF THE APES 1968

TIME-TRAVEL JOURNEY Cigar-chewing astronaut George Taylor and his brave crew leave Earth on the Icarus, a spaceship traveling close to the speed of light. By the time they land, 2,000 years have passed on Earth – and the planet is ruled by damn dirty apes.

JIM’S VERDICT