Tim Travers, the debut for writer director Stimson Snead, follows reality’s smartest smartass as he seeks to test the Time Traveler’s Paradox by traveling back in time and killing his younger self to see if he can unmake reality. To everyone’s surprise, the universe remains intact and instead Tim finds the most horrible thing he can imagine: himself. This award-winning film provides a positive message around self-acceptance and mental health at its core.
That’s what the official blurb says. What they don’t mention is that the film stars Samuel Dunning as Tim Travers, the inventor of time travel who goes one minute back into the past and shoots himself as an experiment. It also stars Danny Trejo in a delightful role as a hired gun sent to retrieve the stolen plutonium Travers used to power his time machine, Joel McHale as James Bunratty (you’ll remember him as Sylvester Pemberton in the CW TV series Stargirl — he’s been doing a ton of voice work for games and animated TV series), Keith David and Felicia Day as Delilah, whose first reponse in seeing herself from earlier in her own timeline is to shoot herself dead.
I don’t understand why they didn’t just lead with that.
To understand the Time Traveler’s Paradox, imagine that a man invents a time machine, goes back one minute in time, and then murders his previous self before he can step into the time machine for the one minute trip. What happens? Does he cease to exist? Did time travel happen?
If time is, in fact, linear, the question is unsolvable, and breaks causality. What actually happens, though, is that each version of himself has his own temporal context, experiencing time moving forward with reference to himself regardless of his current time frame of residence. In other words, from the perspective of the time traveler, once having traveled, the act of time travel is in his past and cannot be changed. There can be no ripple effect in causality, because it’s already happened.
This is what nearly all time travel fiction gets wrong, and absolutely what nearly all television and movies get wrong about it. It’s not a single linear thread with an intact causality despite the loops created by time travelers. There is no “going back in time and accidentally stepping on a butterfly, thereby rewriting all of the history that follows”. Time only changes for that instance. Everything that happened that lead up to that moment still happened, and that instance of time continues to function in its own separate context, unaffected by the event.
This time travel film gets it right. Star Trek gets it wrong. A lot.
This fact is what leads to all the hilarity in Tim Travers and the Time Traveller’s Paradox, including variants of himself, one of which appears to be God, or something close to that.
This might become a film series. The tell is the title. Whenever you see <Character Name> and the <Story Event>, it’s a clue that there might be more than one <Story Event> in the offing. If this film does as well as I think it will, I’m here for it. The film has already won Best Comedy Feature Film at the Cinequest San Jose Film Festival in 2024, and the Phoenix International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival for Best Sci-Fi Feature.
Tim Travers & The Time Travelers Paradox hits theaters on May 30, 2025.
I remember watching this movie with Queen Victoria back in the late 19th century. Her Majesty said it was the first full length film she had ever seen. But Queen Elizabeth had already seen it.
A bit more seriously, travel into the past is generally considered a logical impossibility, but there is of course debate. (As there should always be in scientific matters. Once “everybody agrees and nobody questions,” it stops being science.)
Travel into the future is certainly possible, and happens quite often. By relativistic time dilation, there’s the case when someone leaves Earth and travels by plane or spacecraft and then returns to Earth. Their “time” will be a tiny bit different than Earth’s.
That said, if I wanted to test the effects of going back in time, I certainly wouldn’t do it by killing myself. Maybe I’d test it by taking a cockroach with me….