Spoilers and infographics: Time travel in movies

I think the original Mr Dalliard Tumblr for which there is a credit on this time travel in movies flowchart, has been lost to time. You can visit to reach machine text about apps that are hard to recommend, though.

Movies featuring cool time travel ideas, paradoxes and plots are easier to commend. You can find artful spoilers for many in this infographic plotting commonalities and division.

Warning: Spoilers.

Common time travel paradoxes in movies

Which plot holes or challenging paradoxes do you see the most often? Here are some that Geek Native suggests are common in time travel movies.

• The Grandfather Paradox: This paradox occurs when a person travels back in time and kills their own grandfather before they were born. This creates a paradox because if the grandfather was never born, the person who travelled back in time would never have been born.
• The Bootstrap Paradox: This paradox occurs when a person or object is sent back in time and then becomes the source of their own existence. For example, a person might travel back in time and give themselves the plans for a time machine. This would mean that the person who travelled back in time could only exist because they gave themselves the plans for the time machine in the first place.
• The Predestination Paradox: This paradox occurs when a person’s past actions actually lead them to travel back in time in the first place. For example, a person might travel back in time to stop a crime from happening. However, if they successfully stopped the crime, then they would never have had a reason to travel back in time in the first place.
• The Novikov Self-Consistency Principle: This principle states that time travellers cannot change the past because the past is already set in stone. Any attempt to change the past will create a new timeline that branches off from the original one.