Which One of These Three Time-Traveling Films is the Best?
Written by Rayhan Abrar Rizkan
 Writing this comparing and contrast piece has been a challenge for me, the biggest challenge is to pick what topics do I really want to discuss. The runner ups are : Star Wars, the Ocean’s franchise, and even down to which is the best girl in Chainsaw Man. Other references aside, this one is my pick, due to my fascination towards Time-Traveling films. For this piece, I narrowed down the nominations into these three : TENET, Avengers: Endgame, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
 I picked TENET because of my personal bias. I picked Avengers: Endgame because you all have probably seen it. And I picked the second Terminator movie because it is one of the most quintessential, monumental, and an absolute classic to set the pop culture we know today. I could have picked Back to the Future, but I can’t, or won’t, pick one. Let us begin with the first point of comparison : The Story.
 The most important thing to a film is the script, the writing that you sell to the studio or anyone you want to work with. It goes without saying, it has to be good. A Movie has to tell a story, to follow a character, and/or to set a specific goal in mind. It is the easiest and the first thing people say when they are describing a movie, for example, “It’s the one where they have to carry a ring to the volcano.”, “There’s wizards, magic, and they have to defeat a snub-nosed villain.”, “So there’s this guy, and he got bit by a radioactive spider....”. Case in point, you can probably guess those movies just by the plot or the premise, that is set by the script, that is how powerful a story could be if written properly.
 TENET has a simple story. Calling it complicated is an understatement, but if you finally opened your third eye somehow while watching this movie, it is simple. TENET is a lot of movies stacked into one, it is a spy movie, a heist movie, a sci-fi, and action. TENET follows the Protagonist (That is how you know this movie is beyond awesome, they do not even bother naming the lead) to find pieces of an advanced weapon algorithm with secret battles coming from the past and the future to stop World War III from the hand of the main villain, Sator. See my point here? It is simple..... but I did leave out the whole time-bending plot to see it all in one straight line. . But when you see all things unveil, especially during the second watch seeing that it is how Nolan makes his movies, you can truly appreciate TENET for what it is, cinema.
 Avengers: Endgame, you already know the story. After their massive defeat in Infinity War, the original members with the help of few others tries to undo what Thanos did and return those who are lost. This movie is plain and vanilla yet the perfect closing for this symphony of Marvel’s ensemble cast in comic book movies, you do not have to follow all 21 MCU movies to watch the adventures that they went through to understand the main story, but they will reward you if you do, as there are tons of fan service and easter eggs to get excited for.
 For Terminator 2, maybe I should explain on why I chose this instead of the original, and it ties in to the story. In the first Terminator movie, Skynet, to put it simply is a future-evil-internet-robot-brain programmed to eradicate humanity and enslave those who survived in the purge. Skynet sent a robot assassin with the face of Arnold Schwarzenegger to kill Sarah Connor from giving birth to John Connor, the future leader of the resistance that will defeat Skynet. So the John Connor in the future sent Kyle Reese, one of the member of the resistance to protect his mother Sarah from the Terminator Model 101. Kyle eventually stopped the Terminator and somehow fathered John Connor in the process. To recap the first movie, John sent his own father to protect his mom from the past. Now, the second movie is where they did a twist. Instead of just having another advanced Terminator to the past sent by another version of Skynet, the resistance also sent another reprogrammed Terminator to protect the target that is (kid) John Connor. If this is done now, the twist is completely overdone and seen as nothing but a gimmick. But for a movie in the 90’s? this is revolutionary. Its like having Jason Krueger as your ally in the sequel, but replace that with an Arnold Schwarzenegger looking killer robot despite the lack of his trademark of making unintelligible noises. Because of the same face, the Terminator has to convince Sarah that he is not the Terminator she once knew in the first movie, but a reprogrammed one set to protect them, this interaction of not trusting one another and always be on guard sets up the movie very well. The flick is a staple of action movie back in the day, having two indestructible killing machines squaring up against one another, how can anyone top that at that era?
 Now that we are all caught up with the story, it is time to discuss the soul of these movies have in common, the Time-traveling aspect, the main plot device, the cause or the breaker of movie retcons. In this short list, Terminator has to be the simplest in terms of the mechanics of the time-travel story. The time machine is one time use only, as it can only be used in the future where such things exist. So once you go back in time, the only way to go back to the future is to wait, just like everyone else. And what you did in the past will instantly affect the future accordingly. The time machine in Terminator movies has to be the one with the weirdest mechanic, where you can only send things with living tissues and no other, now that the fact is laid out on you then yes, everyone who went back in time has to be naked. So they have to find new clothing when they arrived. At least that is their explanation on why the Terminator has to be wrapped up in synthetic human skin, not to show off Arnold’s five hours a day of intensive muscle toning in six months with the help of a big pile chicken breast and a year supply of protein shake, not at all.
 Avengers: Endgame has the most flexible machine out of all, where you can set the time and place of where you want to be, as long as you have enough supply of Pym particles to go subatomic and travel a safe passage through the fabric of time. But with multiple journeys with different groups you will run a risk of creating an alternate timeline, but they simply nullify such possibility with having Hulk said that they will go back in time after the final battle is done, and return the things they took in the past back to its place and time so nothing will inherently change. The time traveling part of the movie is the charm of Endgame, where we get to re-visit the characters, places, and events we have seen in the previous films in a different perspective that is canon to the universe.
 Now, this is where it all gets tricky to explain, because the time-traveling of TENET is not the same as any other movies I have seen. Calling it a time-traveling is not even entirely accurate, but the mechanic of how it works calls for more of a “Time-inversion”. The time machine in this film is very rustic, where you go into this big turning door that leads to the other side of the room, but once you are “inverted”, you move forward in time, but the world around you goes backwards. You cannot choose which time you want to go to, if you want to go back in time for 10 minutes, you have to wait it out while being inverted for 10 minutes, that is why the palindrome suits with the whole movie. This makes amazing visuals when combined with action sequences, imagine reverse car chases, bullets were caught to the gun instead of being shot out of, punches were pulled instead of thrown. In other words, if you see a sequence of two people with one of them inverted, they can both win or lose at the end depending on which point-of-view you choose.
The time inversion in TENET is not only treated as a plot device, but also the philosophy that is abided by the movie, as there is only one timeline that exist in the movie. This is made clear in the story that no matter what you do, you cannot change the outcome of the future, as the present is set with the human’s free will, and even though they are randomly generated, it happened anyway. “What’s happened, happened” said Neil, one of the main characters in the movie explaining how time inversion works to the Protagonist. It is not a battle to change the outcome, but to gain a perspective for what’s to come. Whatever happens, happened and will happen all at the same time. With the limited mechanic of time-inversion that TENET has (or had, or will have, this is confusing even to me now), it is amazing what it can achieve in terms of storytelling, how the story we see in front of us is one enormous temporal pincer collision of the past, future, and present in one sitting (or collide, collided, will collide, I do not know what is happening).
From my standpoint, clearly I prefer TENET above all else, but do let me know what’s your pick out of these three! Better yet, what is your favourite time-traveling film?Â
