And yet more time travel! (#SFWApro)

JOURNEY TO THE BEGINNING OF TIME (1967) is a 1954 movie by Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman with an added prologue in the New York Museum of natural History. The story of four kids traveling through prehistory to the very dawn of time is really a documentary, though it has enough fictional elements I might appendix (documentaries with a time-travel frame don’t qualify for the book). “They eat fish because they’ve never tasted a boy before.”

NAUTILUS (1999) is a near miss reminiscent of Flight That Disappeared as a future scientist steers the eponymous sub (curiously, no Verne references) back from a century in the future to stave off an eco-collapse triggered by an experiment in tapping the Earth’s core for power (so the sixties film Crack in the World would double-bill well). The various elements don’t all come together, and this spends way too much time explaining the Nautilus Awesome Future Tech, but better than a lot of what I have to watch these days. “You give yourself too much credit, captain—and me not enough.”

Case in point, THE MEEKSVILLE GHOST (2001), in which a young drifter hunting his mother in a dying Western town discovers that Judge Reinhold’s ghost is haunting him for help to be released from an old curse. Disney churned out lots of kidvid like this in the 1970s, but almost all of it was slicker; although the protagonist undoes the tragedy that led to the curse, it doesn’t actually change any of the town’s history. Lesley Anne Downe plays a woman with a tragic secret you’ll guess long before the reveal. Appendix only. “Let me give you the benefit of 130 years of regret.”

THE INFINITE MAN (2014) is an enjoyable Aussie rom-com in which a scientist desperate to win back the woman he broke up with uses a time machine to take them back to their last day together—only to realize he’s failed to account for their lpast selves being around, to say nothing of other iterations of himself trying to put right what once went wrong. I’d probably like this better if I’d seen it another time (I wouldn’t be worrying so much how it all fits together) but fun, even so, and extra points for acknowledging at the end that the romantic issues aren’t quite solved yet. “Just listen to your heart—and to the earpiece.”