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8 Fictional Futurists We Love

At Nostradamical.com we love predictions. Our community is thinking about the future, mostly. So we were chatting this week on our fav time travel characters in popular fiction. Here they are…

1. Doc Emmett Brown (Back To The Future 1, 2 & 3). The wild eyed scientist played perfectly by Christopher Lloyd is obsessed with time travel and buggy space-time continuum problems. Back to the Future really introduced the whole ‘disruptive’ future events thing that was continued later in some of these other movies / programs. Nice little comparison against Harry Potter here (if slightly random). Visit his MySpace page here (?)

2. Hiro Nakamura (Heroes). The Japanese comic book nut with the ability to manipulate space-time is the moral backdone of the Heroes series. He’s funny, heroic and let’s face it, has one of the coolest powers in the Heroes clan. Oh and the latest series, ‘Fugitives’ has started…woo hoo!

3. Daniel Faraday (Lost). The mumbling scientist from the visitors to the Lost island initially seemed to be a malicious character. However it’s clearer now that he is more concerned with unravelling the mysteries of the island, whilst jumping back and forth through time. His experiments on time travel at Oxford seem to have lead the Lost heroes to his mother who seems even more mysterious…oooh

4. Doctor Who (Doctor Who). Much more child orientated these days by the BBC than it felt in it’s hayday. However you cannot deny Doctor Who as one of the original time travellers (Time Lords). Although he seems to change actors with the weather these days. Plenty of DW resources here and here.

5. Donnie Darko (Donnie Darko). This slow burning cult classic features a fantastic storyline based around time travel and alternative realities. The film starts weird but makes more sense as it goes on. And that bunny? Creep as hell. Love it. And a sequel is in production…eh?

6. HG Wells (The Time Machine), An oldie but a classic. Really one of the first portrayals of time travel in film, this is a great primer for later films like Back to the Future. However the 2002 remake sucked.

7. Bill & Ted (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure + Bogus Journey). Yes, two those crazy dudes that went back through time in the first movie to retrieve key characters from history, and then died in the second film…all this before one of them went on to save the world in The Matrix. This was ‘The Space-Time Continuum for Dummies’.

8. The Terminator (The Terminator). Arnie’s seminal 80s cyborg that spawned no less than 3 sequels and a fascinating universe of interconnected storylines…a great franchise with some truly great scenes, although T3 was a bit rubbish. Soon to hit our screens is the latest franchise reboot with Christian Bale as the leader son of Sarah Connor, this is a great franchise indeed. My fav being T2 of course. As he said back in 1984, ‘I’ll be back’.

Honourable mentions - movies and people:

• Timecop - Van Damme kicks his way through time.
• The Time Bandits - fun, cute and a little weird…but certainly a new spin on things from Terry Gilliam.
• Austin Powers - quite funny, sometimes
• Highlander - Not really a time travel movie, technically.
• Timeline - OKish time travel from the director of Lethal Weapon
• Millenium - Forgotten classic about an ailing future. Nice ideas.
• Star Trek: The Voyage Home & Star Trek: First Contact - The Enterprise crews runs out of storyline ideas so has to go back in time to find a solution, twice.

See a list of other time travel movies here. A useful discussion of time travel in movies is on Greencine.com.

Have a prediction on future events? Browse Nostradamical’s predictions here or publish one of your own. We’re a prediction market and a microblog at the same time. Oooh.

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