The Best Teen Time Travel Movies

When you set out to make a list of time travel movies, teen-centric or otherwise, you have to start with Back to the Future. There’s a reason that decades later, we still love this movie, and it’s not just because Part 2 promised us we’d have hoverboards before we got old.

This is what every kid wants out of life: you get to go on an awesome adventure, drive the coolest car you can imagine, have a huge influence on history, and invent rock and roll in the process.

And it all happens while wearing an awesome vest that your mom thinks is a life jacket. Not only does this sound like an absolute blast, but you get emotionally invested in the characters.

It is such a tight, almost perfectly written script, one that Robert Zemeckis and Michael J. Fox execute to precise perfection. There’s nothing not to like here.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a time travel movie that actually shows up in another movie on this list (hint: it’s at the end). We were tempted to throw Bogus Journey into the just for the hell of it, but we realized that, while the heroes are still young, they’re not exactly teens anymore.

Every kid who has ever strapped on a guitar has dreamed of being a rock god, and slacker burnouts Bill S. Preston, Esquire (Alex Winter), and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) not only get to realize their dream, but ride a magic phone booth through the circuits of time with the help of George Carlin, all without being able to play a note.

Rescuing beautiful princesses, meeting the greatest historical figures of all time, and saving the future, acing a history report has never been so much fun. Strange things are indeed afoot at the Circle K.

For some reason, Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits tends to get lost in the rest of his filmography. That’s a risk you take when you make classics like 12 Monkeys and Brazil, but it’s also a damn shame.

As you would expect from a Gilliam’s joint, the time travel story of an eleven-year-old boy who teams up with a group of time-traveling dwarves to pillage valuable artifacts from historical figures is even stranger than the description makes it sound.

Full of fantastic cameos—Sean Connery plays Agamemnon, Gilliam’s Monty Python brother John Cleese shows up as Robin Hood, among others—this is a lunatic ride from beginning to gleefully delirious end.

If you haven’t watched this in a while, you owe it to yourself to pop it in the player or cue it up on your preferred streaming service. It’s a wild ride well worth taking again.

If you love mid-1980s adventure films where the kid is the real hero, like The Goonies, D.A.R.Y.L., and Explorers, then 1986’s Flight of the Navigator is right up your time travel alley. And if you like seeing kids pilot their very own spaceship, even better.

Young David Freeman has somehow lost eight years of his life, and the explanation involves alien abductions, star maps implanted in his brain, and blasting off in an awesome, retro-future spaceship.

The whole thing is way more complicated than that, but there are also some awesome practical puppet aliens, and who among us didn’t want to spend most of our childhoods zipping around in an awesome spacecraft and traveling light years from Earth?

Easily the most badass installment on this list, Edward Furlong’s young John Connor in Terminator 2 also has the distinction of being the biggest criminal among the protagonists of these particular time travel films.

He’s way more adept than the others at doing things like ripping off ATM machines, and when you add his very own futuristic killing machine into the mix, that’s the making of a very good time indeed.

Making the titular robotic assassin, who is so cold and terrifying in the first film, the good guy, took some stones on the part of James Cameron, but the results obviously speak for themselves. Instead of trying to destroy the future, this unlikeliest of duos embarks on a quest to save the human race, and just for the heck of it, they bring John’s mom along for the ride.

The most recent addition to the time travel list, though listed last for a reason, Project Almanac is the 2015 found-footage sci-fi film directed by Dean Israelite.

A group of teenagers discover blueprints for a time machine created by one of their fathers. Of course, you have David, the high school genius aspiring to attend MIT (ever heard of it?).

Along with his friends and sister, he builds the time machine, initially using it for fun and personal gain. However, their meddling with time leads to a bunch of (foreseeable) chaos, and they realize that time travel isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Honestly? They could have probably learned that from the previous movies on the list.