What movies about time travel are really about

Sci-fi has never been my genre - especially if it involves space and time travel (or worse, aliens dripping with goo). I like both my feet firmly planted on the ground. If you ask me what my favorite age is, my answer will always be: right now.

When I was a kid, the only sci-fi book that held my attention was A Wrinkle in Time and it was because of the above illustration, when Mrs. Who and Mrs. Whatsit explain dimensional travel to Meg. For someone whose brain immediately shuts down if anything related to math or science is presented, this drawing was a total revelation - it allowed me to understand the concept of tessering (traveling through space and time) clearly because the visual said it all - without numbers and equations, without words. Several years ago, when the artist Hope Larson adapted L'Engle's classic into a graphic novel, I read it together with my daughter - who, at the time was 8 or 9 - to see if the book held up and to my surprise, it was even better than I'd remembered because I realized it was ultimately a story about the power of love.

I am thinking about A Wrinkle in Time because last night was a double-feature movie night for my family and without meaning to, we chose two movies about time and space travel. The first was About Time. My husband loves movies and over the years, has been very intentional about how he curates the movies he watches with our children - he decides what to show them depending on age, theme, and current mood. About Time is one of his favorites, which he had shown our two sons separately, right about when they turned 11 or 12. Last night was our daughter's turn to watch it with Dad.

I love the title of the movie because there are so many different ways to read it. Literally, it's a movie about time - as in, time is the subject matter at hand. Idiomatically, the title can be read with a sense of urgency - as in, it's high time for something to happen. And if we read the title regarding "about" as an adverb, meaning "around" (as in - "there is love all about"), then the title takes on a multi-dimensional quality to it - the idea that time is all about us. The setup of the movie - the first half of it - is quite silly, but the payoff is deeply satisfying. There is time travel, but just as A Wrinkle in Time is not really a story about tessering, About Time is not about traveling through time, but about what a father teaches his son about being present.

The second movie we watched last night was our younger son's choice - Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. My husband had watched it several times before - apparently, the first time was together with me, in the theater, though I have no recollection of it. I just did a quick search and noticed that the movie came out in 2014, which was when our children were 7, 4, and 2 - no wonder I don't remember watching it - there was no chance I stayed awake for three hours in a darkened theater! Interstellar is classic Christopher Nolan storytelling, where everything locks in place like furniture that puzzles together without using any screws or nails. There's space exploration and the obligatory complicated equations scribbled across a large chalkboard, but ultimately, it is a story about how love is the guide that will lead us both on our journeys away from and back towards home.

So, maybe I do like stories about space and time travel, after all. But still, no gooey aliens, please!