Before I begin doling out the rant soup with a side order of opinionated snark, I should make one thing clear: I'm not talking about films in which time travel is a central concept. The Time Machine, Back to the Future, Time After Time, Bill & Ted, Casablanca, Somewhere in Time, etc., are all exempt from the following (rather silly) rule:

Time travel sucks. And here's why:

Take the new Star Trek, for example. Or better yet, pretty much any episode of Heroes. At one point we start out on linear playing fields, an A to B to C storytelling device that, you must admit, usually works pretty darn well. But once a character stumbles onto the ability to leap through time ... I get bored. All bets are off. I'm probably going to watch something else. Why?

1. It's a screenwriting cheat: As much as I enjoyed the new Star Trek (and I seriously did), the time-twist subplot seemed ... out of place. As if it was concocted just so we could have a "logical" way for Leonard Nimoy to play an important role. Which leads to...
2. A whole lot of screen-time must now be devoted to the time-travel subplot. So the plot makes sense, so the audience is up to speed, so nerds like me don't blog about temporal inconsistencies and anachronistic euphemisms -- we must now have numerous explanations on why / how / where / when the time-travel stuff occurs. And even with a movie as fun as Star Trek, that's just a lot of blah blah blah, isn't it?

3. Time travel: The death of tension. Whenever I watch Heroes and see one of our favorite freaks get killed (I think Ali Larter has been killed more times than Jason Voorhees), I roll my eyes and wait a few weeks. Oh look! The flameball guy is back because Peter and Hiro went back in time and stopped time at the same time and brought him back on a giant pterodactyl! Boy, time travel gives the writers a lot of options, but it also lessens the drama (a whole lot) when you know that a demise is virtually always followed by a non-shock of a resurrection. Kinda takes the excitement out of those life-and-death battles.

Yeah, time travel bugs me a lot. Not nearly as much as "oh, it was all a dream!?!?" or "here's a bunch of flashbacks for no good reason," but just enough to rant about. Obviously. (Pic courtesy of HowStuffWorks.com, which explains right here how time travel might work.)