10 Sci-Fi Movies That Broke All The Rules
4. Time Travel Doesn't Work How You Think It Does - Avengers: Endgame
The vast majority of popular time travel movies adhere to the logic that if you travel back in time and change the past, it will immediately alter your future - most popular envisioned in the Back to the Future films.
But Avengers: Endgame bravely - and, upon first viewing, confusingly - decided to go in an entirely different direction with its logic-bending approach to time travel.
After Rhodey (Don Cheadle) asks Professor Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) why they can't simply murder Thanos (Josh Brolin) as a baby, Hulk explains that changing the past doesn't change the future.
Effectively, by travelling back to a given past, that past then becomes the future, and what was your present then becomes your past, which by the laws of causality can't then be changed by your new future.
It's certainly noodle-baking to think about, yet if we're honest, it's basically just a neat way to hand-wave the inevitable timeline contradictions so the audience can enjoy the fan service of Captain America (Chris Evans) fighting himself without thinking too much.
Even so, fans are still debating the finer points of Endgame's time travel rules to this day, which if nothing else run entirely counter to the time-hopping logistics audiences are used to dealing with.