"Are you telling me you built a time machine out of a Delorean?"

Time travel, changing the past and altering the future are concepts that filmmakers simply can’t resist. Modern movies like Terminator: Dark Fate and The Adam Project continue to tackle time travel, envisioning some truly jaw-dropping time machines.

RELATED: 7 Movies like 'The Adam Project' for the Best Time Travel Experience

Time travel films often grapple with moral dilemmas or showcase the overwhelming powerlessness of humanity against the unstoppable march of time. But sometimes these movies stun us with some truly awe-inspiring devices, gadgets that defy or reshape our expectations of what a time travel machine could be.

The Back to the Future trilogy set the bar for every time travel movie to follow when it began, with the unforgettable release of the first film in 1985. Each film chronicles the adventures of genius Doctor Emmet “Doc” Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and his friend/sidekick Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) beginning with the accidental use of Doc’s experimental time machine in the first Back to the Future film.

The time machine in question could not be more original and stylish if it tried, as it takes the form of a modified DMC Delorean. Retrofitted with the time travel device known as the flux capacitor, reaching a speed of 88 miles per hour in the iconic sports car allows its passengers and the vehicle to travel through time. To this day, the Delorean of Back to the Future remains one of the most recognizable movie automobiles and an icon of the genre of time travel films.

H. G. Wells’ 1895 novel The Time Machine was instrumental in the development of the science fiction genre. It stands to reason that the titular time machine remains one of the most important sci-fi devices in fiction; as the first of its kind, it definitely qualifies as one of cinema's most inventive time machines.

The machine, which takes the form of an other-worldly-looking time sled, became a movie icon in 1960, with the metrocolor release of the book’s first feature film adaptation. The film begins in Victorian England, with an inventor who constructs a time machine that allows him to travel far into the future. The time traveller unwittingly discovers a dying earth, and the distant, infighting descendants of the fragmented human race.

Inventive is certainly a word you can use to describe the time-warping turnstiles from 2020’s Tenet. Like the entirety of Inception, these strange devices were so creative and bizarre that many audiences walked out of Tenet scratching their heads.

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In Christopher Nolan’s 2020 sci-fi spy thriller, turnstiles reverse the entropy of objects and people, allowing anything and anyone that travels through it to experience time in the opposite direction. What does this mean for the world and characters of Nolan’s film? An international conflict that moves in both directions through time. What does this mean for Tenet’s audience? Extremely cerebral and inventive spectacle that redefines sci-fi action films.

Does Hermione Granger’s Time Turner from the Harry Potter films count as a time travel machine if it’s magical in nature? Either way, its appearance in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban certainly came as a surprise.

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Even more inventive than its quirky, clockwork appearance is the fact that Hermione, played by Emma Watson, mostly used the insanely powerful device to take concurrent classes. It was impressive to see the film introduce time travel so early in the franchise – it would later become vital to the plot of the series’ sequel spin-off Harry Potter and the Cursed Child– but it was just as amazing to see the film set up and follow its own time travel rules so well.

Though technically a TV creation, the TARDIS featured heavily in the 1996 television movie Doctor Who. Fans of the classic BBC show will recognize the TARDIS – an acronym for “Time And Relative Dimension In Space” – as the spaceship belonging to the protagonist of the show and film, the extraterrestrial Time Lord known as The Doctor (Paul McGann).

RELATED: 'Doctor Who': 12 Historical Figures the Doctor Has Met

There’s more than meets the eye with regards to this time-and-space-hopping machine, as the TARDIS is famously impossibly larger on the inside than it seems. The TARDIS featured in the show and 1996 movie appears as a seemingly innocuous blue police box, as the ship’s technology allows it to disguise itself as ordinary environmental objects in its present surroundings (though the one in the Doctor’s care seems stuck in its boxy shell).

Who would have thought that moviegoers would see a hot tub propel someone through time? No one, until the release of Hot Tub Time Machine that is. The 2010 sci-fi comedy film follows a group of four depressed friends who, after accidentally spilling an energy drink onto the console of their hotel room’s hot tub, fall into a desperate scramble to the present after being drawn by the hot tub in the not-too-distant past.

The concept of a hot tub time machine is hilarious and unexpected, and completely off-the-wall. For that reason, it takes its place among one of the most inventive time machines in movie history.

The Liberty 1, also known as the Icarus, is the spacecraft whose near-light-speed journey brings astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston) to the eponymous, dystopian world of 1968’s Planet of the Apes.

The Icarus holds a special seat in the halls of movie time travel machines, a seat reserved for one of the few movie time machines that might actually work. According to physicists, the science behind the Icarus’ journey to the future is horrifyingly sound, making the 1968 film’s uncomfortable depiction of the ape-ruled planet sink in a bit deeper.

NEXT: The 15 Best Time Travel Movies Ever Made, Ranked

Emilio Gabriel Lapitan is a writer and aspiring author. A lover of stories of any kind, he is passionate about video games, TV, movies, theatre, comic books and cats.

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