It’s all in the timing

The movie’s based on Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 novel. Elements of it could just as easily be based on dozens of other movies where time travel figures as a plot device. Of course, there’s a sense in which all movies depend on time travel. What’s a motion picture, after all, but a time machine that works at 24 frames per second?

Here are a dozen examples of the time-travel genre.

BACK TO THE FUTURE Time sure does Marty McFly. Has there ever been a better movie time machine than the DeLorean Michael J. Fox gets to use here and in the two subsequent “Back to the Future’’ movies? If you’re going to travel through time, gull-winged is definitely the way to go.

TIME BANDITS Some directors would seem more suited to time travel than others. Judd Apatow, say, would not. (Seth Rogen . . . in a toga?) Terry Gilliam definitely qualifies. Honoring the space-time continuum has never ranked very high on his to-do list. So “Time Bandits’’ visits contemporary England, ancient Greece, medieval England, the Fortress of Ultimate Evil (which stands outside of time, actually), and much else besides.

TWELVE MONKEYS And if you doubted Gilliam was a time-travel kind of guy, here’s exhibit two from his filmography. Bruce Willis is sent from 2035 back to 1996 to prevent a deadly epidemic. Only he arrives in 1990, and everyone thinks he’s crazy. He also ends up in World War I before finally making it to 1996. At least he gets to fall in love with Madeleine Stowe.

STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME So maybe it’s time that’s the final frontier. The crew of the Enterprise boldly go where many men have gone already, the 20th century (San Francisco, to be precise). Admittedly, no one else has ever gone there who started out in the 23d century.

THE TERMINATOR Going from the future into the past to prevent something from happening: It’s one of the favorite time-travel premises. Hey, who wouldn’t want to change history? Ah, but what if the history changer is a killing-machine cyborg who happens to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. You get a Hollywood franchise, that’s what.

THE TIME MACHINE Time travel, in the form of memory or prophecy, has been a staple of world literature for thousands of years. It was H. G. Wells’s 1895 novella that first mechanized the ability to overcome chronology. There have been two movie versions, 1960 and 2002. Oddly enough, each has an Australian in the lead, Rod Taylor and Guy Pearce, respectively.

TIME AFTER TIME Wells gets to do some time traveling of his own in this 1979 romantic thriller. Played by Malcolm McDowell, the author journeys from Victorian London to late-’70s San Francisco in pursuit of Jack the Ripper (David Warner, the Evil Genius in “Time Bandits’’), who’s used Wells’s apparatus to escape police pursuit. Mary Steenburgen is the love interest.

PLEASANTVILLE Incongruity being the essence of time travel, you’d think it would get played for laughs more often. But it’s not. “Pleasantville,’’ like the “Back to the Future’’ series, is one of the rare exceptions. Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon click nicely as brother and sister - and casting Don Knotts as the TV repairman who causes all the temporal trouble is the best joke in the movie.

AUSTIN POWERS: THE SPY WHO SHAGGED ME In a sense, all the Austin Powers movies are about time travel, transporting the ’60s to the present. This one, though, has an actual time machine, courtesy of Dr. Evil, which transports him back to Swinging London where he steals Powers’s mojo. (“Mojo travel’’ - now there’s a movie concept.)

KATE & LEOPOLD Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman (another Australian!) are the title characters in this romantic comedy about a 19th-century English aristocrat who makes it through a Brooklyn-based gap in time to current-day Manhattan. Think of it as “When Leopold Met Kate,’’ only Jackman’s a lot better looking than Billy Crystal and there’s no deli scene.

THE LAKE HOUSE The only time-travel movie in which a copy of Jane Austen’s “Persuasion’’ figures in the plot and the time machine takes the form of a mailbox. Keanu Reeves is an architect. Sandra Bullock is a doctor. They’re made for each other. Except there’s this problem of a two-year gap between where she’s leading her life and he’s leading his.

PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED Sometimes time travel isn’t the biggest plausibility problem a plot poses. The idea of Kathleen Turner fainting at her high school reunion and waking up back in school as her teenage self is far-fetched. But it’s hardly as far-fetched as the idea of her being married to Nicolas Cage.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.