In Short:	Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.
Recommended:	Yes! San Dimas High School football rules!

BILL:

[to Billy the Kid] Billy, you are dealing with the oddity of time travel with the greatest of ease.

It’s been over twenty years now since one of my favorite movies was released, but amazingly for something from the faux pas 1980’s, it still feels fresh and is a joy to watch (or maybe it’s something about 80’s American comedies; Blues Brothers, Coming to America, Stripes, Trading Places, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Princess Bride, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids…all classics). Apart from just being a comedy, it is a most triumphant time travel film, and boy does it have a ball completely messing with history. Oh, and it gives us the phrase that would define Keanu Reeves for the rest of his career:

Keanu Reeves (in every movie ever): Whoa….

Our most excellent guide, Rufus (George Carlin) sets the scene by telling us that whilst the future is a bodacious place (sorry, it’s an 80’s movie, I feel the need to use 80’s adjectives), he has to go back in time 700 years to help out the two that are responsible for making the future so great before it doesn’t ever happen. So before we’ve even finished the prologue, we’ve already introduced a temporal paradox (the first of many). But Rufus assures us “Don’t worry, it’ll all make sense. I’m a professional”. So you go along with it.

The two in question are Ted Theodore Logan (Keanu Reeves) and Bill Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter), members of the heavy metal band Wyld Stallyns, whose music is destined to bring harmony to the future world (in the age of Van Halen, this was almost believable). The problem is that if they can’t pass their final history assignment, there will be no band. And considering Bill and Ted think George Washington is famous for being born on President’s day and being ‘the dollar bill guy’, Caesar is the ‘salad dressing dude’, Napoleon is the ‘short dead dude’, and Joan of Arc is ‘Noah’s Wife’ (okay, we’ve all made that mistake at some point), things don’t look good.

Enter Rufus and his time machine to help them learn a few things about the past.

It isn’t too long before Bill and Ted are travelling through time in a phone booth, nabbing famous people from history to help with their history assignment. But this is largely an excuse to observe the calamity bound to ensue by bringing people such as Socrates (pronounced by Bill and Ted as ‘So-crates’), Genghis Kahn, Sigmund Freud, Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig van Beethoven and Joan of Arc into the future. The big arc scene is when these people are let loose in a shopping mall, where Genghis goes, well…Genghis in a sports store, Joan of Arc gets over-enthusiastic about aerobics, and Ludwig goes to town on a bank of Casio electric keyboards.

It would be wrong to over-think Bill and Ted, and its intended audience certainly wouldn’t have, but there are some quite witty aspects to the script. Some of the dialogue is great, maximising the opportunity to have some fun with historical figures transferred to modern day. Sigmund Freud particularly has a field day.

POLICE PSYCHIATRIST:	I wanna know why you claim to be Sigmund Freud.
SIGMUD FREUD:	Why do you claim I’m not Sigmund Freud?
POLICE PSYCHIATRIST:	Why do you keep asking me these questions?
SIGMUD FREUD:	Tell me about your mother.

Plus, for a comedy film, it handles time travel with the greatest of ease. First of all, unlike Back to the Future, which came out a couple of years earlier, it COMPLETELY ignores any consideration that they have affected the past by interacting with these famous ‘dead people’, and therefore have changed modern day as they know it. But this ignorance is established early on, so you aren’t sitting there scratching your head trying to follow. Nor do they do the ‘meeting yourself would lead to an annihilation of everything’, made famous in Back to the Future II, and the interaction between Bill and Ted, and, um, Bill and Ted is quite well done and is instrumental to the telling of the story.

That said, there are still some excellent uses of time travel dynamics, particularly later on in the film. Temporal paradoxes, or more specifically predestination paradoxes are utilized and then quickly parodied, in both a smart and funny way.

For example, when the historical characters are all arrested, Bill and Ted need to break them out. Ted’s father works at the police station, and so Ted thinks they can break them out using his dad’s keys. But earlier in the film we learnt that Ted’s dad has lost his keys.

BILL:	If only we could go back to two days ago before your dad lost his keys, and steal them
TED:	Well, why don't we?
BILL:	Cuz we don't have time, dude
TED:	We could do it after the report.
BILL:	Oh yeah! Where should we put 'em?
TED:	How 'bout behind this sign?
BILL:	OK. [Bill reaches around the sign, and finds the keys] Woah! It worked! Right, so when we're done with the report, we have to remember to do this or else it won't happen. Except it did happen! Ted, it was you who stole your dad's keys!

We never learn if they do indeed go back in time and steal the keys after the movie has finished, but my guess is they don’t. Following the internal logic of the film, they no longer need to, as the causality loop is already technically closed. And in no time flat, they even parody this form of temporal paradox with a hilarious ‘trash can’ scene.

To finish, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure manages to get the right balance between a typical stoner comedy flick, which was common in the late 80’s, and a tight, smart time travel film that involves historical figures caught up in modern times (I haven’t even mentioned Napoleon, who gets his own hilarious sub-plot throughout the film). Bill and Ted themselves spend some time travelling throughout history for even more laughs (such as
‘philosophizing’ with Socrates, and learning the true meaning of Iron Maiden). Perhaps people expect time travel movies to be more serious nowadays, but Bill and Ted’s serves to remind us all that you can make a comedy out of anything, if you are prepared to go along with it.

So… party on, dudes.