(1980)

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Superman: The Movie

Superman (Christopher Reeve), upon finding Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) dead, goes into a rage, flies retrograde around the Earth fast enough to reverse its spin, and somehow (*) reverses time. He stops and returns things back to normal, but giving himself just enough time to save Lois from the landslide.

*AlfaMale writes in with the following explanation: Recently I realized, this isn’t what happens. What we see is Superman flying around the earth, (doesn’t matter which direction he’s flying), faster and faster, as he approches the speed of light, he starts experiencing relativistic effects, time starts to slow relative to him. Finally Superman exceeds the speed of light, whereupon he starts to move backwards through time. For him, (and us the omnicient observer) the earth *appears* to slow, stop and start spinning in the opposite direction. In reality, the earth is spinning the way it always has, time itself is just being viewed differently. Superman could’ve just flown off and back in a straight line, rather than circling the planet, but that might’ve been even more confusing than what the director settled on. Of course, I think that this interpretation has problems as well, because it looks to me like the earth and its atmosphere are changing direction at different rates; i.e., that the movement of the clouds lags behind the change in the Earth’s rotation due to viscosity effects, not due to relativistic effects. Please feel free to write in if you have your own opinion…