Fish Out Of Temporal Water / Live-Action Films

• In 13 Going on 30, Jenna is a 13-year-old girl in 1987 who wishes she was 30 already. Her wish is granted when she suddenly wakes up in 2004 in her thirty-year-old body. Since she has no memories of what happened in between, she gets confused by her new life as an adult. She gets confused by a cellphone and when someone mentions Eminem, she thinks they're talking about M&Ms.
• In 1994 Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Returns, Sherlock Holmes actually adapts fairly quickly to the late 20th Century, despite having been a Human Popsicle for almost 100 years. However, lack of knowledge of certain social and technological developments cause some of his Sherlock Scans to go humorously astray: such as deducing that Lt. Griffin is a supporter of the rights of little people after seeing a certificate of appreciation from the Little League on his wall.
• The final scene of American Gangster shows Frank Lucas stepping out of prison in 1991, in a New York that has changed dramatically since his reign as drug lord. The first thing he hears is gangsta rap blaring from a car rolling down the street.
• An American Pickle: Jewish immigrant worker Herschel Greenbaum accidentally falls into a vat of brine at the Brooklyn pickle factory he works in in 1919. The brine preserves him and he wakes up one century later in a New York City he doesn't recognize anymore, with only one surviving member of his lineage.
• Much of the humor in the Austin Powers films derives from this trope. Interestingly enough, the movies focus almost entirely on the social changes, with the technology changes barely being mentioned at all. Then again, considering he's a James Bond-style spy, the technology change probably isn't as great for him, but he does try to play a CD on a record player, and there is the scene in Goldmember where Austin introduces the Internet to Foxxy. Hilarity Ensues.
• In Awakenings, the revived catatonics are pleasantly surprised to learn that Prohibition was long ago repealed. They still feel (and act) young despite their advanced ages.
• Back to the Future films, with the first and third both being examples of "From The Present going into The Past", the third even moreso. The second however, puts our heroes into an example of being "From The Present going into The Future" for the first third, then going back to The Present only to end up in a different timeline altogether, only to end up going back into being "From The Present ending up in The Past" for the last third of the film.
• The British comedy Bernard and the Genie features Lenny Henry as Josephus, a former merchant circa 1st Century A.D. (he claims that he met Jesus and was present at the Wedding at Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine), having been cursed into being a genie by an irate customer and sealed in a lamp for 2000 years. While he misses his family, he is amazed by the music, food and technology of the late 20th century. When he first listens to classical music, he declares, "My ears want to mate with this music and bear its children!". When he first tastes ice cream, his response is to rush out of the ice cream parlor and shout to anyone within earshot, "YOU HAVE GOT TO TRY THIS STUFF! IT IS COMPLETELY COLD AND TASTES WHOLLY OF STRAWBERRIES!"
• Jamal Walker in Black Knight (2001) works at a Medieval-themed park. He is cleaning the moat and sees a necklace. Trying to reach it, he falls into the moat and finds himself in Medieval England. It takes him a while to even figure out that he's not in Kansas anymore. He just assumes that the castle is a rival theme park. Then he witnesses a Public Execution and realizes the truth. At the end, it's revealed to be All Just a Dream, when he is resuscitated by paramedics. Some time later, he trips and falls into the moat again... and ends up in the Roman Colosseum about to be eaten by lions.
• Played with in Blast from the Past: The main character has the mindset of someone from the late 50s/early 60s because he was raised in a bunker by parents who cut themselves off from the outside world in 1962 and had no idea of the changes the world went through while they were locked away.
• Much of the humor in The Brady Bunch Movie and A Very Brady Sequel comes from putting the stuck-in-the-'70s Brady clan in the grunge-era early-to-mid-'90s. This example is a comedy inversion of the trope as the Bradys themselves are perfectly at ease acting as if it were still a 70s era sitcom, leaving others around them stunned and confused.
• Several of the storybook characters of Children's Party at the Palace come from works of British literature created over 50 years ago. For one, the Grand High Witch talks about "selling children’s GameBoys on eBay", though that handheld had been obsolete for quite a while in 2006, when the production was filmed.
• This is the premise of Tim Burton's Dark Shadows starring (of course) Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter, about a Vampire waking up after a 200-years-long sleep and finding himself in the 1970s. See a trailer here.
  • Love at First Bite played with the same concept decades earlier, although Dracula hadn't been sleeping, just holed up in his isolated castle for generations.
• Demolition Man sees Sylvester Stallone's usual character end up in the future through suspended animation. He's suitably confused by technological advances (such as the "three seashells" that have replaced toilet paper), and horrified by the fact that the world (or at least the city) has been entirely Disneyfied.
• Variation: Enchanted. The world of Andalasia exists in modern times, but is seemingly in Medieval Stasis, allowing the characters who cross over into our world to be like this.
• In the first act of Flight of the Navigator, set on July 4, 1978, twelve-year-old David Freeman walks across the woods to get a friend, slips into a ravine and returns home... only to find it's July 4, 1986. His younger brother is now older than he is. He is taken to a NASA lab where he it is discovered that he was abducted by aliens and taken to their planet 560 light-years away and back in the equivalent of four hours. At the lab he is taken aback by Sarah Jessica Parker's partially purple hair, five different varieties of Coke, and music videos on TV.
• In Good Bye, Lenin!, a fake East Germany needs to be staged for the protagonist's mother who was Rip Van Winkle for just a few months... during which the Berlin Wall fell.
• The French movie Hibernatus is about a man who became a Human Popsicle after a shipwreck in 1905.
• Iceman is a deconstruction of this trope. It asks, completely seriously, how a Neanderthal man frozen for 40,000 years would be able to function in the modern world. The answer is very simple: he wouldn't.
• Idiocracy: Suspended animation into a distant future full of idiots...
• In Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession, a Soviet comedy movie, a young, aspiring Mad Scientist Shurik builds a time machine, and a superintendent of the house he was living in, Ivan Bunsha, exchanges places with the tsar Ivan the Terrible (the two Ivans are lookalikes). We get two fish out of temporal water, the superintendent who impersonates the tsar, and the tsar who thinks he is in a world of demons. Hilarity Ensues.
• Just Imagine revolves around someone from 1930 awakening in the incredible far-off year of 1980.
• Just Visiting. The instinctive reaction of a French knight and his servant when confronted with an SUV is to kill it. A lot. Also true in the French original: Les Visiteurs.
• In Kate & Leopold a 19th century duke falls through a time portal into 21st century New York. While he's out of place he does adjust quickly and isn't really all that out of place (he'd be seen as a quirky cosplayer or method actor who never breaks character, at worst).
• In The Knight Before Christmas 14th Century Knight, Sir Cole, is sent from 1334 England to 2019 Ohio and whilst he adjusts fairly quickly he does consistently seem to think cars are some sort of "steel steed", he becomes obsessed with the "Magic Box the Makes Merry" (television) and thinks car radios are actually minstrels and seems to think an Amazon Echo is actually a woman called Alexa. Speaking of the Amazon Echo when he can't switch it off he "banishes her to the night air" (puts it in the freezer), Brooke also has to stop him trying to start sword fights over her honor and prevent him from trying to kill a skunk for food. He finds along with television he really likes the "delicious meade" she keeps giving him (hot chocolate).
• In Kong: Skull Island, Hank Marlow is a relic of World War II due to being stranded on Skull Island for 28 years and is shocked to learn that the U.S. is now in conflict with the Soviet Union.
• In Life (1999), after being locked up for a murder he didn't commit, convict Claude Banks thinks about driving off in the Governor's car while driving him around town. He changes his mind and stays put, when he realizes that the world in the 1970s' is very different from the world of the 1930s'.
• Look Who's Back: Chillingly Subverted. Adolf Hitler suddenly comes back to life and he bumbles around in the world of The New '10s because he doesn't understand a lot of modern technology like the Internet... but then he adapts and things take a darker turn. He becomes an internet celebrity and gullible people begin to fall under his thrall precisely because nobody can believe that a pitch-perfect Hitler impersonator in modern Germany is anything more than some kind of politically-incorrect joke. And to him, if being seen as a comedian gets him supporters, then he'll play along. By the end of the film, Hitler's popularity is soaring and the one person who knows he's the real Hitler is locked in a mental asylum, powerless to do anything but watch as he prepares to strike out into politics.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • At the end of Captain America: The First Avenger, Steve Rogers wakes up in a recovery room in New York, sees through the ruse of the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent trying to convince him it's still 1944 and breaks out of the room and runs out of the building. He then realizes he's woken up almost 70 years later (in 2011) as he runs down the street and stands in Times Square. In The Avengers (2012), we see more of this. Steve doesn't know what Pilates is, and all of Tony's pop-culture jokes go over his head. Then Fury mentions that Loki turned two of his best men into his personal flying monkeys.
    Thor: I do not understand—
    Captain America: I do! [beat] I understood that reference.
  • By the time of Captain America: The Winter Soldier Steve has been catching up on pop culture and technology (he's able to recognize a WarGames reference by Natasha) but is still struggling with the fact that most of the people he knew are either dead or very old and that SHIELD, the supposed "good guys", use tactics that people in the 1940s would consider morally repugnant because they are largely a front for HYDRA.
    • The film shows a to-do list he's made (different versions for different language or regional releases of the film) of the things he needs to catch up on. In the North American version, one page shows he's seen Star Wars but still needs to look up Star Trek, I Love Lucy, the Moon Landing, Steve Jobs, the Berlin Wall (up and down), Thai food, the band Nirvana, Rocky, disco, and at Sam Wilson's suggestion, Marvin Gaye's album Trouble Man.
  • Avengers: Endgame:
    • The last thing Scott Lang remembered was entering the Quantum Realm and losing contact with Hank, Hope, and Janet, then come out in what seemed like five hours only to learn that it's been five years since that day, with a kid giving him a dirty look when he asks in genuine confusion what happened. Not only he learns that half of all humans had vanished (including his friends) but he was also reported as a casualty, and when he sees his daughter Cassie again she's now a teenager. On the upside, this also means that when he and Hope reunite for the final battle with Thanos's forces, it's not much of a reunion for them since it's only been a day since they've seen each other from Hope's perspective.
    • The Avengers are forced to contend with the Thanos of 2014, who time travels forward to 2023 after learning that he will succeed in destroying half the universe, but the other half won't move on. Naturally, since he isn't the same Thanos that killed half the universe, he has no idea why some heroes are personally gunning for him. This causes him to end up on the losing end of a beatdown when he crosses paths with Wanda Maximoff, who (from her perspective) just saw his 2018 counterpart murder her lover 30 minutes ago.
      Wanda Maximoff: You. Took. EVERYTHING. From me.
      Thanos: I don't even know who you are.^* Thanos's 2018 self had a short conversation with Wanda after watching her sacrifice Vision in an attempt to keep the Mind Stone away from him, right before he used the Time Stone to revive Vision and directly rip the Mind Stone from his head
      Wanda Maximoff: You will.
    • As is revealed by WandaVision, for everyone who got dusted in the Snap, five years went by in an instant. This is illustrated with Monica Rambeau, who got dusted while her mother Maria was in the hospital for cancer treatments. She's dusted while dozing off in a hospital chair. When she comes back, she's baffled to find that not only have five years passed, but her mother's cancer relapsed and she died in 2020.
    • Notably, among Thanos' army who time traveled from 2014, Gamora chooses to defect and join the Avengers' side, and as a result is spared when Tony uses the Infinity Gauntlet to snap Thanos and his army out of his existence. While this conveniently enables her to replace the previous Gamora who was sacrificed by Thanos to get the Soul Stone, she seemingly runs off after the final battle, since she came from a time before she joined the Guardians, and everything, barring her sister Nebula (who nevertheless has nine more years worth of experience that she knows nothing about), confuses her. This Gamora is revealed in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 to have joined Stakar Ogord's Ravager faction, and throughout the movie expresses frustration with the Guardians (especially Quill) projecting their feelings for the original Gamora onto her.
  • Spider-Man: No Way Home sees Peter and Doctor Strange causing a major Cosmic Flaw that resulted in an Intra-Franchise Crossover with both the Spider-Man Trilogy and The Amazing Spider-Man Series (as well as Sony's Spider-Man Universe, though its presence is only factored in The Stinger), plucking characters from both film continuities with most of the supervillains in particular being pulled from moments before (Lizard), during (Green Goblin), or near the end (Doc Ock, Electro) of their Final Battle with their Spider-Man. Sandman seems to be the only exception, obviously coming from a time post-the finale of his film^* He's reintroduced saving MCU Peter from Electro and asking the former if he remembers him, lining up to his Heel–Face Turn at the climax of his original film but his appearance when de-powered is still the same (Stock Footage even).
• The German film Das Wunder von Bern ("The Miracle of Berne") is set in 1954, the year Germany won the FIFA world championship the first time. One of the protagonists, Richard Lubanski, returns home from a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp, one of the last Germans to be repatriated. He finds it hard to adjust to the unfamiliar new West German society which is on its way to give up the strict patriarchal and authoritarian ways he had been accustomed to, and in particular he finds himself unable to deal with his elder son, a young rebel with communist leanings. Richard's situation is aggravated by his own war trauma and the fact that his wife and children have of necessity learned to cope without him during the intervening decade and thus resist his attempts to reimpose the pre-war pattern of him as husband, provider and near-absolute head of the family.
• In The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, some medieval villagers wander through a time-rift and find themselves in the present day. Unusual in that, while they are frightened by much of what they see, they never realize what's actually happening and assume it's just what big cities are like.
• A New York Christmas Wedding: Jenni, stumbling around very confused in the new timeline. Since she's in a timeline where hers and Gabby's split was only temporary the last decade is, for all intents and purposes, a complete blank to her.
• A mild version occurs in Escape From the Planet of the Apes, when Zira and Cornelius hop a spaceship and get thrown back in time after Earth is destroyed. They're amazed by how advanced human civilization is and perplexed by human things like prize fights, human clothes, wine (a.k.a. "grape juice plus"), not to mention the fact that apes are wild animals kept in zoos.
• Pleasantville: Two '90s kids get Trapped in TV Land, in a '50s Dom Com of exaggerated squareness.
• A memory-loss version in the Disney Channel Original Movie The Poof Point. A failed Time Travel experiment causes a pair of scientists (a married couple) to regress mentally to their college days. They don't recognize their kids, and when told of what happened, they spend a few minutes examining the wonderful technology of 2001. The father even expresses his disbelief that "silly Billy Gates", whom he tutored in calculus, is partly responsible for that.
• The 1984 SF farce Sex Mission has two guys volunteer to get frozen for a short time, in a medical experiment; of course, a world war erupts in the meantime and they wake up many decades later, in a dystopian world inhabited only by... no, not by idiots, but by women.
• Sleeper has Woody Allen's character cryogenically frozen when he doesn't recover from routine surgery, then revived 200 years later. He unwillingly becomes a key figure in a revolution as someone who has no identifying records.
• The Spirit of '76. Citizens of a future American dystopia attempt to travel back and rediscover the nature of the titular spirit. Instead of 1776, they end up in 1976. Hilarity Ensues.
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home:
  • Kirk and company go to the mid-1980s. There was some serious breakage of the Temporal Prime Directive there, what with McCoy refusing to leave hospital patients to primitive medicine, and Kirk's attempts to explain why Spock wasn't fitting in....
    Kirk: Back in the '60s he was part of the free-speech movement at Berkeley... and I think he did a little too much LDS.
  • This would have been before (on the TOSers timeline) the Temporal Prime Directive existed. Between them and the TNG crew, they made altering the past a B plot.
  • And of course, the famous scene where Scotty attempts to issue voice commands to a Macintosh, attempts to talk into the mouse, and is then told to use the keyboard, which he calls "quaint". And Gillian Taylor, who goes from the present to the future and stays there, though we never hear from her again.
    Scotty: [in-character as a man from Edinburgh] I've come millions of miles -
    McCoy: [sotto voce] Thousands
    Scotty: Thousands of miles...
  • And also the famous scene where Chekov (the Russian guy) stops a cop to get directions to the 'nuclear wessels'.
• Harrison a.k.a. Khan averts this in Star Trek Into Darkness. Despite waking up a few centuries into the future, he seems to have adjusted pretty well. Being genetically enhanced might have something to do with it, and he had been thawed out for significantly longer than his original timeline counterpart had been in his first appearance.
• The Terminator series has a few. The title robots have no problem adapting to the past given their memory banks allows for quick knowledge of the past (having No Social Skills is another deal). Kyle Reese, on the other hand, was deemed a lunatic by the LAPD. And then comes Terminator Genisys, where Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor travel to 2017 once they realized something in the future created an Alternate Timeline. And in there they find another time traveler in John Connor... who has become a Terminator. Kyle puts it clear that "Time travel makes my head hurt".
• In Time After Time, idealistic socialist H.G. Wells travels to the 20th century in pursuit of time-machine-thief Jack the Ripper, and finds it's not the utopia he'd expected.
• The Christian film Time Changer, is about a nineteenth-century Bible scholar who travels to the present. He gets used to our technology (he'd better; he came in a solar-powered time machine), but is horrified by our perceived rampant immorality. ^note The actual Victorian era had as much immorality as now, though in a different form and not spoken of in polite society, but he's from The Theme Park Version.
• The Time Machine (1960): George is entirely out of place in the future society. They're nearly all apathetic, such that one of his first sights is several placidly watching while another drowns (who he rescues). Since in their time everything is given to them by the Morlocks, they spend all of their time just relaxing and eating. He's disgusted at first, feeling they've given up everything inventors like him worked to build, but then realized it's not their fault as they're kept this way by the Morlocks. After he finally realizes what the Morlocks use the Eloi for, George fights against this and resolves to change their ways for the better.
• The 1986 film Tough Guys had Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster as the last guys to rob a train, back in the 1950s, coping with the different world they were released from prison into a quarter-century later.
• The tagline from Trancers says it all. "Meet Jack Deth. He's a Cop From The Future Trapped in the Present, and he's chasing a 23rd century menace in 1985."
• The page image comes from the Disney movie, Unidentified Flying Oddball (alternately known as A Spaceman In King Arthur's Court), where an astronaut winds up in the time of King Arthur.
• Wonder Woman: The title character herself. Since Themyscira has been separated from the human world since time immemorial, and Diana spent her entire life there, she faces cultural shock when she leaves for the human world. A major driving issue is Diana's childhood naivety: she believes that human warfare is artificial, that there is a higher being responsible for instigating it behind the scenes, rather than warfare being something that is inherent in humanity. Coupled with the fact that Themysicra itself is stuck in a Medieval Stasis, everyone looks at her funnily because she carries a lasso into a battlefield instead of a gun. In Wonder Woman 1984 it's the turn of Steve Trevor who's come Back from the Dead to be confused by the modern era while Diana guides him through it—getting amazed by new technology such as jet aircraft, escalators and CCTV cameras; complaining about 80's fashion, and confusing a trash can with a modern art piece.
• X-Men: Apocalypse: En Sabah Nur wakes up in 1980s Egypt after being sealed for thousands of years, and he's understandably confused at first. He initially speaks ancient Egyptian, and none of the Arabic-speaking people he bumps into can understand what he says. He quickly overcomes the problem after meeting Storm: he learns every language in the world and the world's history in a matter of seconds by touching a TV screen.