Time Travel in Donnie Darko

As a previously enthusiastic Doctor Who fan, a avid re-reader of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and someone who is interested in paradoxes in general, time travel has always fascinated me. Time travel is a prominent theme and plot device in Donnie Darko and I think the way the film goes about explaining time travel is very interesting.  In the film the rabbit Frank (who is actually a man in a rabbit costume) uses time travel to tell Donnie when the world will end. Throughout the film Donnie is re-visited by Frank in order to introduce him to people and books that will culminate into giving Donnie answers as to how he can save his girlfriend Gretchen from being accidentally killed by Frank himself. 

The way the film presented time travel is different from how I would think time travel would work. I prefer the Prisoner of Azkaban method that involves a fixed time line where the time travel was meant to happen all along, and events in the story leading up to the time traveling had already happened. Donnie Darko uses a flexible timeline where the events of the film can be undone by traveling back in time and doing something different. 

Obviously there is no "right" way to depict time travel because its physics and impacts on timespace are not yet known, so all we can really do is play out scenarios to see how time travel would influence characters and situations. Time travel makes me thing a lot about the "otherness" of God, who is not bound by time and space like people are. God is just as present now as He was yesterday, last week, and four thousand years ago. He is omnipresent in both location and time, which is something I cannot truly fathom, but I still think is incredible.