The movie is nonsensical because of the paradox of time travel

I like to make a distinction between fiction and nonsense.

I am a great fan of science fiction movies, but time travel SF is nonsense - eccept for "Primer".

I'm personally fond of the theory that any influence a time traveler might have on the past has already happened. In other words, if I traveled back in time and tried to change something, nothing would change because whatever influence I make will already be taken into account. To put it another way, each moment in time only happens once even if the same person were to experience it multiple times. So if someone tried to go back in time and kill Hitler, he has already tried and failed as far as the flow of time is concerned.

Anyway, this was a stupid movie that had pretty much zero internal logic with how it handled time travel. And seriously, time quakes? What the hell were those supposed to be?

I think haggar is right and the reason the time travel thing is hard to believe in this particular movie is because they bring the theme of a paradox right into it at the forefront of the story. Many movies that incorporate a time travel idea don't even mention the idea of a paradox. They don't get into that. So since this movie keep bringing it up, you start thinking about the various possibilities of paradox, you start thinking about how all of these scenarios with time travel wouldn't be possible and it ruins your ability to believe in (even a small way) what the story is about.

The thing I didn't get was that at the end they all jumped into some distant future to get away from the paradox and I thought, why didn't they do that in the first place? Why didn't they just all go into what would probably be a better place than where they were and then they wouldn't even have to live that way?

“Honey, there’s a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick!”--Alvy (Annie Hall/1977)

There isn't a paradox though, see this wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novikov_self-consistency_principle

"The Novikov Principle does not allow a time traveller to change the past in any way, but it does allow them to affect past events in a way that produces no inconsistencies—for example, a time traveller could rescue people from a disaster, and replace them with realistic corpses seconds before it occurs. Providing that the rescuees do not re-emerge until after the time traveller first journeyed into the past, his/her motivation to create the time machine and travel into the past will be preserved. In this example, it must always have been true that the people were rescued by a time traveller and replaced with realistic corpses, there was no "original" history where they were actually killed, since the notion of "changing" the past is ruled out completely by the self-consistency principle."

That's why the copilot said the bodies were dead and burning before the plane crashed, the people from the future snuck in and saved everyone from the plane BEFORE it crashed and replaced them with burnt corpses. They kept everyone they saved in stasis so that they could send them into the far future to repopulate the earth, since in their future the world had become polluted and humans couldn't reproduce anymore.

The part which REALLY doesn't make any sense is everyone going to the far future in the end. If the timequake destroyed the year 2989, then what else is there after that?

What is you consider everything as a wave? With multi dimensional planes and waves inside it, you would not need infinite of anything but depending on where in the planes you point at, things would appear distinct than any other point. They already theorize that matter is made up of strings and depending on the frequency defines what that particle is. ofcourse those particles combining with other particles become all the matter we can interact with. If we look at everything as defined then it would be hard to imagine things changing. But if we look at things as a hologram and waves then depending on where we look, anything is possible. So take one side of a wave and you would be alive but on the other end of it you would be dead because you went back in time and killed your grand father, in between you have all the variations where you were killed by aliens and you were the president and you were rich or you something else. Time itself is a wave, how else can it change because of gravity? Just like electromagnetic waves or gravity waves and light waves. If all those things were solid then things would not work the way it does. Although there does seem to be some indication of multi universes it could be something we dont know about yet like dark matter. All the galaxies are being pulled by something around 300 mil light years away and this has to be massive like another galaxy to affect galaxies in this universe. Or it could be one gigantic massive black hole even if there are some which are as big as galaxies itself it still dont affect things like this one does. If true then we have even more things we need to understand. Even Hawking says there might be zillions of universes since it is so easy to create one. Each with its own peculiar physics in it. The physics in a universe is created as it is born depending on how the matter that is left over from the big bang combines. Which itself is a small minuscule part of what happed then. Something like 0.00001% of the matter/anti-matter that was present, of which we have only detected like 5% of what was left. Just imagine the scale of nothing. The scale of infinite nothingness can drive one mad just thinking about it.