A couple of days ago, I had a lesson with a student. The lesson was about talking about your favorite movie. The goal of the lesson was to talk about your favorite movie and give some background information about it. For example,

Star Wars came out in 1977. It had Harrison Ford in it. It takes place in space. It had really good special effects.

All of these sentences are in past tense, but one sentence is not:

'It takes place … '

My student asked me why it was in present tense. It took me awhile to think of a clear answer. We can use present tense to tell a story:

Luke Skywalker leaves his home and goes to fight the evil Darth Vader.

This is the main use of present tense. We can also use present tense when we talk about fictional books, movies, or stories:

It has Harrison Ford in it.

It stars Carrie Fisher.

It runs 120 minutes.

The movie tells the story of a hero leaving his home planet and fighting evil.

Be careful! We CAN use present tense. We can also use past tense:

Luke Skywalker left his home and went to fight the evil Darth Vader (in Star Wars: A New Hope).

This sentence needs a little context (e.g. in Star Wars: A New Hope) to sound natural.

The following sentences are also okay:

It had Harrison Ford in it.

It starred Carrie Fisher.

It ran 120 minutes.

The movie told the story of a hero leaving his home planet and fighting evil.

When you use the present tense, the sentences sound more active.

So, can you say 'The movie took place in space'?

Well, yes. I think this sounds a little strange, but one teacher's opinion is definitely not very scientific. I did some research with a corpus. Using the Corpus of Contemporary American English¹, I found that the past tense of 'take place' is sometimes used to talk about movies and books. But, the present tense of 'take place' is more often used.

What do you think? What is most natural to you? Present or past tense?

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¹The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is a freely available corpus created by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University.