I still think the best movie treatment of time travel was in The Spy Who Shagged Me, when Basil Exposition turned to the camera and said "I suggest you don't worry about those things and just enjoy yourself."

as well as that terrific scene in the mall.

I liked that scene quite a bit, as well as the brief appearance by Peter Stormare as the black market doctor (he really needs to get more work out here, though he gets plenty of leading roles in his native Sweden).

Because they want to - it's a useful method of social control.

So, apparently there has been some major tort reform too -- because the first person whose family sued the city/state for false imprisonment should by modern standards make meelions and meelions of dollars and completely bankrupt state, city and police department and end this particular experiment of social control.

I mean, after all, none of the prisoners have committed a crime; they're imprisoned for a crime they didn't commit; ergo, false imprisonment. Imagine the lawyer's percentage of the settlement! It would make John Grisham blush.

(someone here had mentioned a possibility that the too-happy-an-ending could be interpreted as Anderton's hallucination/dream post-halo-ing, which I liked)

I don't know if I was the only one who said that, but it was certainly how I interpreted it.

There comes a point that you have to stop letting Spielberg off the hook with the "last 10 minutes are a dream" excuse and accept that he's just a big softy (cf AI)

brief appearance by Peter Stormare

Oh yeah. He was great. Except whenever someone mentions his name, my mind now defaults to the leg-in-woodchipper image with the resulting wiggins.

apparently there has been some major tort reform too

Well, yeah ... wasn't it part and parcel of the assumption that fear had reached such proportions that you could imprison someone to prevent, as opposed to punish?

There comes a point that you have to stop letting Spielberg off the hook with the "last 10 minutes are a dream" excuse and accept that he's just a big softy (cf AI)

I haven't seen AI, but I thought at the time it was all a dream. And I don't see any reason it's not. It's not a justification -- it's an honest interpretation.

Except whenever someone mentions his name, my mind now defaults to the leg-in-woodchipper image with the resulting wiggins.

Some actors just get permanently marked by certain roles.

Michael Madsen's the same way. In Free Willy, I spent the whole movie waiting for his utterly harmless dad character to freak out, cut somebody's ear off, and pour gasoline all over them.

Also, The Final Countdown in which a modern US Navy aircraft carrier gets sent to Hawaii on Dec 6, 1941. But I didn't see that one.

Love. That. Movie.

Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, Charles Durning, time-travel, moral dilemmas...what's not to like?

I have to admit one of my favorite time-travel movies is Timecop. The MMBS for "how it works" is annoying and hand-wavy, but I dug the realization in the last fifteen minutes that the entire movie is the second time through the time loop! There's, conceivably, an original timeline we never see where Ron Silver doesn't come back and kill Jean-Claude Van Damme's wife. I thought that was kinda cool.

Back to the Future 2 is great. Couldn't happen, according to its own internal logic, but lots of fun.

12 Monkeys, naturally. Just brilliant.

And, *cough* Millennium with Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd. Odd little movie, but fun.

Fair enough. and it might be, it's just I tend to be suspicious, where there's no evidence to suggest it, of the argument that the coda to films is a death dream of some sort.