LOST deals with time travel? When did that happen? (I stopped watching after season 2.)
One of my favorite time-traveling-dealing-movies is "The Paycheck". Well, actually there's no time traveling per se.

I didn't really like The Lake House because of the plothole you mention, L.M. I also don't like the way relationships in the story are treated, but that's a bit off the subject. Someone (I think it was Hoodwinked) once said that that movie was someone trying to be utterly brilliant... and failing . I remembered that comment because I agreed!

I've never read The Time Machine, though I would like to eventually. Though we saw the movie starring Guy Pierce (I think) and it was fairly meh.

LOST had a little time travel in season 4 and more in season 5.

I agree that the multiverse concept of Sliders, while not time travel per se, was a very clever idea. But after a few seasons it just started getting a little weird.

Highlander was a good series, but the Immortals actually didn't time travel. Important to each episode were nearly-seamless flashbacks to earlier times in a character's life - almost like time travel, but not quite.

Quantum Leap was another innovative concept - the main character

A couple years ago NBC tried a similar concept with its short-lived JourneyMan, which had the distinction that the 'leaper' could go back and forth in time - though it wasn't under his control - unlike being stuck as in Quantum Leap. Unfortunately it didn't last long.

My other favorite no-people-time-traveling-time-travel movie is Frequency with Dennis Quaid...

I thought of this one yesterday. It's a good movie, with information (rather than people) traveling through time. As L.M. Pevensie noted, the results of trying to change the past result in a butterfly effect-like situation.

Another of my favorite short stories is Ray Bradbury's 1952 "A Sound of Thunder," which was adapted into a movie a few years ago (which I haven't seen). It explores the possible results one tiny change in the past might make in the present.

Highlander was about an immortal, who had flashbacks to his earlier life. Technically not Time Travel . Great movie and TV show though.

Sliders was about a kind of Time Travel though, W4J. The parallel universes were all "divergent" timelines, and the sliders traveled across time horizontally, rather than vertically back or forwards in one timeline.

If anything, Sliders was one of the more accurate representations of a Multi-verse in which Time Travel would be possible. Thus avoiding the paradoxes that plague films like The Lake House and Frequency (which are both great films otherwise), and the Back to the Future films (also great), and many episodes of Star Trek.

As I said, I enjoy many Time Travel stories where people try to change the past or future or fix it, but it doesn't really make any sense. We live in a Universe (part of a larger Multi-verse) of Probabilities, all the possible choices we could make exist simultaneously, but we only experience One Reality at a time. But in a way, through dreams and fiction, we can explore all the possibilities.

That's why I love modern physics , it implies that in some other Universe Narnia, or Oz, really exists as a physical reality. Or that Middle-Earth really is our past in another Timeline.

GB

Highlander technically isn't time travel? Okay. Still, great series!

I suddenly remembered a children's movie [can't recall the name ] about this 1990s girl who wants to be an entrepreneur [she sells candy bars at school]. She then travels back to the Great Depression in the 1930s to learn about the importance of character. The twist is that she leaves notes in a journal about the modern success of Japan after the war and when she returns to the 1990s she discovers her grandfather is rich because he followed her notes. It's been nearly ten years since I've seen this movie and yet I still remember it.

Does anyone remember a CBS drama about a guy who looked in the next day's paper and tried to help people based on what he found? What was the name of it? I know it isn't time travel, per se, but it is sci-fi/fantasy, isn't it?

Gah! This is driving me nuts 220CT. I totally remember the show you're talking about, and I totally forget the name of it .

I think it fits in this thread though, because it does have some time travel elements. Information comes from the future, giving the protagonist a chance to fix things and change the outcome. I do think that is actually a plausible scenario. It's just that the person that fixes things resides in an alternate or "divergent" universe than the one the info came from.

GB

Well, this may come as something of a stretch then, but there was a very interesting line of comics in the Marvel universe titled "What If...", and was about this alien fellow (whose name escapes me now, although I know it begins with a U) who will replay for the reader some pivotal moment from a Marvel superhero's life and then would take the reader into an alternate timeline of what would have happened had that pivotal event not transpired, or had turned out differently. My friend had a stack of the things and I loved sitting over in his dorm room on a Saturday afternoon and just kicking back and reading them.

I don't think that's a stretch at all Shadow. Those Marvel What If's were a perfect example of the Alternate Realities or Multiple Universes that would make Time Travel logical. Which reminds me of the classic "What If" film, It's a Wonderful Life. Again, Traveling across time is as much Time Travel as going forwards or back, and indeed time travel vertically necessitates horizontal travel to avoid Paradoxes.

GB

My mom remembered: "Early Edition." Can you believe that?

How did I forget It's a Wonderful Life? I loved this movie! George Bailey discovers what it is to be non-existent and see a world he hates seem hateful without him. George discovers the simple joy of being needed. I think my favorite scene was when he said "My mouth's bleeding, Bert! My mouth's bleeding! ... Zuzu's petals!"

Thank your Mom for me 220CT . I've been trying to remember the title since you brought it up.

GB

I like time travel in movies cause it's entertaining, but I have to force myself not to think about it too much and ruin it because it's totally impossible (they should just leave out 'scientific' explanations on how they do it because it's always bogus and irritates me lol).

But, if by some magical power it was possible, I'd like to go back to the 6th or 7th century (but I have a feeling I'd be blown away by the smell of inefficient sewage and people who rarely bathe!)

Actually General, most physicists have come around to the point of view that not only is Time Travel possible, but that the quantum behaviour of some particles demonstrates that it occurs already. And when they discover how certain particles do it, they will eventually be able to engineer a real Time Travel device.

GB

I've read it exists in a sense. The closer a person travels to the speed of light the slower that time passes for them, while time flows normally for everything else. However, even if you had a ship capable of travelling at the speed of light, you can really only move in one direction: the future. If you took a year or two in your ship travelling near lightspeed and then returned to Earth you'd find many years had passed since you left since time was passing normally for all the denizens of the planet. I can't remember which movie it was that had such an excellent depiction of this (I believe it was "Young Einstein", which was kind of a spazzy, weird little movie). The title character is explaining to his paramour how Relativity works and said something to the effect of...

Let's say you're in a ship and you blast off from Earth and start going very fast. And let's say that in the ship you could see a specific clock on Earth whose hands read 2:20. The light bounces off of the clockface and chases your ship at the speed of light. The closer you come to the speed of light means the light from the clockface will take longer to reach you, and if you hit lightspeed it never will. Time stops for you.

There's also the concept of Black Holes, where gravity is so intense that light itself cannot escape. If a person were to be dragged into one, time would practically stop for them while time would pass normally for the rest of the universe. This holds true for any gravity well. Let's say there's a skyscraper that's 70 stories high. A person who works each day on the top floor will have the slightest (and I mean infintesimally small) degree of less gravity than one who works on the 1st floor. So the person who works on the 70th floor will experience a day which goes faster, even if it is by a thousandth of a millisecond. Still one can only time travel in the one direction: the future. If you can figure out how to make the process go backwards you'd be one rich person.

I'm sure I have more favourites but these are the ones I can currently think of:

Books:
That Hideous Strength - C.S. Lewis

Surely That Hideous Strength doesn't use time travel?

Would you be thinking about his unfinished story The Dark Tower?

I've seen Back to the Future 1, not the later ones. That's a movie which very much allows the characters to change the past, and thus change their own history.

I also remember one funny incident from that movie - the main character wakes up after his first night in the past. He recognises the woman standing above his bed (his mother, I think), and is very relieved and tells her that he's had this terrible dream about going into the past. She smiles and says, Oh, yes, that's terrible - but now you're safely back in 1955.

Okay, That Hideous Strength has only the slightest hint of time travel, in the sense that Merlin is dug up and brought into the present day.
I really enjoyed The Dark Tower but I don't like that it was left unfinished.