History evades human control

Rating: 10/10 (29 January 2007)

This is a remake of the French film « La Jetée », and yet it is completely different. The film kept the time-travelling dimension, the catastrophe that killed five billions human beings and forced the survivors to live underground in some kind of medically managed prison for everyone. The time-traveller is a volunteer in this prison who is trying to reduce his time by volunteering to the surface to pick insects and samples of life out there, and also to the past to find out what happened in 1996, and eventually prevent the catastrophe. But that is about all, except for the boy at the airport and the man killed there with the same twitch in the punchline as in « La Jetée ». But the film develops three other dimensions. The first one is the reaction of the world of the past when confronted to this time-traveller from their future. They just put him away in some asylum where he meets the woman of his dream as one of the doctors there. This reaction reveals the strange blindness of humanity because they consider anyone who is in anyway different, divergent as one says, as being insane. In this world you have to conform to the little box where fate, in fact social determination, has put you. You can be normal, or you can be a deranged preacher, or you can be a whore or pimp, or you can be a homeless bum, or you can be a criminal, but beyond there you are insane. That makes society absolutely blind to anything that is slightly off the line because they refuse to see it. This is perfectly exemplified with this army of the 12 monkeys, a clandestine criminal organization that has stolen some dangerous bacterial germ and is going to spread it in half a dozen cities in the world. The film also develops the relation between the time-traveller and the lady of his dream. It is a real relation. Medical at first, then it is an abduction, then it becomes some kind of love or cooperation. The lady then is no longer dead like in the French model. She sure is alive and she ends up believing him about what was or is supposed to happen on December 13th. But they fail or rather fate, history, destiny succeed. He dies and she runs after him and the criminal with his bacteriological samples can escape. The world is doomed. This is the third development of the French model. You cannot change history. This already was in H.G. Wells's « The Time Machine ». But this time it is central in the film. At the same time he plays on two embodiments of the same character in the same scene but duplicated by one who is time-travelling. This is an essential element of the trilogy « Back to the Future ». But you cannot change history that follows its own rules and cannot be tampered with. What is to happen has to happen. Total fatality. Strangely enough it does not have the same meaning as in H.G. Wells. No sentimentality about it. Just the brutal realization that humanity has vainly thought and believed they could make history. This new idea was common in H.G. Wells's time. Today it has become some oddity from our marxist positivistic past, some oddity that very few people believe in any more. History is going its own way along its own rails with its own reasons and any human being in this history has to follow the flow. They can swim or they can let themselves be carried by the current, or they can sink in a way or another. But they will not stop the stream nor change its course. A river has never been able to go up the hills : it has to follow rules that have little to do with us, such as gravity and slope.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne