Too cunning to be understood - almost

Rating: 9/10 (8 January 2007)

Oh dear. Time-travel movies. Most of the time they have some fatal flaw in their logic, and at first I thought that Deja Vu did, too. But apparently it doesn't. Only problem is, on first viewing it's nearly impossible for mortal intellects to understand, and even harder to explain.
When the movie starts, another earlier timeline has already played itself out. Claire's phone message for Doug could only have come if he had already gotten involved in her life. So what we don't see in the movie is the first time he goes back in time to save her. He doesn't succeed, and so we get a second (actually a third) timeline, where we follow the "third Doug's" point of view, meaning that neither he nor we know the whole story. It's a plot much like in Christopher Nolan's Memento. Doug has to discover his mistakes over and over until he gets it right. Trouble is, the movie doesn't show you this with enough clarity for the ordinary (or even a bit advanced) viewer (or critic) to understand. There are not enough clues. It's being too steenkin' intellectual! But, this is forgivable; I always like a movie that doesn't give away all its secrets at once. The downside is that it will not be a commercial or critical success, at least not until posterity as a whole figures out what's going on in it. But to have a decent time-travel movie for once, I do think it's worth it! (And hey, don't movies take in most of their cash on DVD sales anyway?)
So I must say that, after thinking about it, it's actually a much better movie than I thought it was just after I finished it. This is good. Discovering surprising depths to a Hollywood movie is very, very rare. Good job, everybody who worked on it. You did well.
9 out of 10.