Nineties man trapped in self-contradicting time travel film

Rating: 6/10 (18 July 2007)

When making a time travel action film you have a choice to make. Is it going to be daft but entertaining fun (eg Timecop) or is it going to be an intellectual science fiction film that pursues deep philosophical points about determinism and free will (eg 12 Monkeys)? If you take the first path, then you can pretty much mess around with time-lines and ignore contradictions and paradoxes - time travel is simply a plot device. If you follow the second path, then you really have to make sure the plot is tight and there are no mistakes.
Unfortunately, Tony Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer go for the latter but only have the ability to produce the former. The result is a film that on the surface seems intelligent, but as the story progresses fills the intelligent viewer with a growing sense of things not making sense until all suspension of disbelief is lost. The messages are confused: the philosophical stance of the film is to suggest that dictatorial spoilsport science tells us that there is no such thing as free will. Fortunately, so the film tells us, having faith and believing in God means that free will actually can exist. Washington believes he can change the future and so he finds he can... however, in a strange contradiction to this, the film produces the branching time-line theory to explain how time travel allows us to change the present in a way that is consistent with a deterministic view of the universe! Does society need faith to choose its own future? Or is it just that we're all following the wrong theory of how time works? The film is inconclusive - and not deliberately (which could work!), but because the screenplay writer(s) obviously didn't see the contradiction.
Ironically, this reveals much about mainstream US cultural attitudes to science and spirituality. So, the bad guy in the film believes that everything in the future is already decided. Then the 'dogmatic' scientist overcomes his disbelief in the possibility of altering the present because he believes in God. However, the pretty black female scientist (ie, non-conformist who we should identify with because she is not trapped by the scientific atheist conspiracy) presents a clear physics reason why all this is perfectly explainable through normal cause and effect. The film justifies this blatant contradiction by implying that the theory she suggests is outside the mainstream of science. This is a common attitude, especially in the US (where the citizen believes they have an absolute right to believe what they want irrespective of reason or evidence) - the desire to keep life mysterious (and so allow the belief in God or ghosts or whatever) crashes up against the need for an explanation of everything in the context of a technologically advanced society and creates this strange kind of 'non-conventional science' which both explains everything yet allows the individual to maintain his or her unscientific spiritual beliefs. Intelligent Design and Scientology are prime examples of this kind of non-conventional 'science'. The non-conventional science suggested here is clearly not well understood, because it doesn't require the existence of free will to allow the changing of the present.
There is also one really big error - BIG SPOILER ALERT - and that is with all the stuff that happens in the woman's flat when Washington jumps back in time. When examining the woman's apartment before Washington jumps back, his forensics pal says that Washington's fingerprints are everywhere. However, this is not possible in the branching theory of time travel. The version of time that Washington observes through the high-tech surveillance system is the original branch of time (where the terrorist blows up the boat). The problem is that everything that happens as a result of his time travel is in the NEW branch of time. In the old branch Washington has no effect on the events leading up to the terrorist attack (we know this because the attack is successful) yet we are told that his fingerprints are in the apartment and we can work out that the woman calls his office. This is stuff that can only have happened in the NEW branch of time - otherwise the explosion would not have happened in the original time-line and the whole story could never have happened. In other words, the screenplay uses the tricks of a time travel story to illicit surprise and spine tingling moments of realisation but fails to be self-consistent.
Despite this, the film could still have worked as a good action flick. I've enjoyed plenty of preposterous action movies that have a dynamic driving pace and interesting characters. However, Scott's style is now outdated - a decade ago he could get away with laying the emotion on so thickly because the action was so BIG. Things have changed now. In the age of ultra-fast action and ultra-realistic fight scenes, Scott's directing lacks bite and drive and in places feels quite pedestrian. Compared to Casino Royal, which also has a rubbish story, watching this film sometimes feels like wading through a river of syrup. Add to this the over-emoting of Washington and it is hard to care for the characters. Modern action heroes are hard-edged and cold, only displaying emotion in moments of weakness. Scott's hero is very much a 'new man' of the nineties and so is passé.
So, the film pretty much fails to succeed on all levels. It feels like it should be a an exciting movie, but it isn't. It feels like it has something to say, but it doesn't. The film isn't really bad in any way, it just isn't good in any way either. It is clear from the film that Scott can direct - he just needs to move into the twenty-first century and stay away from the intellectual stuff.