Unbelievable but definitely frightening if not sickening

Rating: 10/10 (6 July 2008)

A strange film on a very trite and over-used theme. The dedication to New Orleans does not change that fact. After "Back to the Future" we cannot accept some of the rather sloppy elements we find in this film. A few examples. At the beginning, thanks to the machine to explore the past, we discover the car with the explosives on the boat did not have a number plate. How can security rules explain the fact that a car without a number plate was allowed on a boat transporting more than 500 people? The terrorist stole a car because he needed one. But he actually had one. So why did he use a stolen one? But the worst part is how the Doug from the future when arriving in the past does all kinds of antics, leaving all kinds of traces behind him in the past, obviously cutting short the plan of the terrorist, and yet the terrorist will fulfill his plan entirely in the first version of the attack, but in the first version still the investigation reveals the Doug from the future has already intervened in the past and hence should have changed the result of the terrorist attack by hijacking it off its normal course. If he was in the girl's apartment before the terrorist attack, leaving his finger prints and his blood everywhere, how could the terrorist succeed in killing the girl and blowing the boat up. And he the Doug from the future dies in the past, that would make him dead for the future. He could not come up alive and start everything like normal after the explosion. If the past is changed, then the future is changed too. If you die, you die and you do not exist any more. And the Doug who died in the explosion will not be able to arrest the terrorist who was killed just before the explosion, both being dead for the future. And if the girl managed to escape from the car when it fell into the Mississippi through a broken window, and she was not trained like a federal agent, how come Doug, a trained federal agent, could not follow suit and get out from the car through the same window? But we can suspend our disbelief and then consider the film as something that does not have to be logical. Pure action. Fine. What's the meaning of this action in 2006, five years after 9/11 and three years after the invasion of Iraq, not to mention today in 2008? Terrorist attacks in the USA come from white Americans who define themselves as patriots and consider they have to attack the security forces and the people of the USA to make them realize they have to start a third world war to stop the world from changing and to prevent the USA from becoming a second rank nation, and do not forget the USA became the first nation in the world after and thanks to the second world war. And in this scenario, one little bomb can kill more than 500 people. They don't need four or five Boeings to do that. One man alone, properly trained can be a lot more effective than Al Qaeda. That's what you call economy of scales. The second idea is that in such cases the terrorist, when caught, will be buried by the FBI into silence and disappearance because the government will not want details to be given on two subjects. First of all the absolute incapability of the state to protect the territory and the people of the USA. Second the fact that they possess a technology that enables them to reconstruct everything that has happened in a particular place, behind walls, closed doors and any kind of protection. There is no privacy and no protection of privacy in this new hi-tech vision. That is a lot more frightening than a few berserk patriots who consider the death of a few thousand people to be a good thing to arouse consciousness. There, beyond believability, this film is a really scary movie. "Minority Report" was frightening but they only read the future, and in the end dropped the technology for political reason. Here it is a lot worse since they can read the past, what really happened. We are trapped 100%. We are under constant surveillance and control by people, forces and agencies we do not even know exist or will exist.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines