What a cool flick!

Rating: 10/10 (14 January 2007)

As usual, no synopsis here; just a comment. And, yes, definite SPOILERS.
When I realized at the start that it was a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, my reaction was 'cool'! A time travel theme done by Bruckheimer; what more could anyone want? With Denzel Washington and Val Kilmer to bootplus one Paula Patton, who in the beginning on the morgue slab looks almost like Halle Berry, almost to the extend of making me think 'what the...', but then turns safely into a non-Halle-Berry, which is all good, because Patton has several times the personality of the former.
Since I write SF I am a clued-in kind of guy, and so when a terrorist/CSI tale turned into a time-travel story, well that was even better. It's a daring genre mixa bit like The Island wasbut that makes it more interesting. I know a lot of cinema goers get 'genre-confused' when the clues are pointing _this_ way at the start, but then the movie ends up going _that_ way, but in this case it worked.
The sci-fi premise was simple, supported by the inevitable and probably necessary bit of yak-speak in which the word 'wormhole' just _had_ to figure. But once you accepted the basic idea, it was followed through with fairly solid logic. That's the hallmark of good sci-fi premises, and especially those involving time-travel, and even more especially those set in a current-day context.
In this instance (last spoiler warning!) it was this: Take any given location on the map. You can build a device that peeks a fixed amount of time into the past within a given radius around that location. Meaning that you can't peek outside the area thus defined. The only way you can do that is if you carry some remote to the device around and position said remote close to whatever you want to look at, since it was a much smaller viewing radius. Also, you can only always look at a given point in time a fixed interval 'behind' your current position on the time-axis; that is, if you are looking back using the device at time 't' and you can look back by an interval of 'dt', the point in time you're looking at is 't-dt'. Meaning you'd better look close, because if you don't you might miss itand even recording what you see doesn't help, because you can't look everywhere. Just like you can't look everywhere right now.
That was the premise and they basically ran with it. I like those kinds of plots, because they allow you to spin out things without too much strain on credibility. Stephen Gould writes books like that: _Jumper_ and _Wildside_ are two examples of the same kind of approach. I've tried it myself. It's a very neat way of story-telling. Simple and clear premises often give rise to much more complex tales than worlds created with too much artifice.
Great flick. Worth every dollar my wife and I spent on seeing it, and more.
Till Noever, owlglass.com