Securing the future, George Bush style

Rating: Null/10 (12 December 2011)

"De Ja Vu" is one of Tony Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer's better collaborations. The film stars Denzel Washington as an ATF agent who is brought into the folds of a government programme called "Snow White". "Snow White" "opens a time window" which allows viewers in the present to look four days back into the past. Using this forensic tool viewers in the present are able to gather clues which may help them solve crimes which have already been committed. The catch is, "Snow White" unfolds in real-time. What it shows is always four days, 6 hours and 3 minutes ago. While this limitation hampers "Snow White's" effectiveness - once the device misses a moment, it's gone forever - it is still a remarkable tool: it's essentially a super-controllable time-camera, a "worm hole" which can be manually moved about such that those in the present see anywhere in the past, albeit within the four day window.
The film's theories, machines and techno-babble are ridiculous. Science fiction has always gleefully expounded on mind-bending ideas, but "De Ja Vu's" problem is not that its ideas are too far fetched – the film's central idea is a good one - but that everything works too well. Tony Scott doesn't sell us the idea of "Snow White". It works too powerfully, too precisely, too conveniently, too quickly. On the flip side, it's hilarious the way Scott doesn't care. And though his film bares resemblance to such time-movies as "Primer", "12 Monkeys", "Minority Report", "Looper", "The Butterfly Effect", "La Jettee", "Source Code" and "Frequency", the real influence seems to be the sequence in big brother Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" where Harrisson Ford manipulates a photograph, trawling its borders in a search for clues. What "De Ja Vu" does is construct a whole film out of this sequence, Scott treating the whole world as a photograph which his boundless camera bounces back and forth exploring. "Snow White's" not a time machine, so much as its a forensic tool which turns yesterdays into a virtual, explorable globe. It's like a cross between Google Earth Street View and a giant magnifying glass.
The film's central crime is a terrorist attack on a New Orleans river ferry. The way the film handles the terrorist, the terrorist attack and the government's solution, is crass. The film ignores a very spooky aspect of the US government: its paranoiac obsession with preventing tragedies in the future through money, high-tech gadgets, covert forces, data-mining, wide-spread surveillance, illegal information gathering and the breaking of any number of privacy and/or civil rights laws. It's a kind of super-neurosis, the state organism so uber-desirous of control that it's not only oppressive and controlling in the present, but reaches far out in to the past and future as well, obsessively gathering all it can to preserve and protect itself. But Scott's too small an artist to see these nefarious avenues. He's in the Cameron, Spielberg, Bay mould, interested in technology only insofar as its able to zap eyeballs. It's along these lines, and these lines only, that "De Ja Vu" works. Scott's more interesting in playing with cameras, time-lines and points of view.
The film was written by Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio. Their script was heavily changed by Scott, who has since apologised and expressed regret for his meddling. Marsilii and Rossio's script was allegedly more highbrow, clever and had less plot holes. Still, some good stuff remains in Scott's final version. Consider your typical Tony Scott car-chase, only now it takes place simultaneously within two time-lines, Denzel carrying a camera on his vehicle (akin to the Google camera, currently mapping our streets for Google Earth) which allows him to catch up to and chase a car that travelled a particular route four days ago. It's a cool idea, even if Scott doesn't milk it fully.
More interesting is the way the film implies that what we're witnessing is the third or fourth "unfolding" of its particular events. Late in the film Denzel uses "Snow White" to physically jump into the past in an attempt to stop the terrorist action. What the film does, however, is start 3 or 4 jumps after Denzel's first jump into the past. The effect is such that the past versions of Denzel are leaving clues for both Denzel and the audience in the future, the hope being that these clues allow us to "break the conspiracy of time" (no matter what actions occur in the past and present, the film says, the future outcome is always the same, though it unfolds in a slightly different way) and catch the terrorist in the present. In this way the film itself becomes a time-window, a forensic wormhole akin to "Snow White's" own event horizon. Meanwhile we become time-detectives.
The film's cast and characters are more functional than interesting. Only Denzel Washington stands out. He's always good in these every-man roles. The film ends with a very forced romance, which for some reason always finds its way into these time-traveller movies. It's funny the way human beings can't think of any other reason to break the space-time continuum other than sex. Interestingly, the film's "worm hole" functions in such a way that those in the past can "feel" or "sense" that they're being watched by observers in the future. As far as I know, this is the opposite of an event horizon under the general theory of relativity, in which the boundary marks the point at which events beyond cannot be affected by outside observers. In "De Ja Vu" there is no point of no return. A light shone through "Snow White" will reach into the past and cause knock-on reactions. In a way this epitomises the unconditional hopefulness, naivety or optimism of the film. The past, present and future will be changed through sheer will and covert technology, it says, and your tomorrow will always be safeguarded. Meanwhile, in the real world...
8/10 – Worth one viewing.