Back to Come Forward

Rating: Null/10 (29 June 2007)

I think there must be a craft in Hollywood, a guild of stunt designers. Presumably they used to be stuntmen and explosives gurus. But now they must be more like writers and production designers. Half of this movie has nothing to do with Willis or the story, That half is the stunts, and they are designed to be overtly retro, both in what they actually are and the tone of how we see them. This has to be enough, and for me it marginally was.
That's not because they were good  they were typical in wow factor. But that they were designed with reference in mind. Those first scenes in the Bond films were this way too: the stance, the historical placement was as well considered as normal dramatic qualities. Stunts had arrived; now they can have irony, self-reference, temporal semiotics.
But there's a second half of this movie too. The Willis character isn't in either half; he's irrelevant. In previous films we see him as haunted. Its a cartoonish haunting of family and self-worth. Here, there's none of that, no "everyman."
The second half is the computer assault. (You should know that I know how much of this computer infrastructure really is put together.)
What we have here is something that (except for cell phones) uses notions and even devices at the "data center," that come from 1988. Its incredibly dated, even more unsophisticated than that Sandra Bullock thing, "The Net." Its retro, just like the stunts. Its a risky decision; I think it works. More important to me is that they can design something like this. Horror movies do it all the time, but they don't do it with double-skips: Skipping back to see how they would have skipped forward.
Its just the sort of design ethic that the Willis character had in the first one, which also was the first summer action blockbuster. Its that work at the action, then wink bit.
Fitting into that skip forward is casting of the "I'm a Mac" guy as the main hacker, and the skip back of Kevin Smith as the secondary one.
This might mean something important when we see it in a real movie, this engineering of time stance.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.