Déjà Vu (2006) — "I'd try."

Weird way being. You think you know what's coming, you don't have a clue. You don't have a clue. It's a phenomenon known as dejevo. It's a phenomenon known as deja vu.

You arrive at a place you've never been, but it feels familiar. But it feels familiar. You look into the face of a stranger and you feel like you've known her all your life. Have we met? Deja vu is believed by many to be a trick of the mind, but the truth is far more extraordinary.

What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world, but you knew they'd never believe you. I try. I have been put in charge of a newly formed investigative unit. I want you on the team. Got some unique time constraints.

He has been shown a secret to brand new program. We can look anywhere four days in the past. The government doesn't want you to know. This is not surveillance, this is the actual past. Yes, they found a way to fold space back onto itself.

Remember that lack how we. Had a few years back after Northeast You're saying you got fifty million homes. My bad. Wow, this Thanksgiving the key to stomping a disaster. You think you know what's coming, you don't have a clue.

It starts by unraveling the mystery of DejaVu. What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world, but you knew they'd never believe you. I try, I got it, I got it. You know you don't have to do this. They've already had dejah.

If you think it's just a feeling, go back and look again. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Culture Cast. I am your host, Chris Tashue, and I'm joined by my good friend. He is the professor of Media and Communications over at Texas Tech University TTU, the home of Patrick Mahomes. Yay, your friend and mine, doctor David pearl Mutter.

Hello, Chris, thank you again. I would say you're Texas Tech's most famous export, but I think Patrick Mahomes may take the cake now for that. Would you say you're Switzerland's most famous export, doctor David pear Mutter. Or is that chocolate? I think cheese, chocolate and meltin sar Lebrond is more focused on them.

Yeah, that's right. If you clicked on this episode, or if you're sitting in a lecture hall listening to it, or if your professor has told you to grace your ear holes with it. On this episode of the Culture Cast, we're gonna be talking about a film from two thousand and six that stars someone who just to bury the lead here. I'm not normally he's super big of a fan of his, so I am really excited to be more or less reminded that Denzel Washington is an actor that I don't resonate with particularly. However, that's not the case with this film we'll be talking about.

Two thousand and six is Tony Scott directed Deja Vu So. The film is directed by Tony Scott, written by Bill Marcilly and Terry Terry Rossio, stars Denzel Washington, Val Kilmer, Paula Patton, Bruce Greenwood, Adam Goldberg, and Jesus Christ himself Jim Cavizl. The film is about an ATF agent who is effectively attempting to prevent the Oklahoma City bombing from happening in New Orleans, and he sort of prevents it but doesn't prevent it because time travel is involved. It's a confusing movie. We will be spoiling it if you've never seen it before, so go ahead and watch it.

Come on back, because if you've never seen it, this conversation may get a tad confusing if we talk about the plot of the film, par Mutter, you and I talked on the phone before I was going to the True False Documentary Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri last week, and you were rattling off some films that you enjoyed watching or wanted to talk about, and this was on that list. So, sir, I am so very curious. Why Deja Vu a film that I know I saw in theaters, but no one in my family can remember if they saw it with Well, I. Think that was part of the deja vu part. I see this movie, did you see it?

That that would be a true time travel movie? Right? Nobody? Nobody saw the movie. Nobody remembers even though they were there.

Yeah, this movie has two prices of entry. One, it's a Denzel Washington movie, and Denzel Washington plays Denzel Washington, which is perfectly acceptable. There's been many stars in Hollywood history who were fantastic at playing themselves. He's a starring in the mold of a star that doesn't exist anymore. Yeah, and that's that either you resonate with him or you don't.

Like that's just the way it is with an actor like Denzel. Like you said, he's kind of always playing himself for the most part recently anyways, I think. There's a fan theory online that all Denzel Washington movies are in the same universe, like he just he's he will find out in his final film that he was some sort of it was some some sort of Star Trek split personality and tractures to multiverse. Yeah, but so so for he is an excellent actor. He plays a certain role, the very smart, charming, personable guy who's also very tough.

I mean, you've got a little bit of Michael Caine, a little bit of John Wick, you know, a little bit a little bit of shards of other stars of the past. But as you said, some people just don't want to watch Denzel Washington. So there's Denzel Washington playing an ATF agent, but he's Denzel Washington playing an ATF agent. And then the other price of entry is that it's a Tony Scott film. So you're going to see shockingly you know, and bless his memory, but you're going to see a Tony Scott film, like you're gonna have five hundred cuts per minute, and you're gonna, you know, there's gonna be interesting uses of light reflecting off of mirrors.

And it's a Tony Scott film. So if you pay those two prices of entry, I think you get a pretty clever, thoughtful, fun and uh occasionally deep time travel time twisting movie. And it's worth That's it. That's what it's worth. I mean, this should not have won an Oscar.

It did. It did not, unsurprisingly, but it's there's something to take away. And I've always been a fan of attempts and I use the word attempts to make time travel work as a plot because it has so many inherent problems. Right, I'm going back, Yeah, I'm going back to any I guess I guess it's a spoiler the Superman, the original Christopher Reeve Superman movie, right where you've got a plot, and the plot was all this self by Superman going back in time. Doctor Pearl Mutter.

He flew around the Earth backwards so fast that the Earth spun backwards, going back in time. Yeah, but a mechanism through which he does it is so Superman specific that the only way it could ever work is in a cartoon setting, because if that's how Denzel said he was going to time travel in this movie, Val Kilmer and everyone else would have laughed him out of the building. Yeah, and there's a lot to talk about. I'm always interested in the portrayal of science in movies, and I think this also does a good job of not going the full Star Trek route of having long explanations of essentially magic, crazy stuff that doesn't exist in real world. But on the other hand, it doesn't under explain.

I mean, the mechanism of time travel or time projection or time viewing feels good, Like, the technology looks good. So I could go through the basic plot and then we could just cover some of the parts of it that we usually find interesting. But yeah, the other Yeah, let's start out, if you don't mind. I was a professor at LSU during Hurricane Katrina. So the other part about this film, which has a resonance more than just an adventure movie or a fun mark or a thriller, was that this is in.

Post Katrina New Orleans. Yeah, and they make, they make, they make, they don't they make mention of it. I think one time, and then there's a poster or a couple banners that say, like still strong after Katrina. They don't blabor the point, but it is very clearly post. Katrina, yes, and yeah they don't.

This is not a meditation on Katrina. H But for those of us who lived nearby, and I lived in Baton Ruge, and we were impacted in the sense of like there was weather there not as disastrous as New Orleans, and then we got several hundred thousand people moving out of New Orleans coming up the just it's an hour up the highway there. So a lot of the scene, a lot of the setting were very familiar, and there was a certain sadness about it. In fact, that's one of the themes in this movie is lost. What can you do to regain something you've lost, even when you maybe not don't even know that you've lost it.

And then we'll get back to that moment. But as you said, this has got some elements of some other like it's like in the news stuff. Basically I meant at the time in the news. I would say now a lot in the news as well, but at the time death. Yeah, I mean people using bombs to commit terrorism in the United States is unfortunately not out of the news.

Uh. But but so you begin with Denzel Washington. He arrives, we've seen a terrible crime occur, a faery that is carrying Navy personnel and their families out into the river that New Orleans and you know the Atlantic Ocean, but the waters off New Orleans that everybody's familiar with from Katrina. And the bomb explodes and I guess probably hundreds of people are killed. And I have one hundred and forty three to be exact.

Yeah, and there are some pretty grizzly moments there. I mean you're seeing small children and innocent civilians burned to death and so on. I mean, it's not quite forensically lingering, but there's a lot of dead bodies in this movie. So right away you get established horrible crime. Then Denzel Washington shows up, and of course he's Denzel Washington.

So there's two thousand police officers and members of every other agency imaginable. But Denzel Washington walks through the crime scene and notices three or four things right away that immediately is a big breakthrough in the case. So that's okay, it's a Denzel Washington movie, he's gonna be the one who solves most of the case, and you're thinking, like, this could be a regular crime thrower. I mean, he's done like twenty of these movies before. Right, He's a tough cop who's smart and notices things other people don't know this, and he chases down the bad guy and captures him and probably saves a woman that he's in love with along the way.

So like part of the plot is already in your head, but it takes an interesting twist, which is that he emerges because he's den to Washington as the lead breakthrough investigator, not necessarily in rank, but just in ability, and he is recruited to go to it seems like it's temporarily set up. It's a mobile base. It has to be mobile, I think by convention of what they're getting at, it has to be moved. This is not like they go to Area fifty one or you know, some secret Antarctic layer or something like that. It's a trailer, but the trailer with Adam Goldberg and some scientists there and Bruce Breenwood always playing a great role as versus r.

Greenwood is always like the head of something like he's the president of robot Incorporated in eye World. Literally the president of the United States in thirteen days. Yeah, yeah, Jonathat. He has that authority that just seems to lend itself to presidential managerial just in charge roles, and so he's sort of in charge here. But he introduced his Denzel Washington brings them in.

Now you can tell Denzil Washington at the very beginning of this introduction to these scientists, who this is two thousand and six, right, so like flat screen TVs and big monitors are still relatively a new thing. I mean today, of course, we go into some secret science base and that'd be three hundred giant, two hundred inch flat screens. But I remember looking at it and going like, yeah, this is really interesting. They've got all of these screens, all of this technolog the technology looks good for two thousand and six, that like, oh this is some sort of high tech. And it's explained to him that oh yeah, we are able to coordinate collate all the video cameras, all the surveillance cameras of the entire city of New Orleans.

And there's some rules like I think you can only go back three days four days. Six four days and six hours. Specificy okay, yeah, you you watched it more than I did. And you can tell Denzel Washington is already getting a little because suspicious, like, oh wow, this is pretty neat technology. I had never heard of this before.

Oh yeah, it's a secret technology. But what kind of secret technology is it? And I'm going to sort of accelerate the plot here, but we find out that what they're really doing is they are looking back through time. They can see what happened in the past live as if it's happening right in front of them. That's reveal number one, which is not the only one to come now.

There are there are several in this movie. This movie ties itself into notts very quickly, I feel, which I appreciate. I appreciate about it, but I do I do a pretic longe like weave this technology. It's called snow white because it's a magic mirror, and we're able to do like Lucius Fox in Batman and the Dark Knight, and we have everything linked together, and we essentially have this view of the city because of all the cameras linked together. I like how there's the bait and switch of that because that feels very pedestrian, given where this film ultimately ends up going.

Yes, And when we've talked before, I've said that I have a rule that I wish all Hollywood filmmakers would follow, and nobody's consulted me. But the rule is actually one made up by people who have some authority. I heard Isaac Asimov say this, Arthur C. Clark, Georgia R. Martin said this too, which is that if you're going to have either a accelerated amazing technology plot or a fantasy plot, you have to have hard walls and you have to have some rule you can't keep coming up with.

So if you introduce dragons in chapter one of your fantasy epic, and the dragons can fly, that's fine. They can breathe fire, okay, that's fine. They can talk, that's fine, they're telepathic, great, okay. But in book three we can't find out that they can magically time travel, and and it's because they would have used it right right to get out of some other plots. So it's so adding on new capabilities, and I think this movie goes a little bit too far in that because we're jumping ahead.

But like we at first Okay, you can only see back in the past, and there's no interaction with the past, right, we can't affect seemingly. Seemingly it's communicated. Then, yes, that's right. But then we find oh, yeah we can of course Denzel Washington being Denzel Washington playing Denzil Washington in a theater near you as Denzel Washington flashes a little light on the screen and the person from the past reacts to it, which is I thought was very clever. Yes, so okay, so that's the next reveal is like, oh, there is some level of interactivity there.

Ah, okay, yeah, But then of course the final reveal is that if you squeeze yourself really tightly into a small homunculus. Uh, into a into a dumb waiter, and a time traveling dumb waiter. Essentially, Yeah, that that's not a very good moment there. That's not that where he has to squeeze himself real small. I just somehow visually it just doesn't look real good.

But he can travel to the past. So we finally no way. One way, only one way. It's a one way trip. You are going into the past, and that is it.

And uh and and effectively the kind of the dodge here the way they get around the well, how hasn't anyone been doing this the whole time? Is you in going through the Einstein Rosen Bridge and e MP essentially goes off that kills you on the other side, So the dodges, you would have to have a way to be resuscitated more or less immediately on the other side if you were a time travel That's what they hint at. They don't say that explicitly. That ends up being the way that they get themselves out of the position they put themselves in, which goes to my point about this movie. I love that this movie doesn't treat the audience like moron.

This movie actually respects the audience because there are moments early on in the movie that the movie doesn't be labor points that are things that if you watch the movie again you'll pick up on, Like when he's walking on the docks at the beginning of the movie and he hears his phone ringing, and he looks at his phone trying to figure out why his phone is ringing. It's because he's hearing the phone ringing on his dead body that he's standing two feet from and doesn't realize it because it's in a body bag. That's not something that you are even meant to give any thought to at the beginning of this movie, because you're not even meant to know at the beginning of this movie that there's time travel in them.

And yet the movie is giving away itself early on, but not in a way that feels ham fisted for me as kind of higgleley piggleley as the time travel in this movie can be and is at times. I think for me, this is one of my favorite uses of time travel in a movie, because it feels like they sew it all up pretty tightly, but they do leave a little gap for divine intervention, possibly question mark. It's almost like this is Tony Scott going, maybe there is a God, because they essentially allude to the fact that it would take an act of divine intervention to move the stream over, to tide the stream over, to move it, to damn the stream and move it. And I mean we see ostensibly at the end of the film the film, the outcome of the events is changed at the end of the film, so there must be something else.

Denzel Washington alludes to it several times in the movie is well, what if there's something else too, Like it could be science and something else. It's a very weird movie because at times it feels like amusing on faith and science together, which I did not remember the last time I watched this movie. When I saw I was sixteen, twenty years ago in theaters. Yeah, this movie, it has some of the elements of what are in fact a really good science fiction movie, which is that they don't try too hard to explain too much. That is too crazy, right.

It's not the point of the movie. It it would do nothing other than it's like the stranger things of it all. If you start explaining too much, you just you have to explain everything. If you take it upon yourself to explain a couple things, you then take it upon yourself for most of these screenwriters to explain everything, and it's like some ambiguity left up to the viewer is actually beneficial. It has.

So an example of that is that he starts falling in love with a woman that he's never met. Although you know, New Orleans is an interesting city in that it's a large metropolitan city, but like there's places that people tend to go more than others. So plausibility for me was that they never met. But anyway, there's a young woman who is found dead at the same time or a little bit later than the terrible terrorist bombing, and okay, there's she's found in the river and she has burns. But it turns out, okay, surprise, it's not she's not found connected to the bombing.

It was like earlier she. Was sound like ten minutes before the bombing happened. Yeah, I think it was maybe a couple hours or something. But the point was that, okay, so so somehow she's connected. And then talking about this science plus something higher or something more.

Denzil Washington is introduced to the very beginning of the movie as somebody who's a loner. I mean, he's very successful. It's not clear what past life he's had, but he's not obviously with anybody. He's not married, doesn't any kids, and he starts this is Paul Patton. He starts looking at this woman.

And now here's where there's these interesting layers of discomfort and also sympathy. Right. The discomfort is that we are watching somebody in their house, right, which at that time that was sort of a fantastic technology. But of course. Now, I mean there are a bit you cound with with some of the infrared technology I've seen us like military have, like you can see through a wall and at least see the heat signature of somebody outside the wall.

With satellites, you can see through somebody's window. So it's we're getting real close to a drone, you know, hanging out outside your house and watching you, which happens to people all the time now. So the surveillance society that we are living in, where our phones listen to us, we don't know who when we're being watched. Every detective show that I've ever watched in the last ten years has a real problem. In fact, you almost wonder why they make detective series anymore because there's a camera everywhere.

Right. We just went through this with the uh whatever happened to poor this is Nancy Guthrie. Is that you saw like somebody coming to her house masked ready for the cameras, And of course everybody's got cameras, right, So there's cameras everywhere in the detective series. I've noticed I don't watch that many of them, but have noticed a lot of them have a plot where the detectives sort of range around doing different things, and then like three minutes before the end, oh yeah, let's pull the security camera tapes across the street. Oh there's the murderer right there, right right.

But this wasn't quite there yet in two thousand and six, so we're still removing. From the iPhone for what eighteen months almost. I mean, you know, this film is one of the last like pre iPhone films. I think he's got a flip flug, right, he does, he does. He has like a Nokia essentially, like yeah, even I think, yeah, it's either a flip phone or it's just one of those like hard body Nokia's the little like the Snickers bar phone.

Yeah, those things could survive an explosion. You could play snake on them too. Well, I mean, to be fair, his phone is going off at the end of the movie after he was in blast radius of a bomb. So he's dead, but his phone survived being underwater and blown up. So I think you're right.

Maybe maybe Nokia would have prospered more if they could advertise that we survived time travel and being blown up. Oh yeah, his phone survived time travel even huh. So anyway, I do like that I do like those layers you could. You can tell he and a number of the scientists are uncomfortable with this, like we are watching somebody's private life. You know, she's taking a shower, she has a personal moment.

But then you have this overriding issue of like, well, we're trying to catch somebody who just killed five hundred plus people. So this is this goes go to something we faced in society all the time. Is ends justifying me, right, and they've got this new technology. Never has any new technology ever been developed that people stop themselves from using, with a few exceptions, right, right, But you can imagine it's the Ian melcame. Of it, all right.

I mean it's the yeah, we didn't ask if we We never stopped ourselves and asked if we should. We just did, you know. And I love and I love the conceit in this movie with Adam Goldberg's character where they're like, well, we were researching something else and then we found out we could generate a wormhole, and it's like that. I love that conceit as well, because that is such a fun way of like we were doing something else and this came about because of it, which also feels very real. World feels very real, Like you know, some a lot of inventions that have come out of the you know, out of the world have been from military technology or vice versa.

Was not a military technology and turned into military technology, like that is a thing. So it's interesting. I like that. It's like a bunch of these like Cambridge students were you know, trying to figure out how to increase optic lens enhancement and they ended up creating a wormhole. Like okay, like you know what, I could believe that.

It's more believable than other wormholes we've seen recently that are just like a wormhole happened. It's like, but what that's no, Like, if you're gonna mention it, you got to explain it somehow or give us some If you're going to explain it a little bit, you have to explain it a little bit more than you think, but don't overdo it. This movie, I think underdoes it at times. I think there's one or two moments where I'm like, we're verging on a little much here. But I think this movie does a good job at balancing that less explanation is more, but you have to give some to keep people engaged.

Yeah, it feels science adjacent. It doesn't feel science lunatic or crazy. I mean, there's enough science there to feel like it respects science. And what you just said is really important because I'm at a university and one of the arguments that scientists stem people and so scientists humanists make is that often, as you're saying, like is a long history of inventions that were not discovered linearly, Like somebody was doing basic research. They were not trying to design a microwave oven, They were not trying to design something in particular, but they were trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe, and boom, something practical came from it.

So when science is funded, it's important that it's not always asked, Okay, what's going to be the practical result. So we don't know where we're going to get time travel from, which I don't believe is possible, but it isn't this movie. Well, you can travel to the past, but you can't try or it's you could travel to the future, but you can't travel to the past, is what it is. And I think that that's I think that that's the thing that I appreciate about this movie, and you know, it's it's funny to think about something else that utilizes time travel and almost tries to explain it in a similar way. Is a Vengers.

Endgame tries to use this same theory of time travel, like we have the bending time back on itself, right, which is the initial theory of how we're doing it. But then we also have the female character, Shanty, who's one of the other scientists who's kind of at odds with Adam Goldberg. She says, hey, there's also this other idea that there are all these concurrent timelines going at the same time, and so while yes, you are traveling back on yourself, you could possibly change something, which means you have created another timeline concurrence to the other timeline that's still going. And what I like about this movie is it actually integrates the two things together. Endgame tries to and I think fails because it overexplains like, oh, it's look back to the future.

There's none of that in this movie. They just say it and they move on. We get Adam Goldberg folding the paper in on itself, but we don't get impressing the pen through it as my point, they stop short of Adam Goldberg sticking the pen through the piece of paper that's folded to signify we can punch a hole through space time, because I think the do that in at least Avengers Endgame, possibly Stranger Things, and at least and Interstellar as well. I think where it's like we fold it like this and punched through, it's like, okay, I'm glad they don't do it here. We get like the halfway of it like that.

This movie is very restrained with what it's doing, and I think it pays off in a movie that doesn't treat its audience like we're mumbling idiots who aren't here for a sci fi Yeah. It does what is achievable in a reasonably good science fiction movie, which is it states some things which may not be scientifically correct now who knows right, and they may not be completely plausible, but like just enough of them that we can get the plot going and we don't have to stop every five minutes for a new scientific explanation. So it's got a level of confidence that that's warranted. Right, Like, I mean to meet the signature action scene in this movie, which probably I am really I did it's funny. I didn't remember it, but like, oh yeah, this was the most enjoyable.

Yeah, I didn't remember it either. Yeah, Like I mean, okay, So there's a car chase, and the car chase is probably Hollywood's most repeated signature event, right, a car chase in a movie, And of course over the years, they've tried every possible variation of the car chase. I remember there was one, was it a Roger Moore James Bond where they've always had car chases and James Bond movies the signature car chase and like a stunt, right, and they this one. They gave him like like a little tiny Fiat, like a little tiny car, like not a not a four hundred thousand dollars sports car. And because they were just trying to come up with some variation on a car chase, well, this this is quite a variation on a car chase because Denzel Washington is following somebody in the past, like he's he's using a camera that can see in the past to follow somebody.

And I think you have to watch the movie if you haven't to appreciate it. But it's like really well done. I mean it's what Tony Scott does best is a kinetic action sequence. It is a technically impressive scene from like you said, from a filmmaking standpoint, but from a conceptual standpoint, it's so interesting. We have, like you said, we have a character trait who knows where the bomber is going to be, and he follows his car, but he's following his car in the past, and he isn't orientated correctly initially, so he's on a bridge with the guy going the wrong direction and he has to figure out a way to turn around, and he literally just ends up like causing like a three or four car pile up, which one of my favorite lines of the movie is just call the police to the to the Crescent City Bridge, like, yeah, that's gonna help the guy whose car went flying through the air and did like a hero wet through the air that you hit.

But it's such a novel idea because, like you said, the car chase is such a I wouldn't I say tired, but it is such a easy trope to go back to, especially in action movies, especially if you're looking to fill time easily, and like you said, this is such a novel way of doing it. It feels so unique and different, and I didn't remember it either. I am almost like kicking myself or not remembering it, because I can't think of another car chase in a film that's like this at all. I mean, this is unique unto itself as a car chase in a film. Yes, now there are some familiar elements.

I remember when I was very young, I watched the film called Lethal Weapon. And this is so long ago. I mean, I'm Joe, I'm laughing as I'm saying that. Like I watched the film called Leith the Webble. It's become an iconic film, but it was such a long time ago that the trope of the police officer who gets in the car chase and kills fifty people driving home from work.

But the only thing he gets is that his boss says, hey, don't do that again or else. Lap on the wrist. Yeah, well, i'll put you in the work unit and you'll be filling out forms, you know, don't ever kill those fifty people again, you know. But so that that has been something that just I mean, it's been lampooned and fall Guy, I'm sorry, sorry, the family guy and all a lot of other shows and this one. Yeah that it sort of bothered me even at the time.

It's just like really, but because he goes the wrong way, right, he's the one he's coosi. Yeah, that's see the actual terrorist disobeying the rules of the rooms, right, Denzil Washington is causing all the may have there. But uh, it is really done well and it's a signature. It stands out like. And again, I as you've said, I don't think I've seen anything quite like it done even with today's technology.

And in fact you've said this on your show before. We're lucky to have some of the stunts in the past done in the past where they had to use, for example, practical effects, and they they don't have bad ais I'm sure they would use nowadays. When you were watching this, you were going like, Wow, a lot of stunk people took a lot of risk to make this happen. Like impressive, that's great. I know, I like you said, like, I'm actually kind of disappointed in myself in a way for not remembering this movie kind of the chasing in this movie more fondly because it is such it's such a good it's such a good chase scene and it's such a well thought out chas scene.

And again, it's one of those things where this movie I wouldn't I don't know what you would consider this movie outside of it being a sci fi movie. I don't think it's much of an action movie. It has a couple action set pieces, and this is a very good action set piece in in otherwise I would say non action kind of like I wouldn't say specific. But the point of this movie is to not beat you over the head with the action, is my point. But it is a very good chase scene in a movie that is not necessarily concerning itself with action scene.

Which is interesting given the Tony Todd of it or the Tony Scott of it all, because Tony Scott kind of known for shooting, and you brought it up, so let's talk about it a little bit, known for shooting action scenes that maybe I don't necessarily resonate with because they're not shot particularly well. Because the way that he chose to shoot things is just not something I personally resonate with as a film watcher, and it would seem to me you maybe have a similar concern. Well, I think that I have evolved over my lifetime. When I was younger, I was able to put up with an inordinate amount of cuts and swishing, swinging, wildly gesticulating cameras, lens flair. Yeah.

I think maybe by brain in its decay years. I just find it headache inducing. And I as I I. Am thirty six, I am thirty six, and it was still frustrating to me. Okay, it is not just you.

I mean I look at a film like a Paul green Grass film, and I think the same thing. Like though some of the later Born identity movies, it's like, just cool it with the cuts. Cool it. We don't need fifty cuts in one scene. Yeah, And that's why you know, if you if you're a Hollywood filmmaker or you're an aspiring filmmaker, I think when if you ever have a chase scene or an action scene, it's to me more expensive, but it's also easier to do the five hundred cuts, right.

I mean, we've had some examples. To me. The most famous one, I guess when I was growing up as an example of like an action scene that was all one take, was Orson Wells at his movie Touch at Evil. Very first, long, long, long, no cuts there and that's that's interesting. I mean, you can't do it very often, but I mean the point is that not every action scene has to be shot so frantically and kinetically.

Sometimes the action itself is enough to get our attention. The other part about this, which I like to get your opinion as our representative of youth on this panel here, Chris, is that I actually like the love story here. I agree. I think it has a lot of problems in the sense that like, hmm, he was introduced to her by basically spying on her, but I think he registers the amount of discomfort that he should. It is told to us, I mean shown to us that she has died horribly, so like the propellant of like solving her murder as long along with the murders of these other people that she's linked to, seems like it's reason enough to violate her privacy, especially as the movie goes on and they start dropping hints and finally a confirmation that he might actually be able to save her.

I so, interestingly enough, I think that and you know you you ask me, as the you know you representative of the group today, what do I think of the romantic relationship between our lead who effectively meets the other romantic lead on an autopsy table ten minutes into the film, because that's I mean, that's the first scene that they share together. Is she's already dead and he is, you know, examining her or he's part of you know, in the room during her autops So it's it's strange. I mean, it's very different in terms of the way it's even framed to open it. And like you said, there is kind of this I wouldn't say icky level, but it's could we call it a moral gray area, because, like you've alluded to, the loss of one's privacy should come at the trade off of higher security.

At least that's what we've been sold in this country. That's why we when we go through TSA, we essentially give up our rights through going through the TSA. Pendulette always talks about having a little bill of rights printed on a piece of metal in his pocket so that when they go through the TSA they can literally take his rights away as supposed to just figureatively doing it. They sell those at his show in Vegas. I know because I own one and I keep it on me from time to time.

So it's interesting in a post nine to eleven society, that this is one of the few movies I can think of that exists as a I am meeting her because we have been spying on her, but we are spying on her under the auspices of preventing her death from happening, which is not a it could happen. It is a it has happened, and we are trying to prevent a thing that is a given from happening. Right, her rights are being diminished, but it's. Rights are already diminished effectively. It's kind of the converse, is kind of the The argument I would make is it's less sicky than it seems only because she's already dead.

But I think that that plot contrivance works in the film's favor, because otherwise this movie would not be Not that it's a meat cute, but it's somewhat of a meet cute in the way that they want to play it off, like, oh, they met through the this you know, insane murder terrorism investigation, and that bonded them forever. I mean, at one point he kisses her when he runs off, and I'm like, why are you kissing her? Like why are you kissing her? But it totally works because you have to sell that by the end of the movie, she will be willing to talk to him, to tell him what he told her, to get him up to speed with what happened, because, like she says, what if you had to tell the most important person in the world the hardest thing you've ever had to tell him, and it's you know, I try.

Like I love that there is that at the center of this movie because it it, like you said, like, ultimately the film is about what do you do in moments of grief and loss, but also what do you do in moments where you have to find immense amounts of strength within yourself to do something that seems impossible. Because again we get the sense that what Denzel Washington does in this movie is impossible and it is through only some some kind of divine intervention that he is able to stop Jim Cavizl from blowing up this faery. There is some divine intervention in this movie, is there not? Yes, let me just talk about that. A fan theory that I have, which I'm not sure I've seen anywhere else.

So this is my own completely lunatic fan theory that I can register trademark right now is that this like a lot of Denzil Washington movies. He I've seen some interviews with him. He is a deeply spiritual person, like he does believe in hereafter and God and so on, and I think that that enters some of his characters in movies. I got a feeling that something that was implied but not stated, which is pretty unusual for Tony Scottsfield, was that maybe somehow the essence of time travel or the system of time travel that they have met before, in the sense that like maybe the plot of the film, it isn't that they're in a time loop, but some of the energy. And I know I'm sounding like I'm spouting pseudoscience, but I think it's part of like the theory of how time travel works, is that he didn't do this already and they're just going in a loop.

It's just that when he's looking at her, there is this moment of like, wait a minute, do I know her? Is there some recognition? And then the same thing. And I think these are two excellent actors. She's a very good actors.

Oh, Paula Patton is fantastic. They have great chemistry together. That's what works. That's why it works is because they share all of like three or four scenes together when they're alive, and it works like Gangbusters. The two of them like really works.

And that's the only way this movie works is because they actually have chemistry when they're on screen. Yes, and so they're able to accomplish something of subtlety here, which I think if it had been stated, like if Tony, if the script had Denzel Washington said, you know, in a way we have met before, and I think there's a magical resonance in time travel that comes from a high park. Those things are better left unstated, right, it should be. A good actors can just give you a feeling of something that you take away walking out of the movie. And I think that was something that was going on there, that there was something beyond just the events there and something else you said, and I'm going to go on a little tangent I apologize.

Is this is my lecture hour for the next two minutes. One of the challenges whenever you watch any kind of genre movie, or especially a subgenre okay, a time travel movie, a zombie movie, a spy movie, is you go sort of ask yourself yeah, haven't these people ever watched the movie before? In the TV series Pluribus, the main character, who is caught in a sort of hive mind world where everybody else is almost everybody in the world is thinking differently. She says, we've all watched this movie before. And the fact is, like nobody on planet Earth should be shocked at a time travel plot.

They just might be shocked it's happening to them. So there's a little fun little movie which I don't know where it's worth like devoting an episode, but I really loved it. It's called Round and Round and it's a Hallmark movie, and yeah, it's a Hallmark movie, but it's a really good Hallmark movie. It's one of their few honekh movies. And in the movie, the main the main character is a young woman and she gets caught in a Groundhog Day time loop.

But they do two things which are very clever, which, like Lifted, Beside it being funny and interesting, Lifted above not only the typical Hallmark movie, but like the typical time loop movie is they recognize that these people exist in our universe. So like the first thing she thinks of is, oh my gosh, I'm in a groundhog Day situation. But then they go further in cleverness and where Okay, suppose you actually found yourself in something that's familiar from the movie world, right, like you found your like, my gosh, I am actually reliving the same day over and over again. Right right right? Well, where would you go where you could find people who would believe you and might have clever ideas on what to do?

A comic bookstore. And that's what happens in the movie is the her love interest happens to know these guys at a comic bookstore who they're geeky guys who know all popular culture from all time and have discussed every situation, like they've had three hundred conversversations like yeah, what if we were in a timeloop? What would we do? And these guys come up with some ideas of what to do to get out of the time loop. Okay, so that's a completely different movie than the one we're talking about, But I do like that in this movie.

While nobody says, hey, you know, I saw five time travel movies before and they did this, there is a sort of understanding of, like, what are the possibilities right right when he's apple. Or then we understand here your science does not fine and explain everything. And I like that there's that it's a it's a crack is left open. But the movie at the end it it, it goes right to that crack and peers through it and says, yeah, we're we know if you're looking through it with us, we see you. Because that moment at the end of the film where Denzel looks at her and goes no and then they drive off, it's like he doesn't need to do anything else.

That one line and that look at her is all you need to know that he understands in that moment the entire plot of the movie that has come before, and it's just like it's no fucking way, like no way, and it's like, yeah, you're right, no way, Like I don't know how he would believe it other than giving himself over in that moment to some other divine be because there is no explanation that the movie is going to give otherwise. And so my assumption is the explanation that Denzel gives is the explanation the movie wants us to have. And I'm curious if that was in the film to begin with if that wasn't something that Denzel brought to the table, because, like you said, I have also seen interviews with him, and he seems to be a deeply spiritual person who and he also seems like he's the kind of guy who knows what he likes and what he does when he works with people.

So I wouldn't be surprised if he was like, put this in there, or let's include this, or let's have this, let's lean into this a little bit more, because it's weird. Science and faith tend to not intersect one another. They tend to be separate lanes, and when they do intersect, they're not intersecting in a complementary, commingling way like they are here. This movie is essentially saying time travel exists, but also God exists and has some capacity to be in control of time travel. God is there somewhere in this movie.

There's no question we get a sense of it. There was I years ago. Carl Sagan is probably the most famous science popularizer, but there was another gentleman of biologist, very accomplished biologist, named Stephen Jay Gould. He wrote a lot of popular science books, and he had this one sentence that was in an essay about science and religion, and I always remember the sentence because, gosh, it's so well written. He said science and religion should be non overlapping magisteria.

What he meant was scientists really shouldn't give advice about religion, and people who are religious shouldn't give advice about science, and will just agree that these worlds are not antithetical to each other. But just like we should, we can respect both worlds, right, right. And I think this is a movie. It's not often that we describe a Tony Scott's film as restrained. No no, no, no, no, no, that's that last thing I would describe a Tony Scott film in a lot of ways.

Yeah, but I feel like this is among his best movies because for me, because it chooses to leave, as you say, certain things unexplained, certain things implied, certain things just as a feeling that honestly would sound stupid or silly or just feel wrong if they were just straight out some character yapped away at them. And that ending where we fill in that they're gonna by the end of the conversation, they're both going to be convinced that something happened and you know, I hope they get married and live happily ever after. That's great. What I love about the movie is that by the end of it, you foresee what you just said being a reasonable possibility because of the chemistry, because of the restraint, because the movie doesn't club you over the head with what it's getting at either.

I love that, like you said, we don't have an over explanation of the time travel where the movie at the end feels like it can't just let time change. It can't. Like normally, when you put yourself into a box, sometimes you put a lid on that box, even and in putting a lid on that box, you have no way out of said box. In putting a little faith or the mystery of the divine into this, you kind of give yourself a little bit of a parachute out of here where you're like, well, hell, there is the odd faith, there is the divine interference. It could have been that.

And they don't need to labor that point. They just go okay, all right, Like don't I don't need a movie sometimes to do any more than that, because I can make my own conclusion. I can get to the point the movie wants to get to the movie doesn't have to drag me. I am coming along willingly. And we've talked a lot about Denzel Washington and Paul Patten's character, but let's give recognition to Adam Goldberg because he actually embodies a lot of what you're saying.

Like at the beginning, he comes off like, Okay, this is gonna be the smug, know it all, jerk scientist character that we're all pretty familiar with, as like he knows everything and he's cynical and doesn't have any real feelings or emotions. But I don't have any time to explain this to you. Yes, essentially the way his character comes off, but. And so obsessed with the science that he's not thinking about the human ramifications of the science. Right that group of scientists, they have one who tends to be more caring and the one who's always making some cynical, smug remarks, you know, and and Adam Goldberg is sort of in the middle.

And by the end talk about it, there's a wonderful moment and a sort of I find a slightly silly moment. But yeah, Adam, Adam Goldberg says, well, you know, I think we you can time travel, and so Denzil Washington gets into the machine and sort of squeezes in there, and you can Adam Goldberg is a good enough act that he is resonating like, okay, you've taught me something, you know. I'm the science is what I was obsessed about, because of course we want our sciences obsessed with science. You produce better science when you're obsessed with something right, right, right, But you can see that he feels like he's taken something about we haven't mentioned the word love, but like not beyond spirituality and God and something beyond the physical realm.

There's love here, right about the love between these two main characters, and he is and Goldberg sort of registers, Yeah, I get there's something more important than science here. Love right which is? Which? Which? No?

To your point, I think is very interesting because again, the the movie goes, the movie goes places I wouldn't have expected it to go, because it feels like it's being written by two screenwriters who I think have a better sense of what makes this an interesting story is taking it to an interesting spot and actually leaving it there and not just taking us to that interesting spot and then just kind of looking at it like and then running away and not giving us time Like. I think this movie is really invested in doing something different and forcing the audience to kind of sit with it and to look at the two screenwriters. Bill Marcilly has not done a whole lot, but Terry Rossio has done a lot of things, both television and movie, and you know, doing the research, the two of them were friends who worked on a you know, Rossio had an idea for a one page script where a cop is looking back a week to investigate his girlfriend's murder.

And you know, that is where the notion of the idea came from, and then it kind of blossomed from there and that idea. You can see that base idea here at the center of this script, but it's so much more built out than that you have the I mean, we haven't even talked about Val Kilmer yet, who's an interesting kind of He's almost more hands off than I would have wanted him to be as a character, as an and as an actor because I love Val Kilmer so much, and obviously he's no longer with us, so any role that we get to see of him now is you know, cherish it because we're not getting anymore. He's not in it enough. But the person that I want to talk about that I found very interesting is Jim cavesal of all people playing what I would put he's doing his best timoth best Timothy McVeigh in person is what I perceive it as, like, it's very Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, Ruby Ridge, like one of those people that now seemed to be running around with more prevalence than they were in two thousand and six, which is very interesting to me because that in and of itself feels kind of prescient, with the rise of kind of a certain kind of feeling and sentiment that his character embodies that was around for a long time.

And you see that here too, because we get a whole scene of him back and forth with Denzel kind of outing himself as to what his you know, modus operandi or his motivating forces for why he blows a faery of military members in their family. Yeah, I want to go back to Vell Kilmer for a moment. Yeah, he's in a forgettable role. I mean, anybody could have been FBI agent Jones. I forgot how to spell it.

Paul Pizwara, which, by the way, they gave him the most difficult name to pronounce on top of everything else. If I've rewritten the screenplay, I would have not done the Marvel thing. A lot of the people that are like Claire Kutcheverer, Paul Bizarro, you know, never never do the alliteration to to Clark Kent or whatever. But anyway, he has just a moment. Really, it's he's not a major role.

I think honestly, his role and the Bruce Greenwood role could just been compacted into one person. Agreed, yeah, but it is. It shows something else Tony Scott had as a filmmaker, which was that almost all the time. It's hard to think of any of his films where anyone was a bad actor or completely miscast. Usually he found really good people in roles.

Now, sometimes those roles were pretty stereotypical or what you'd expect, but he he had a crew Valcilmer being one of them that just they were always good in what they did right, and this film was there. So I guess for me, this movie is not and like the greatest movies ever made, but it is a movie that checks a lot of boxes for success. I was like to tell my students one way to look at a movie is was it successful in what it's set out to do? Because if somebody if something is setting out to be a light, frothy comedy and something else is supposed to be a dark, disturbed journey into the abyss of the human mind, you can't really compare them and say one's better than the other. It just did they succeed right in what they were attempting.

And so I felt like, this is an action thriller, a love story, and a little bit of spiritual philosophy, meditation, a time travel movie, and it does all of those things pretty well. Yeah, I would agree, I think, you know, for me, I think it probably in terms of it being an action movie. I think it doesn't do much in terms of the kind of one set piece we get with the car chase through time I would say, or reverse car chase, orhever you would want to interpret it. I don't think that the film really does a lot else, and it doesn't really bother itself with being an action movie per se, which I feel like is a tad of a missed opportunity. But at the same time, you know, I like we've clearly already talked about like the movie is not necessarily concerning itself with being an action movie per se.

I mean, I think it has I think the problem I maybe have with the movie is it feels like there is actually something more interesting to be said here in the movie actually is not getting to it. Ah, And I think that there is an interesting story that could be told about the intersection between time travel and faith and the idea of what does that mean and how and how does one put one's faith in technology to go back and do something like this with the belief and faith that the change that you're making is the right one or a positive one. And I you know, that's the other thing that the movie never gets to. You know, we go with the character that Denzel Washington is playing that what he is doing will cause a positive change in the world, saving her life, But that is a question that he never asks himself about the other five hundred and forty three people on that boat that he saves and what their possible moral compasses in what direction they may be pointing.

And that's an interesting conversation that the movie doesn't have. But it starts verging on having a intellectual conversation about time travel that most movies that use time travel don't have any interest in getting involved. Well, it's interesting because most time travel TV shows and movies have as a sort of overriding driving principle that stated out loud is we can't change the past. Whatever we do, we can't change the past right over and over and over and over, and sometimes will be told like, oh gosh, if you change the past, there'll be terrible consequences. And there have been some very famous science fiction stories.

I'm thinking of one will go too far in there, but like people go back in time, I'm to the era of the dinosaurs and a guy steps on a butterfly. Yeah, and the ripples through time. The world of movie is terrible, by the way. Yeah, I won't even mention it. It.

Sound of Thunder is the story. It should never. Has Ben Kingsley in it too, by the way, which is just oh yeah, I was gonna say that the Butterfly Effect. While the Sound of Thunder is terrible, the movie The Butterfly Effect does that same thing, I think poorly, but it gets to the same idea of you know, small changes in the past occurring, you know, changing things broadly or bigger in the future. I like that this movie goes you know what, we're just ignoring that kind of and hanging a lantern on it in the corner.

And the point is to change it, like we don't care what happens if we change it. We're trying to change it. Screw the time travel, you know, the continuum there, There. Isn't that kind of this movie in a way, like we're trying to change it, Like, oh, don't change you can't change the past. That's what we're trying to do.

So we're going to do anything within our power to do that. I think there's an argument about whether you can change the past, and this goes to this idea. Of course, a lot of time loop movies, when you go back in time, it turns out to be part of time that you went back in time, so there's nothing changed because you have it's already figured into the universe. And then I'm also thinking, of course of the incredible time travel episode of there's several one in the original Star Trek but they go back in time to the nineteen twenties and they meet Edith I think I even remember her name, Edith Keeler. I think, yeah, yeah, yeah, And they meet a young woman who in that timeline is going to start a peace movement and prevent America from entering World War two and allow the Nazis to win the Second World War.

And so, I gosh, I think eleven year old me thought this was some of the deepest science fiction philosophy ever. It really is a beautiful story, and absolutely beautiful story. And they realized Spock, especially realizes that, yeah, she has to die. There's no way to avoid letting they had done something to change the past, that they have to unchange it. So this movie blithely ignores that Star Trek episode and a lot of other.

Terminator as well. I mean, Terminator is the other big one, right, Like Arnold has to die at the end of Terminator two to close the loop so that the robots don't take over. That's not what happened. They couldn't help themselves, and that's not our fault. But if Terminator two had ended the way it was supposed to, Arnold dies, there's no chips left.

That's it. Bob's your uncle. They've prevented the robot uprising. I mean again, like they's we are literally living with time travel for the most part, not changing things. In Avengers Endgame, they have to take the Jewels back at the end of the movie so that nothing happens untoward in the timeline, and then they just didn't care anyway.

It's you know, I like that this movie just says, screw your rules, We're gonna do this anyways. And it really it works in a way. It works in a way that if you don't constrain yourself so much, you can get away with from time to time because everybody else is constraining themselves so much. If you bring up other time travel movies when you're talking about time travel, you are doing too much to try to explain. Yes, as I said, it worked in this round and round because they I felt that they had to bring up Groundhog Day, like it just was not credible that any human on the planet had not thought a little bit about right, I agree, the Groundhog Day, But then they run with it and it's a fun brought the you know, light comedy that has some interesting philosophical bigs.

But what I'd like to end on is something that you have mentioned and we've talked a little bit about, is and I felt was part of the beauty of the Arrival with Amy Adams, which is based on a Ted Chang towards a famous short story about the idea of continuity of something that happens in the future has also already happened, right, And I do feel that this is a movie that doesn't state it as explicitly as a rival, where like the terrible thing that happens in the future and the terrible thing that happened the past are equally already occurring and influences somebody, and philosophically you just have to accept that. But I think it is implied here, and I think it lends somewhat depths to this movie that you wouldn't get from either the average time travel movie or the average you know, would be action thriller.

I also think for me, the other thing that's fun because I went and did some you know, digging online, because again, this is a movie that feels like, like you just said, it ties everything up and it cares about making sure that everything is given a time and place and an explanation. The overwhelming fan theory with this film is we're actually not seeing the first time that this has happened, but we're actually seeing the second time that this has happened. Because how else would we have his dead body at the beginning of the movie sitting on the pier, And what happened in the first round is he did not prevent the bomb successfully from going off, and his body was somewhere on the boat at the beginning of the movie, or he was on the boat somewhere at the beginning of the movie and we never saw it, or something happened that caused him to be on the boat at the beginning of the movie.

That's why his cell phone is on someone's dead body, his own dead body at the beginning of the movie, which would be a crazy level of continuity to cop to, because that would mean a whole nother movie happened before the movie we even saw. Yeah, I said that my theory was that they could be in some sort of loop, but that it happened once before. I mean, I think some of these people who've gone deep, I mean amazing how Groundhog Day, which I do think is a truly amazing film, has produced so much scholarship, you know, like right, philosophy, right, And of course I think people have talked about the fact that Bill Murray probably went through at least hundreds, if not thousands of days. Yeah, it to become an expert at any one of those things takes hundreds of thousands of hours, which is hundreds of not thousands of days.

But in order for him to remember the skill sets that he had, there had to have been some physical continuity. I mean, like the cells in his brain stayed the same cells, right, So in order for him to learn the piano, he couldn't just repeat a thousand days and set reset. So in this movie, it is saying that there is a ninety nine point nine percent reset, but there's something else, And again, I just think it works really well. Is that is that the faith of the movie. Do you think that that one percent is what the movie is giving the space for the faith of the movie, because that's what it feels like to me, is that's the little bit of faith that the movie gives the intangible, unexplainable.

Is the movie giving that little bit of space to I mean, you know, why why did the Beach Boys come on at the end of the movie again? You know what I mean? That's it's that little moment of like divine the divine intervention is the Beach Boys comes on again at the end of the movie. Right, a song that just played not five ten minutes before is playing again on the radio and it's that same song and he hears it and he heard it before not ten minutes Like that feels like the small amount of divine intervene that, like you said, the one percent and it's time travel movies don't concern themselves with this kind of stuff at all, and it's weird that this one does because it feels I remember enjoying this movie when I saw it, but I don't remember thinking that this is one of the most interesting time travel movies I've ever seen.

This is one of the most interesting time travel movies I think that has ever been made, because it actually makes time travel seem not plausible, but it does. It make it feel like by the end of it, I couldn't follow along with what it was getting it, and that's a rarity for time travel. Yeah. One thing I forgot to add, which I really liked was the time travel was incredibly inordinately expensive. Right and Black East Coast.

I don't like time travel movies where the time travel is accomplished with two double A batteries. And I realized, like, hey, you know, shout out to back to the future that like they had a little mini nuclear reactor and something like that. Even then they realized you're going to have to spend some energy time if you're going to time travel. But this one, there's a very cute scene where they talk about some blackout I think, to the current in Boston, and one of the scientists said, yeah, that was me, my bad. So that's a moment of humor that sort of lends a little bit of scientific credibility, like, yeah, we can look back in the future, but we're going to and talk about Pressian.

The moment when I was watching this film again three weeks ago preparing for today, the moment that when I saw that, I thought, oh Ai and data centers, right, Like, we have this new technology, which I mean people are using it for a very advanced things, and people are also using it just to like make pictures of kittens, but it's costing us a massive amount of energy and water. The price of the new technology is extremely high, and this movie sort of gave a little bit of hint of that for what was to come. I will also mention the other thing about time travel that I appreciate is we never get a sense of what they could do with the time travel otherwise, because it feels so I wouldn't say it feels so useless, but it does kind of feel useless, right, Like the time travel seems so specifically useful, it almost feels broadly useless, Like what are you going to do four days in the past in most capacities if you can't go back in time and you can't affect it, like it will be only kind of specifically used full in a specifically useful way.

It's like having a really high powered telescope, which is why it's so interesting that they allude to initially that it's like, well, it's just a high powered imaging catalog that's essentially creating a three It's essentially what they hitch it as is it's creating a three D space that you're watching things occur inside, and what it actually is is you're seeing back in time. Either way, that technology is effectively useless. Broadly, it's niche useful. But I love is that we don't get the typical well the military tried to use this for its own functionality, Like there's no usefulness the military wouldever get out of this like at all, And you get the sense that this technology is almost more trouble than it's worth in a lot of ways, Like they're moving this giant thing around, it's blacking out the Eastern seaboard for what, like for what are we getting out of it?

Like very little seeming. Yeah, I mean, everybody who owns the telescope is able to view back in time, right, because if you have a especially powerful telescope up in orbit, you're looking back billions of years. So you are seeing a star dying billions of years ago because of course the light took five billion years to reach us or something like that. So the idea of looking back in time is actually very familiar. But the interactivity combined with our surveillance world where everything is being recorded, is something that was pretty innovative for two thousand and six.

I mean there's I'm a science fiction buff, so I can name some stories that I grew up reading where they had time viewers, and I remember those. One story I usually completely forgotten who wrote it. I think was not some famous author, but like somebody in then it's a time viewer and they can see Alexander the Great right live the same way here. So that wasn't like a lot of popular Hollywood movies are reprising very familiar plots from old science fiction of the forties and fifties. We just it's the first time we're seeing it on the screen, right.

But I just again, this movie did not win the Academy Ward, did not deserve the Academy Ward. But it's worth viewing as what it is, and probably it even a little bit more than what it was, like a little bit higher level than the average either action thrower or a time travel movie. Well and given that, you know, like we've already alluded to, and I've mentioned several times now, the Avengers Endgame of it all making time travel that much more ubiquitous, that much more mainstream, making time travel a component of the biggest film ever to be released, and effectively doing time travel in the same way that this movie is both having a folding time back in on itself and multiple timelines going at the same time, like Avengers Endgame tried to do the same thing, like this movie on one one thousandth of the budget did a better job in one scene with Adam Goldberg and Val Kilmer explaining time travel than Mark Ruffalo and Tilda Swinton could have in Avengers Endgame, and it just goes to show that the creative level that some writers operate at in Hollywood is just at a different level, and the expectation of certain writers for their audiences is different.

Because I feel like the reason this film resonates with so much with me and you so much is because it doesn't treat us as the audience like idiots, like we've never seen a time travel movie before, like we don't know where this is already going. But it does some interesting things to keep us as the audience engaged. It keeps us kind of guessing, It keeps us on our toes. It seems like one thing, it becomes another thing, and ultimately it's another thing. Those three twists in tandem all kind of work.

It's a movie that just I think, like you said, is it the best movie I've ever seen? No, but it's definitely up there for one of the best time travel movies I've ever seen. Of a certain ilk, it's definitely the best. Is it time Crimes? No?

Is it? You know some of those other I'm trying to remember the other one where it's the two guys in the business office going into the box over and over again. You know you I don't know. No, no, no, no, no, no, I know, I know what you're talking. Zero budget movie that that has just become famous one way it.

Utilizes time travel. This Looper was another one where it was it was pretty well done. I mean, I think you've covered it, yeah, but. I've never covered it. But I but it's again, it gets it gets mentioned in that same conversation.

But I don't think you need a massive budget to do time travel interesting. I don't think you need a massive budget to tell a time travel story as long as you sort out how it's going to work and make it make sense within reason, in the construct of the the box you've constructed for yourself. And I think this movie does just that. I think this movie is entertaining, it's compelling, and it uses time travel in a way that you know, other movies I think wish they could. Really So I'm glad we got to I'm glad we got to talk about this movie.

Like I said, I'm glad I got to watch it. Tony Scott's not someone I necessarily go to my way to watch all the time. I think the last Tony Scott movie I watch was True Romance, which is one of the few Tarantino movies that I can stomach, and it's probably because he didn't direct it. So I'm glad I got to watch this. I've already mentioned it to a couple people, like you should rewatch this movie.

It's definitely worth checking out. So hopefully I'll get a couple more people reprising or taking a reprisal of this film. But thank you so much for introducing or reintroducing me to this movie. It was a pleasure. This is a good one.

Thank you. A memorable film that people should think about. I agree. So as always, you can follow me on Twitter at maybe don't follow me on Twitter, never mind, don't do just like rate and review the show on iTunes and Spotify, which is more than likely where you're getting it. If it's not on Spotify, get it on iTunes.

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