05.28.07
Déjà Vu Movie Analysis
Well, I recently saw a movie that I feel I must share on here. The movie was Déjà Vu starring Denzel Washington, and it’s one of those time travel themes that have wasted many hours of my life. Anyway, the following contains *spoilers*, so read at your own peril.
The plot of Déjà Vu is of the kind that starts off with the feel that the story could be a run of the mill detective thriller. ATF Agent Doug, played by Washington, is investigating a ferry explosion in New Orleans and quickly determines that it was an act of terrorism. Yet in the course of his investigation, some abnormalities begin to appear in the investigation. The most striking is the find that one woman’s body was found washed up on shore with burn marks and shrapnel wounds, despite it having been two hours prior to the explosion. While I originally hypothesized that she had somehow been warped back two hours (boy I have a hyperactive imagination), the woman really did turn out to be murdered earlier than the explosion. Doug went on to check out her history in a bid to find the bomber, since only the bomber would have known to fake her manner of death in that way. Yet in his investigation, he does end up finding strange things, such as the woman calling the ATF office before the explosion asking for Doug and an odd recording on the woman’s messaging machine. Most interesting of all is the sentence made out of magnet on the refrigerator, “You can save her.”
After this point, Doug is recruited by another government agency due to his keen deductive abilities. They show him a device that is able to view into the past, but with the catch that it is always exactly something like four days and sixteen hours behind the present. It’s basically a second chance to see what happened back in the past from any angle, but the viewers would have to be sure to be looking in the right spot when something happens, since they can only record what is on screen. I enjoyed the concept, although I’m sure that the equal distance time displacement idea has been around for a while.
Yet being able to view the past does not necessarily open up a string of paradoxes. Instead, that comes about when things start getting sent back to the past. When Doug attempts to send a note to himself in the past so that he can stop the attack, the message ends up being intercepted by his partner. This in turn leads to his partner’s death at the hands of the terrorist, and he really had been in the original timeline. In a nutshell, in tampering with the past, they ensured that things would turn out the way they did. In fact, because Doug’s partner had put bullet holes in the bomber’s car, the bomber now had no choice but to steal the car of the woman he would eventually murder. This is actually the type of time travel theme I prefer, since I think it deals the best with the time travel paradoxes.
Once the bomber was captured, however, things began to take a bad turn. For one thing, the bad guy was portrayed as a fanatical Christian and American patriot. Next, during the interrogation he was almost echoing what I had been writing elsewhere just this past week. Now that was kinda weird. What was the terrorist saying? Basically that one cannot change destiny/fate, and that any attempts to do so will only serve to bring it about. (For the record, while I agree with his statement there, I do not in any way condone the use of violence. Christians are commanded to fight in a war of the spirit and not a war of the flesh, as per Ephesians 6: 12.) Now, the Christian bashing out of the way, the movie went on to defy the laws of cause and effect. Doug ends up traveling back in time himself, and although the movie continues along the path that everything Doug does actually occurred in his original timeline, he ends up rendering it all pointless by taking away the motivation for time travel in the first place. He saves not only the ferry, but the woman as well, thus changing the course of time and making it so he will have no reason to go back in time, which in turn ensures that the day will not be saved, despite the happy ending. This part of why I don’t write time travel stories. The Time Machine did it a lot better….
On a final note, the Bible does actually ensure that at least some aspects of the future are unchangeable. Perhaps sometime later I may delve into that, Lord willing.
