![]() Somewhere along the line there needs to be a key turning point between one possible outcome and another, a domino set to fall one way that winds up tipping another, whether due to unpredictable human choices, or even the “divine intervention” (“something spiritual,” something “more than physics”) that the characters keep talking about. There just might be a way out of this dilemma, if the filmmakers were clever enough to find it. At some point, they must choose between one ending that follows from everything we’ve seen, and another ending that gives viewers what they want. So, if I feel like someone’s watching me, maybe it’s crime investigators in the future trying to piece together what happens to me a few days from now? At least it looks like I don’t have to worry about déjà vu - not being a law enforcement official involved in a high-tech crime investigation.ĭéjà Vu rides the razor’s edge between competing theories of time travel: Can the past really be changed? Or will anything you do in the past turn out to be just part of what already happened anyway? The filmmakers spin a slick, engrossing yarn and ratchet up the suspense effectively, but eventually they write themselves into a corner. Later, she makes a note in her diary about “that weird ‘I’m being watched’ feeling.” “Hello? Hello?” she calls uncertainly, looking around her room and then wandering out into the hallway. Why shouldn’t she be half-dressed a lot?Īll the time, though, the past marches on as relentlessly as the present, and there’s a complicated, possibly disingenuous technobabble explanation for why there are no do-overs, no rewinding, no fast-forwarding.Ĭarlin doesn’t mind the view of Claire’s boudoir, but he doesn’t necessarily buy the feds’ technobabble about how the chronoscope works - especially when Claire herself seems aware of something out of the ordinary. Within their surveillance radius, the FBI team can see literally anything happening four days ago - even looking through walls, a bit like in Scott’s earlier Enemy of the State, thus allowing agents to peer in on the last hours of a murder victim named Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton) as she changes clothes, showers and so forth. ![]() He isn’t kidding about the “exactly once” part. “I need someone who can look at a crime scene exactly once,” Pryzwarra says, “and tell us what shouldn’t be there, what’s missing, what matters.” Although Carlin is a lowly ATF officer, an FBI agent named Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) admires his efficient detective work and recruits him to go over the surveillance images with them. Thus, when post-Katrina New Orleans is rocked by a terrorist bomb, the FBI sets up shop and starts combing through images of the days before the blast for clues. Responsible for all this is a top-secret FBI surveillance technology that - according to the official explanation offered to Carlin - reconstructs an on-the-fly virtual view of the recent past by synthesizing input from all available sources, from satellite photography to local security cameras, into a single, continuous roving image of life as it was four and a half days earlier. Are you thinking fourth-dimensionally yet? Beyond that, Déjà Vu pursues its science-fiction conceit to some nifty places, including an extraordinary cross-temporal chase scene in which the hero must negotiate traffic in one timeframe while “following” a vehicle more than half a week in the past. To begin with, this time it’s the bad guy blowing people up, which is always a good thing. No, it’s not the odious Man on Fire all over again - fortunately, it’s quite a bit better than that. “You don’t have to do this,” a character tells ATF agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) at a critical juncture, to which he replies, “What if I already have?”Įven some viewers may have a feeling of déjà vu, what with odd bits of God talk and spiritual references juxtaposed with fingers being lopped off, duct-taped faces and prisoners with hands affixed to steering wheels, a kidnapped damsel in deadly distress, and deadly explosions, all in a hypercaffeinated Tony Scott thriller starring a sunglasses-wearing Denzel Washington, set in a down-and-out Mexican/Gulf area city, and featuring a quasi-Christological climax. Indeed, the film involves some of the most intricately interconnected time-bending plotting seen in years, with a tightly looped storyline that carefully sets up a long chain of dominoes that have already been toppled. True, Déjà Vu deals with timelines revisited, events seen and reseen from different points of view, and ultimately the growing sense that all of this has been before.
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