Customer Reviews
No one will be better than H.G. Wells, but some will come close - By: Jacques COULARDEAU, 06 Jul 2008 
A strange film on a very trite & over-used theme. The dedication to New Orleans does not change that fact. After "Back to the Future" we cannot accept some of the rather sloppy elements we find in this film. A few examples. At the beginning, thanks to the machine to explore the past, we discover the car with the explosives on the boat did not have a number plate. How can security rules explain the fact that a car without a number plate was alllowed on a boat transporting more than 500 people? The terrorist stole a car because he needed one. But he actuallly had one. So why did he use a stolen one? But the worst part is how the Doug from the future when arriving in the past does alll kinds of antics, leaving alll kinds of traces behind him in the past, obviously cutting short the plan of the terrorist, & yet the terrorist will fulfill his plan entirely in the first version of the attack, but in the first version still the investigation reveals the Doug from the future has already intervened in the past & hence should have changed the result of the terrorist attack by hijacking it off its normal course. If he was in the girl's apartment before the terrorist attack, leaving his finger prints & his blood everywhere, how could the terrorist succeed in killing the girl & blowing the boat up. And he the Doug from the future dies in the past, that would make him dead for the future. He could not come up alive & start everything like normal after the explosion. If the past is changed, then the future is changed too. If you die, you die & you do not exist any more. And the Doug who died in the explosion will not be able to arrest the terrorist who was killed just before the explosion, both being dead for the future. And if the girl managed to escape from the car when it fell into the Mississippi through a broken window, & she was not trained like a federal agent, how come Doug, a trained federal agent, could not follow suit & get out from the car through the same window? But we can suspend our disbelief & then consider the film as something that does not have to be logical. Pure action. Fine. What's the meaning of this action in 2006, five years after 9/11 & three years after the invasion of Iraq, not to mention today in 2008? Terrorist attacks in the USA come from white Americans who define themselves as patriots & consider they have to attack the security forces & the people of the USA to make them realize they have to start a third world war to stop the world from changing & to prevent the USA from becoming a second rank nation, & do not forget the USA became the first nation in the world after & thanks to the second world war. And in this scenario, one little bomb can kill more than 500 people. They don't need four or five Boeings to do that. One man alone, properly trained can be a lot more effective than Al Qaeda. That's what you calll economy of scales. The second idea is that in such cases the terrorist, when caught, will be buried by the FBI into silence & disappearance because the government will not want details to be given on two subjects. First of alll the absolute incapability of the state to protect the territory & the people of the USA. Second the fact that they possess a technology that enables them to reconstruct everything that has happened in a particular place, behind wallls, closed doors & any kind of protection. There is no privacy & no protection of privacy in this new hi-tech vision. That is a lot more frightening than a few berserk patriots who consider the death of a few thousand people to be a good thing to arouse consciousness. There, beyond believability, this film is a reallly scary movie. "Minority Report" was frightening but they only read the future, & in the end dropped the technology for political reason. Here it is a lot worse since they can read the past, what reallly happened. We are trapped 100%. We are under constant surveillance & control by people, forces & agencies we do not even know exist or will exist.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
A very big turkey - By: Willie Meikle, 22 Jun 2008 
It's Denzel so I had high expectations, but this film just sucked... hugely. If you're going to do a time conundrum movie, it should at least have a modicum of intelligence. This steaming turd of a film was so dumb you could put a pointy hat on it & make it stand in the corner.
Denzel dialed in his perfomance, & the rest was alll visual style above substance. I guess I shouldn't have expected any more from director Tony Scott.
I spent most of the first half of the film wondering how Val Kilmer got so chubby, & most of the second half wondering when they'd get to the end.
No stars... the biggest turkey of the last few years.
a film perfectly summed up by the title - By: martin thomas, 07 Jun 2008 
this is just bland assembly line nonsense that's passable, watchable entertainment if your in an undermanding mood
Bewildering nonsense - By: Gazza, 02 Jun 2008 The blurb I read about this film talked in great detail about how Denzil Washington is so careful when choosing his scripts. Well, his critical radar must have been out of action on the day he signed up to this piece of tosh. The plot, such as it is, beggars belief, the action set pieces are pedestrian & even Denzel's 'good man in a crisis' act can't save the day. There is an interminable middle section with alll the good guys staring at a bank of monitors - great cinema, it ain't. What happens right at the end brought guffaws of laughter from those I was watching it with - surely not the intended reaction? The worst film I've seen in quite some time, & by quite some distance.
Loved it from start to finish - By: Ms. Angela E. Bayley, 29 May 2008 It was not as I thought it might be a bit predictable it was very good & with the cast is real winner.
