Deja Vu
by Tony Scott
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Adam Goldberg, Denzel Washington, Jim Caviezel, Paula Patton, Val KilmerDirector: Tony Scott
Brand: Buena Vista Home Video
Producer: Barry H. Waldman
Producer: Chad Oman
Producer: Don Ferrarone
Producer: Jerry Bruckheimer
Producer: Mike Stenson
Writer: Bill Marsilii
Writer: Terry Rossio
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0; Spanish (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 126 minutes
Published: 2007-04-01
DVD Release Date: 2007-04-24
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Buena Vista Home Entertainment / Touchstone
Product features:
- When FBI agent Carlin (Denzel Washington) tries to prevent a terrorist attack using a top secret government time shifting device, the action is explosive. Denzel Washington teams up with blockbuster producer Jerry Bruckheimer and renowned director Tony Scott in this intriguing action thriller. Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE Rating: PG-13 Age: 786936705270 UPC:&
Movie Reviews of Deja Vu
Movie Review: What a cool flick!
Summary: 5 Stars
As usual, no synopsis here; just a comment. And, yes, definite SPOILERS.
When I realized at the start that it was a Jerry Bruckheimer movie, my reaction was 'cool'! A time travel theme done by Bruckheimer; what more could anyone want? With Denzel Washington and Val Kilmer to boot--plus one Paula Patton, who in the beginning on the morgue slab looks almost like Halle Berry, almost to the extend of making me think 'what the...', but then turns safely into a non-Halle-Berry, which is all good, because Patton has several times the personality of the former.
Since I write SF I am a clued-in kind of guy, and so when a terrorist/CSI tale turned into a time-travel story, well that was even better. It's a daring genre mix--a bit like The Island was--but that makes it more interesting. I know a lot of cinema goers get 'genre-confused' when the clues are pointing _this_ way at the start, but then the movie ends up going _that_ way, but in this case it worked.
The sci-fi premise was simple, supported by the inevitable and probably necessary bit of yak-speak in which the word 'wormhole' just _had_ to figure. But once you accepted the basic idea, it was followed through with fairly solid logic. That's the hallmark of good sci-fi premises, and especially those involving time-travel, and even more especially those set in a current-day context.
In this instance (last spoiler warning!) it was this:
Take any given location on the map. You can build a device that peeks a fixed amount of time into the past within a given radius around that location. Meaning that you can't peek outside the area thus defined. The only way you can do that is if you carry some remote to the device around and position said remote close to whatever you want to look at, since it was a much smaller viewing radius. Also, you can only always look at a given point in time a fixed interval 'behind' your current position on the time-axis; that is, if you are looking back using the device at time 't' and you can look back by an interval of 'dt', the point in time you're looking at is 't-dt'. Meaning you'd better look close, because if you don't you might miss it--and even recording what you see doesn't help, because you can't look everywhere. Just like you can't look everywhere right now.
That was the premise and they basically ran with it. I like those kinds of plots, because they allow you to spin out things without too much strain on credibility. Stephen Gould writes books like that: _Jumper_ and _Wildside_ are two examples of the same kind of approach. I've tried it myself. It's a very neat way of story-telling. Simple and clear premises often give rise to much more complex tales than worlds created with too much artifice.
Another thing I really liked abut Deja Vu was the nature of its characters. They were intelligent people and behaved as if they were. In other words, they were also 'competent'. All-too-often this is a neglected aspect of characterization that tends to make otherwise potentially great movies seem unbelievable. The viewer sits in the cinema and says to him- or herself (and to the character actually) "Oh, come on, how could you not see that coming? What a dimwit!"
It doesn't happen here, and especially to the main protagonist. What he doesn't predict and can't factor into his decisions are things he genuinely cannot know--because stuff just happens and that's life. But when he _can_, he thinks and calculates and judges and knows well enough what's what. That goes especially for his ability to judge people. He's the kind of guy who'll try to convince someone that something should be done, but at the same time sizes up and assesses a given situation, and knows when it ain't working and people aren't going to do what he wants them to. So he smiles, pretends to be agreeable--and then finds the best way to get around the problem. No temper tantrums and really stupid moves.
I know some people think a character needs a significant 'flaw' to be interesting, but I always thought that there's plenty of 'interest' in someone being smart and competent. Life is complicated enough. 'Doug Carlin' is a character that could have sprung straight from a Robert Heinlein novel. Mixed in with his competence is 'backbone' and a capacity to make decisions about what's what and what he has to do, given that he is who he is.
Of course, part of what drove him was not just what would have driven him anyway (the notion that he could maybe prevent the deaths of several hundred people), but the fact that he fell in love with the woman the back-in-time-peekers were peeping-Tom-ing at, and whom he'd previously seen on a slab in a morgue. That was very sweetly done, and also very believably. Another example of how the whole movie hung together almost seamlessly.
Great flick. Worth every dollar my wife and I spent on seeing it, and more.
[...].
Summary of Deja Vu
Academy Award(R) winner Denzel Washington (Best Actor, TRAINING DAY, 2001) joins forces with blockbuster producer Jerry Bruckheimer and mega-hit director Tony Scott for DÉJÀ VU ? the powerful, fast-paced action-thriller with a spectacular mind-bending twist. Called in to recover evidence in the aftermath of a horrific explosion on a New Orleans ferry, Federal agent Doug Carlin (Washington) gets pulled away from the scene and taken to a top-secret government lab that uses a time-shifting surveillance device to help prevent crime. But can it help Carlin change the past? Hold on to your seat for an explosive and intriguing thrill ride you'll want to experience again and again.'In his most effective thriller since Enemy of the State, Tony Scott makes time travel seem plausible. It helps that his New Orleans hero, ATF agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington in his third go-round with the director), spends more time in the present than the past. In order to catch a terrorist, FBI Agent Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) invites Carlin to join forces. They have the technology to see the past. He has the expertise to interpret the data. Unfortunately, the bomb has already gone off and hundreds of ferry passengers have died. Then there's the body of a beautiful woman, Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton, Idlewild), that turns up in the vicinity of the blast. Evidence indicates she was killed beforehand. Since the FBI enables him to observe Claire prior to her murder, Carlin gets to know what she was like and finds himself falling in love. He becomes convinced that the only way to solve the case--and prove her innocence--is to travel to the past. But as Pryzwarra's colleague, Denny (Adam Goldberg), argues, "You cannot go back in time. It's physically impossible." Or so he says. Déjà Vu is constructed around a clever script and executed by a top-notch cast, notably Washington, Patton, and an eerie Jim Caviezel (miles away from Passion of the Christ). In shedding the excesses of recent years--the sadism of Man on Fire and weirdness of Tarantino favorite Domino--Scott re-affirms his rep as one of the action movie's finest practitioners. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
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