Deja Vu (2006) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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It’s like déjà vu all over again.

The Denzel Washington action/thriller Deja Vu has been here before. It is many of the same concepts from previous action films intertwined with an interesting, and little-used science-fiction idea by director Tony Scott. Does it feel like you’ve already seen it, or is it just a trick of your mind?

First Impressions

After some white supremacist-looking guy tells us we have no idea what’s coming, the opening 5 seconds of the trailer repeat themselves. The audience gets introduced to Denzel Washington’s character investigating a ferry bombing with technology that “the government doesn’t want you to know about.” Technology that can look into the past and fold space back on itself. A woman asks Denzel what he would do if he had to tell someone the most important thing in the world, even though they’d never believe you. He says he’d try. Several action shots show the serious money being spent on the film. Then Denzel repeats the same question to the woman she asked him earlier. Why do I get this strange sense of Deja Vu when I watch this trailer?

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

The film opens with families and sailors boarding a river ferry in New Orleans on the morning of Mardi Gras, only to have it explode a few moments later under a bridge. ATF Agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) arrives on the scene and starts doing his job. He watches surveillance videos of the scene and notices a man on the bridge just before the explosion. The sheriff’s office finds a woman’s body in the water, Claire (Paula Patton), which Doug investigates. Forensics put her death before the explosion, and Doug believes she was killed and made to look like she was part of the disaster.

He talks to the woman’s father who allows him to search her apartment. He finds some odd things including bloody bandages in the sink and trash, plus magnet letters on the fridge that spell the words, “U can save her.” Doug meets with the FBI agent Paul Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) who invites him to join a new task force he’s on. Paul and his team show Doug a detailed 360° video from the ferry before the bombing–specifically 4 days and 6 hours in the past. Doug refuses to believe that this is some satellite imaging system, and the team admits it’s a time window.

Doug attends Claire’s funeral and notices an extra limo driver. Using the time window, the FBI team, including Shanti (Erika Alexander), Gunnars (Elden Henson), and Denny (Adam Goldberg), watch Claire’s apartment and her activity for any clues they might use to find the bomber. Doug realizes that this window is not a one-way view, as Claire admits to her friend that she feels like she’s being watched. She also notices a laser pointer dot that Doug shines into her room from the future. Doug convinces Paul to help him send a note to his past self. It travels successfully but is picked up by Doug’s partner Larry (Matt Craven) who follows the directions to see the bomber.

Larry is captured and killed by the bomber making Doug realize that by changing something they still didn’t change anything–since Larry was killed by the bomb on the ferry two days later. Doug grabs a goggle-rig, a portable version of their viewing technology to follow the bomber and get a better visual of his face. A crazy chase ensues where he’s traveling on a road four-and-a-half days later watching the past play out in his visor. They manage to ID the bomber as Carroll Oerstadt (Jim Caviezel) and arrest him. He explains how he did it, and tells Doug that he’s a true patriot. Having caught the bomber, the agent in charge Jack McCready (Bruce Greenwood) shuts down the project.

Knowing that he can–must–save Claire, Doug convinces Denny to send him back in time. Denny warns that it will induce cardiac arrest in him, so they send him to a hospital on the night before the bombing so the doctors can revive him. Doug steals an ambulance and races out to Carroll’s bayou shack where he finds Claire tied up. Carroll had kidnapped her and stolen her truck to use as the bomb delivery device. In the original timeline, he cut off some of her fingers and killed her, dumping her body in the river. Doug saves her and scares Carroll away–getting shot in the shoulder in the process. They go back to Claire’s apartment.

Doug convinces her that he’s not crazy and is really from the future, but also realizes he still has not changed anything–now noticing the bloody bandages from Claire cleaning his wound. They proceed to the ferry, now the morning of Mardi Gras. Doug gets on the ferry to disarm the bomb, but Carroll notices him and gets on to stop him. Claire follows Carroll as well. While Doug distracts Carroll, Claire uses her bomb-laden truck to pin him against a car. Doug shoots him and they drive the truck over the edge of the ferry into the water. Claire escapes but Doug is caught in the explosion and killed. The explosion narrowly misses the ferry and ATF Agent Doug Carlin arrives on the scene and is introduced to Claire who somehow knows all about what happened. He gets the strangest sense of déjà vu.

“For once in my life, I’d like to catch somebody before they do something horrible.” – Doug Carlin

History in the Making

Deja Vu was Tony Scott’s first and only sci-fi, and a follow-up to his 2005 action film Domino. It was also his third collaboration, of five, with Denzel Washington following 1995s Crimson Tide and 2004s Man on Fire. The two would reunite for Scott’s final two films before his death, a remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, and Unstoppable. Scott’s style was always on display in his film making his action films all seem unique. Top Gun, Days of Thunder, and The Last Boy Scout all have a specific look to them which includes silhouetted images in front of sunsets. His action elements were always presented in a crisp and clean manner, rather than the shaky-cam or handheld styles adapted by filmmakers in the late 20th Century. Yet Deja Vu falters in his body of work. It doesn’t necessarily look like a Tony Scott film, having moments that feel similar to Bad Boys or The Rock by fellow action director Michael Bay.

It may have been the science-fiction elements of the film, which are certainly toned down in comparison to other action/sci-fi of the time. Maybe Scott was apprehensive of leaning into the unfamiliar genre, preferring to stick to the more solid action beats and Washington’s smoldering screen presence. In any case, the title of Deja Vu is apropos of the film, as it is something that we have all experienced before. There is very little newness to the story of an agent investigating an act of domestic terrorism, or the review of surveillance techniques, which Scott did better in the Will Smith thriller Enemy of the State. The film is worthwhile for anyone who is a fan of Denzel Washington, and also as a good example of a film production supporting a city by filming on location. The city of New Orleans was devastated after the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, and productions like Deja Vu helped put individuals back to work as the city healed.

Genre-fication

Time travel has been a popular genre for decades, which has slowly infiltrated the action genre, starting with 1984s The Terminator, and progressing through Freejack, Timecop, and most recently Paycheck. In the early days of the genre, there were only two kinds of time travel–a character moving from the past to the future, or a character moving from the future to the past. They used machines that propelled them through the time stream using scientific advancements. But as filmmaking progressed audiences got ideas such as self-hypnosis (Time After Time), mental projection (La Jetee & 12 Monkeys), and time storms (The Final Countdown). But there has also been the idea of a wormhole through space, first seen in The Philadelphia Experiment, but also in films like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Timeline, and Deja Vu. Wormholes have shown up in other science-fiction films (and stories), but usually as a way to travel great distances instantaneously, rather than as a means of time travel.

Deja Vu refers to its specific wormhole as a “time window,” recalling the John Woo action/sci-fi film Paycheck in which Ben Affleck’s character can look through a wormhole into his future to gather the necessary elements to survive an assassination attempt. While Affleck’s time window was able to be focused on different pathways in his future, the one used here by the FBI is more specific and limited. It can only ever look backward and only see four days and six hours (and “three minutes, 45 seconds, and 14 and a half nanoseconds”). The constraint, along with the limited search area–which appears to be the place where the basecamp is set up, keeps the characters from becoming omniscient (mostly) and leads to the interesting investigatory elements of a standard whodunnit mystery. Aside from this Big Brother technology, the rest of the film is a standard mystery/thriller complete with chases, forensic recreations of events, and the search for a killer in hopes of preventing him from killing again (or chronologically for the first time).

Societal Commentary

American films of the early 21st century adopted a new tone to their worldview. This was not constrained just to science-fiction films, with action and thriller films focusing more on the anxieties of domestic terrorism and the fears that America was no longer the safe place it had been considered. Recent sci-fi films like Steven Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds and last week’s Children of Men are two sci-fi examples of this idea. Certainly, Children of Men is based in London, but the terrorist explosion in a shop in the opening minutes occurred while a very real incident from 2004 was fresh in everyone’s mind. Deja Vu focuses on a psychologically unstable individual who believes himself a patriot, carrying out a bombing of a New Orleans ferry transporting a large number of Naval sailors. The similarities to the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building are eerie–and intended. Oerstadt is portrayed as not just unbalanced, but an extremely smart individual who sees all the potential sides of his actions. He knows that in order to make Claire look like a bombing victim he mustn’t shoot her. His intensity and devotion serve as a counterpoint to Doug’s obsessive nature.

The other element that Deja Vu leans into is the advent of the surveillance state, specifically in a domestic context. Spy films have always dealt with elements of surveillance, however they usually point their microphones and cameras at foreign targets. Tony Scott’s previous film Enemy of the State was an early thriller that dealt with the high-tech (and sometimes sci-fi-like) surveillance techniques used by the NSA to surveil citizens. This differs from Cold War-era films like The Conversation or Blow-Out where individuals end up stumbling into thriller plots. With Deja Vu, the FBI creates a device that appears to allow them autonomy in surveilling the public. It requires no warrants since they are looking into the past, and such could be argued to be a forensic tool like contemporary ATF agents use in determining the makeup of a bomb. Questions do arise in the film about how the FBI can obtain these images, which leads to the sci-fi elements of the plot. Yet Doug, nor any of the other agents, seems to address the creepiness of the surveillance, especially and primarily when related to Claire.

Doug Carlin is a creep. He may be a good ATF agent, but his motives are straight-up weird. I know that the next actions I’m about to describe are probably the filmmakers trying to play into the déjà vu aspect of the film title, but the way he observes and touches Claire’s body in the morgue is most unsettling. He falls in love with a dead woman which creates an obsession with him to solve the case. But soon after seeing her in the past, alive, that obsession becomes even greater. Of course, sending himself messages like “u can save her” probably didn’t help. The film didn’t need Claire to fulfill his purpose of tracking down the killer. Doug was already working on that case. He had a connection with his partner having been killed on the boat in the original timeline. Claire’s inclusion was to what end then? Seemingly she survives the events of the blast while Doug-Prime is killed, only to meet up with Past Doug (having fallen in love with Doug-Prime) and hits on him, yielding a moment of déjà vu for Past Doug which he immediately shakes off. It is definitely awkward.

The Science in The Fiction

Scientifically speaking the time window of Deja Vu has a large plausibility factor surrounding it. The explanations of how the device works are rooted in some actual science. The scientists explain that the technology requires a lot of power–enough to cause a blackout in the northeastern United States. This energy enables an Einstein-Rosen bridge, which is the connection of two points in spacetime, outside of its normal topography. It’s explained in the film using a sheet of paper folded back on itself which would allow two non-contiguous points to touch. This is the essence of the wormhole. It was explained much more cinematically by Sam Neill in Event Horizon, in which he illustrated the wormhole with paper in a similar way, but then punched a pencil between the sheets showing the connection. See also Interstellar and the meta reference of Thor: Love and Thunder which invokes both Event Horizon and Interstellar (but sadly not Deja Vu).

Given this explanation, the idea that the time window would constantly show a fixed length of time in the past doesn’t seem so far-fetched. Rather than the ability to move forward and back through points in time on the “past” side of the window, they have achieved a “fixed distance” between now and the past. As spacetime moves forward that fixed distance remains allowing Doug and people in the present the ability to see four days and six hours into the past. It’s also mentioned that this was all created as an accident and a fluke. Maybe they can achieve different views into the past but are afraid to do so for fear of losing the technology. It’s like creating a motor that does what it needs to but with the inability to understand why it works. Turning it off could affect that “eureka factor.”

While the FBI team has a large radius around the New Orleans area in which they can warrantlessly observe people and actions (using some kind of virtual camera), what happens if they need to know something outside of the area? Not a problem, there’s always goggle street view (unknown if this was the original basis for Google Street View). A mobile rig built into a humvee allows Doug to follow the suspect back to his lair–except that Doug is four days and 6 hours in the future, which makes for a harrowing split-screen scene of Doug on a crowded bridge in the daytime while seeing Oerstadt’s car at night on the same uncrowded bridge.

The Final Frontier

Besides the feeling of déjà vu, which is the sensation that you have experienced the current events or memory before, the film also broaches on another odd human sensation, which is the feeling that someone is watching you. It’s the sensation that causes the hairs on your neck to prickle. The explanation, is of course, that there’s a group of weirdos in a time window watching you shower naked or feed your cat. When Doug is using the goggle rig and standing right in front of where Oerstadt stood in the past, there’s a sense that the bomber experiences something as well–even though it’s unstated.

For a film called Deja Vu, it seems like many of the elements of the film have been seen before. It is fascinating about the way that these elements are connected. For example, most time travel films pick a perspective on their ideology: either falling towards fate (fixed timelines) or free will (open choices). Deja Vu comes down on both sides. The past is very difficult to change. Doug makes small changes (messaging his partner) that do not change the bigger picture (stopping the bombing and saving Claire). But he is eventually able to change the overall outcome, perhaps by sacrificing himself to the timeline–that way at least someone dies.

Deja Vu is a competent film that should be seen at least once. It has great performances by Washington, Kilmer, and Caviezal and some exciting action scenes. Though it seems like less of a science-fiction film than many other action films reviewed here. The ending is the most frustrating part as there doesn’t seem to be any explanation for what may be going on–other than déjà vu. Perhaps watching it again will make that feeling go away.

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