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Probably the ideation of the story in terms of theme and its trans-temporal, trans-spatial characteristics comes from "21 Grams" (Dir: Alejandro Inarritu, 2003) and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (Dir: Michel Gondry, 2004). Audience who are thriller fanatics may be disappointed as its strength is not built upon the genre though there is a strong hermeneutic code in the core of the story. The film is loaded with a strong and enlightening theme of valuing life and controlling one's own destiny. Yet the theme is not communicated even up to the second third of the film but emerges in a very expressive manner in its last third instead. The following quotes from the film suffice to express how captivating its theme is: "Sometimes life can only really begin with the knowledge of death… The important thing in life is to believe that while you're alive, it's never too late… No matter how bad things look, they look better awake than they do asleep. When you die, there's only one thing you want to happen. You wanna come back."

Director John Maybury fully manipulates shuttles of temporal and spatial dimensions together with intrinsic meditation in the narrative by adopting a non-linear structure. He uses many flashback and flashforward sequences in the plots. The temporal orientation of the story is late December 1992 in which Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) first crosses path with young Jackie Price (Laura Marano). Jack's background of his participation in the Gulf War in 1991 is captured by the sporadic flashbacks whereas his future encounter with the grown up Jackie (Keira Knightley) in 2007 is shown under several long sequences of flashforwards.

All events on Jack are by incident but he is able to change his destiny. The same applies to what Jean (Kelly Lynch), the mom of Jackie, does on Jackie. To contrast the differences in fate for expressively conveying the theme that one can be in control of his/her own destiny, Maybury uses 2 visual parallel sequences: Jack meets the grown up Jackie twice at the same petrol station in 2007, one before and the other after the change of destiny. These visual parallel sequences effectively exploit the role of costumes and props in being part of the narrative and demonstrate that they are crucial elements in the signification process as far as communication is concerned: a dejected Jackie in a dust-spoiled Jeep vs a candid / fresh Jackie in a Beetle model Volkswagen. The contrast as well as the entire film perhaps implicitly carries a sub-message of anti-smoking.

The diegetic feature of the film is that the flashforwards account for the events in the present sequences. Hence, the causal relations among events do not follow a cause-effect order but an effect-cause one instead. The plot on Dr. Lorenson (Jennifer Leigh)'s electric-pulse treatment on Babak (Angelo Andreou), which makes the former believe on Jack's power, serves to depict the message.

The films ends with an inspiring technique that Maybury uses the rhetorical mode (talking directly to the audience) to overtly invoke the audience's brain working process by the voice over of Jackie: "How much (time) do you have?" It is an enlightening movie stimulating an analytical decipherment. For those who like thematically meaningful movies, the ideology of the film will remain fresh and impressive in their mind for a long time. It is a touching film not to be missed. The feel of touching does not come from the sentimental staging from the characters (in fact there is no such plots in the film). Rather, it is from the philosophy of trust on oneself and parental care on the younger generation.

註：本評論純屬影評作者個人意見，並不代表本網立場。
Note: This views presented in this review is solely the views of the critic who wrote it and do not represent the stance of our website.

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