The Unseen Movie Review

The Jacket

Time travel can often make for great, fun movies – the Back to the Future trilogy and Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits being prime examples. They can also make for disturbing, psychologically and philosophically confusing films examining the paradoxical possibilities of being able to alter history, like Gilliam’s superb Twelve Monkeys. This film is so consciously modelled on the latter that at first glance it could almost look like a rip off.

In fact, although stylistically there are resemblances to Gilliam’s 1998 Monkeys movie, this is an adaptation of the 1914 Jack London book The Star Rover. Best known for his canine epic White Fang, London was one of the most prolific and successful American authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and dabbled in early science fiction around the time that the genre was being invented by the likes of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

The Star Rover was effectively an early call for an end to inhumane treatment in prisons – a fairly topical subject considering the recent uproar over the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay – as a prisoner locked in an asylum undergoing experimental treatment experiences a kind of astral-projection time travel to various eras.

Here, Oscar-winner Adrien Brody plays the internee, locked up for criminal insanity following a roadside shooting which amnesia prevents him from fully recalling. Strapped into a straightjacket and locked in the dark, his growing hallucinations gradually become lucid as he ends up in the distant future, finding out about his own death just days away in the real world. Much as Bruce Willis in Twelve Monkeys had but days to prove his sanity and save the world, here Brody has but days to prove his sanity and save his life. But, as with Terry Gilliam’s other masterpiece Brazil, are these trips to the future real, or is he actually insane?

Brody does his usual excellent job – just the right level of utter confusion in the eyes to lend credence to his apparent time-shifts, as well as to emphasise just how terrifying the claustrophobic “treatment” he is being put through must be. Director John Maybury, whose last outing was at the helm of the 1998 Francis Bacon biopic Love is the Devil, makes a competent shot at imitating Gilliam’s grittier, more disturbing techniques, amply aided by Mullholland Drive and Evil Dead II cinematographer Peter Deming.

Add to that a supporting cast including Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kris Kristofferson and Keira Knightley, a soundtrack by disconcerting electronica genius Brian Eno, and the knowledge that this comes from the production company set up by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, who act as producers, and you’ve got the makings of an very interesting film. Confusing, thought-provoking and enthralling, it may fall down a bit towards the final reel, but is nonetheless a worthwhile addition to the time travel genre that will most likely keep you guessing until the very end.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM