On the morning of Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday), an American Terrorist sets off a bomb in an SUV aboard a ferry, killing more than five hundred people aboard, as the fireball sets off another explosion in the boiler, and eventually the remains sink to the bottom of the river.
ATF Agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) is assigned the grisly task of figuring out exactly what happened, and as such, he's one of the first on the scene collecting evidence. His partner, who had just taken off for vacation, is nowhere to be found, not even answering his cell phone.
Before long, Carlin is assigned to a special task force researching the event, and finds himself drawn into a special new technology that allows the investigators to look back into the past four-and-a-half days (technically, four days and six hours, but no one seems to notice this, so I'll pretend not to do so either) to see what's happening. The only catch is that this time window is open only for that exact period, and once that time window is gone, it can't be recovered.
There really isn't any explanation as to why the period was chosen, but that's not really an issue. Some period had to be picked, so why not this one? The reasoning for why it can't be reviewed is that just opening the window takes so much energy that recording multiple streams would require so much storage that it is impractical, and I can buy that.
So now that Carlin is on this special force, he needs to help them decide what to look at from four days ago. The problem with being able to see anything is that they need to decide what to look at. And not know what the bomber looks like is a decided disadvantage. Carlin decides to focus on the house of Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), who he had found while trying to investigate the wreckage on his own.
In doing so, it becomes clear that the bomber wanted Claire because she was selling a car - and that car was the one that blew up the ferry. So watching her becomes a game to see if they can find the bomber. Along the way, Carlin falls in love with Claire, but the line between the past and the present becomes increasingly blurred. So much, in fact, that Carlin decides to see if he can change the past, by sending a signal to her.
When he can flash a laser pointer into her window, and she can see it (this apparently through a monitor, which is a bit odd), he knows that it's time to see if he can effect change. The team decides to send a note to him in the past, to find the potential bomber and try to stop him. Unfortunately, Carlin's partner gets the note, and heads to the ferry himself, ending up as a victim of the terrorist. So in fact, Carlin got his partner killed. Time travel has a way of working things out like that, and this part was handled decently.
After this, a portable helmet allows Carlin to "follow" the terrorist (played well by the excellent James Caviezel) outside the normal range of the tracking device, and so Carlin knows where he operates - from a base in the bayou. This comes into play later.
Eventually, Carlin decides that he simply must save Claire, and he needs to risk his own skin to do so, and he decides to send himself back in time. This is where a solid movie gets into shaky territory, as many time travel movies do.
When Carlin goes back, he rescues Claire from the terrorist before he has a chance to kill her. Then they attempt to stop the bomb from exploding on the ferry, and indeed the events on the ferry change from what they were, but this "future" Carlin dies in the process. Just as Claire tries to get over her grief, she is greeted by the "past" Carlin, who doesn't know her, since they haven't met yet. But she knows him, since they had just spent some time together. That part isn't bad.
What is an issue is that, without the explosion on the ferry, Carlin never joined the task force, so he could never be sent back to save Claire in the first place. This is simply the paradox of time travel. If an event takes place that puts you into position to change something, and then you change that event, how can you be in that place again? It's a bit of a puzzle, really.
So long as you can avoid that question, and don't mind it, then the movie isn't bad. And you can write if off as the "future" Carlin simply being the last vestige of an alternate future being extinguished when that future was changed. After all, if he wasn't, there would be two Carlins running around, and that wouldn't be good either. And after that event, none of the people from that alternate future exist any longer. So it's not as bad as some, but it's still there to ponder.
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and terror, disturbing images and some sensuality.
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