Genre: Sci-Fi/Crime
Director: Alfonso Cuaron
Writer: Mo Buck
Cast: Mahershala Ali, Michelle Williams, Ralph Fiennes, Don Cheadle, Cillian Murphy, Michelle Pfeiffer, Willem Dafoe, Giancarlo Esposito, Margo Martindale, Tom Wilkinson
Plot: It’s 2052, Earth changed way less than we imagined decades ago. There was no huge development in the last 40 years or so. We are in what we could call a stagnation period. No huge development, except for one thing. One thing that changed the life of many and it’s this one thing that contributed to this current period of stagnation: time travel. It seems like this particular breakthrough stopped everything, it came like a bomb. People gave up what they were doing and explored the possibility of time traveling. They can go back in the past and revisit some historical events, or they could go in the future and see what the world will become in hundreds, thousands of years. But, as with everything good, some people try to use it to their advantage and some people made it their mission to stop the ones with bad intentions.
Guy Wilson (Willem Dafoe) is in charge of a group of time travelers, today. He was one of the people who caught on the time traveling craze early and built a business out of it. People pay to revisit past events and today, they go back in time to witness the battle of Marathon, in Ancient Greece. In the group, his good friend and frequent client, Julia Wayne (Michelle Williams). She claims to be a fan of history and she never misses a chance to go back in time. The group enters the time machine, a huge structure in fiber glass and stainless steel, it’s all just design, really, you don’t really need this kind of thing, just a small wristband is enough to travel. Wilson presses on a couple of buttons and he closes the doors. People are nervous, but not Julia. She goes over and talks to Guy right before the travel starts. He gives her a Wilson Corps wristband, she wanted one for a long time now. They discuss about what they’ll see and he dictates the rules to the travellers, mainly that they can’t touch and interact with people. He tells people to stand still and to not panic, as a bright white light blinds them. He will see them on the other side.
Shadow (Cillian Murphy) specialises in time travelling crimes. He can do whatever you want, from killing someone, to changing the outcomes of minor events. Shadow will do it, in exchange of a small fee and he will not get caught. He receives a text message from his boss. He needs to change something in a document in the Pentagon. He looks at his cellphone and grabs the document, before leaving the room, nodding at the receptionist on his way out. She didn’t notice anything weird. The Shadow did it again. He finds a empty bathroom and he enters a stall. He enters coordinates on his watch and in an instant, he disappears, in the past or in the future, who knows?
Simon Turner (Mahershala Ali) and Jules Samson (Don Cheadle) are in the past. Together, they form a team of agents, tasked to prevent people from modifying past events. They are part of the group led by Wilson. They’re employed by D’Angelo Booths (Giancarlo Esposito), who’s at the top of the respected organization. They try to find suspicious looking individuals within the group, but they are well behaved, as Wilson describes the action happening in front of them, the battle of Marathon. They are unimpressed by it, having visited Ancient Greece many times before. After she chatted with Wilson, Julia decided to blend in the group and during the entire visit, she looks at Turner and Samson to see how they operate. Turner catches her staring a little bit too long and he wants to warn her. She notices him and smiles. Samson tells his partner that maybe she’s just interested in him, maybe she finds him cute. He says that’s impossible and lets it go. But Wayne wasn’t in love with Turner and she knows it. She was there to collect information on the agents and she got it. She follows the group as Wilson is giving his presentation and does everything in her power to avoid catching the attention, which she succeeds at. She doesn’t have the same attention to the historical event as the other visitors, that’s for sure. The group leaves and nobody touched anything, to the satisfaction of Turner and Samson. The group goes back to the present. Guy tries to find Julia, but she’s nowhere to be found, in fact, she already left the building, as if she was in a hurry.
Ann (Margo Martindale) and Arthur Wayne (Tom Wilkinson) are eating, joined by their friends Al (Ralph Fiennes) and Martha Grimsley (Michelle Pfeiffer) talking about their life and how they enjoy some things and some they don’t enjoy. All in all, it’s just a casual dinner between two couples. The phone rings and Ann answers. Out of nowhere, Arthur faints and he falls head first on his plate. Ann, Al and Martha are terrified and don’t know what to do. Al examines his old friend Arthur, he’s dead. That’s one way to end a dinner, isn’t it?
The Shadow appears in the 1990’s. He’s in a dark alley with his sport bag and he enters a phone booth to change in period appropriate clothes. He puts on round glasses and a suit. He takes a cab to an office building. He gets in the elevator and gets on the top floor. He flirts with a receptionist until he sees Arthur Wayne coming in. He kisses her on the cheek and he runs to Mr. Wayne. He asks for a meeting with him and he accepts, but he better make it quick. The Shadow presents himself as a travelling salesman and he has a pitch. He tries to sell him pencils and when he brings one out to show it to him, he presses on a button and it shoots a small particle at Wayne. Wayne collapses just like he did at diner about 30 years later. The Shadow leaves and he disappears just like he previously did.
Julia is keeping a quick pace, as if she was in a hurry when she receives a first call. She just acknowledges what the caller just said to her and she hangs up. Julia receives another call from her mother this time, crying, still in shock that her husband just died like that. Julia is devastated by the news. She says she’ll come home as soon as she can, but she has to do something really important first. Ann hangs up, still crying, as the paramedics carry away her husband’s body. Julia stops at the insurance company to collect her severance because of her father’s death. She bought insurance a couple of weeks ago to receive money in case her father died. You see, he was the one paying the bills, as Julia doesn’t really have a job and he always wanted to support her, no matter what. She tells the clerk that her father just died and asks for the procedure to collect the insurance money. The woman notices that the insurance was bought too recently to not raise suspicions. So, she sends her in to see her superior, D’Angelo Booths. Mr. Booths presents her the irregularities in her case. She bought the insurance weeks ago and she comes in mere minutes after her father suspiciously died. He notes that she should be grieving his loss instead of coming in here to collect the money. He doesn’t believe her story and her case will be under investigation in the meantime. She needs to go now and they’ll contact her when they’ll have more details. When she leaves his office, Booths calls Turner and Samson, they need to get on the case, it looks like someone is trying to rip them off. On the other end, Julia calls someone and says that it didn’t work, and that someone is Martha. She’s mad at the whole thing, she could have use some more money. When Julia thinks about it, her plan had flaws and she intends to correct them.
Martha announces the news to her husband Al, they won’t get the money, but Al says they won’t get the money, for now… Martha turns around to reveal of wall full of pictures of Arthur and Ann Wayne. They decide to think what they did wrong for this job. They decide to revisit the events leading up to Arthur’s death. The Grimsleys are profiteers, working under the radar, taking full advantage of time travelling to gain money through insurance. Al recounts the time he went back in time to make friends with Arthur. He was sitting at the bar, watching the baseball game and Al just sat next to him and they chatted about baseball. Al worked him perfectly, he knew Arthur better than Arthur knew him himself.
For Martha, it was a little harder, Ann is in the alcoholic anonymous and she goes to the AA meetings when Arthur goes away to watch baseball. That night, she told her story, why alcohol got the better of her, why she drank to forget. Ann thinks she has been a failure in life. She never work, never made money and she feels like she’s just a gold digger who’s been living with her husband all these years because of his money (Arthur begs to differ, but Ann can’t accept otherwise). She’s also ashamed that her only heritage to the world was her daughter Julia, a nobody who never achieved anything except living of her dad’s fortune. She realises that Julia is in fact a younger version of herself and she can’t cope with the fact that she didn’t show her daughter otherwise, so that’s what she tries to forget by drinking. After her speech, Ann is just a mess, and it was really difficult for Martha to talk to her, but she did her best to console her.
After that, the Grimsleys spend almost their entire day going back in time to forge memories about them in their targets mind and they did so with the Waynes. Al tries to understand why the plan fails, but according to his and his wife’s logs, they didn’t do anything wrong, anything different, Julia must have screwed up on her end. Martha adds that she always found her sketchy, for some reason.
Julia hugs her mother really hard, as they both try to cope with the death of their beloved husband / father / cash cow. Julia asks her what happened and Ann proceeds to tell her that he just collapsed, without warning and he was… just dead. She says she wants to collect the insurance check to pay for nice funerals, but she spoke with a certain D’Angelo Booths on the phone and their case is under review. She sits down in the living room with her daughter and she says she needs to say something to her, something serious. She says that she regrets not showing her daughter nothing better, she says she should have been a better role model. Ann is now crying and Julia tells her that it’s alright, she shouldn’t worry about that. She has so much on her mind, right now. She says she really has to go, but tells her to call her if she needs anything.
Julia is back home and enters her bedroom in a negligee. The Shadow is in her bed, she calls him Tom. She tries to get intimate with him, but he reminds her that he doesn’t sleep with his clients, he never gets emotional. She then tells him about her little hiccup at the insurance office today. He says something happened to him too. After he killed Arthur, he logged in the coordinate to return to the present, but something went wrong, like he was intercepted. He was stuck in the 80’s, so he put on his 80’s clothes. He appeared in a disco and found out that his time travelling device was unresponsive.
Right after Julia left his office, D’Angelo Booths checked on her personal history and something ran a bell. He found out that she has a storied relationship with famed time travelling criminal known as the Shadow. Booths contacts his two most trusted agents, Samson and Turner to investigate on the matter. He’s able to track the Shadow thanks to their recognition system and he sends them his coordinates, they must act quick.
Following the successful time travelling session in Ancient Greece, Guy Wilson met with Samson in Turner as he wanted to know if he needed to improve anything security-wise, but they tell him that everything was alright, that they didn’t notice anything suspicious. Turner wants to bring up Julia, who starred at him repeatedly, but Samson dismisses it. Telling Turner that he was just too blind to see a woman clearly hitting on him. Guy Wilson receives a call and he asks the agents to leave. It’s the Shadow, he did it, the tango down. Wilson calls Julia, it’s done and the agents noticed her. She doesn’t say anything and he hangs up.
After the leave Wilson’s office Turner and Samson receive a call from Booths. They take the Shadow’s coordinates and they jump back in time to intercept him. They are in some sort of interdimensional space and they intercept the Shadow and bring him to the closest entry point to the real world, the 80’s. They’ve done it again, they intercepted a criminal. They put on their 80’s gear to make them blend in their favorite criminal hunting territory, the 80’s disco, a clear clash with Turner’s more reserved personality, but a perfect match with Samson’s more showy side. They go inside the disco and they try to locate the Shadow. Drugs and alcohol rule the place and they must cope with all the distractions, but they remain focus on their task. On his end, the Shadow tries to make his time travelling device work in the bathroom. After he unsuccessfully tries to repair it, he goes on the dance floor. He sees Samson and Turner on the other side and he does everything in his power to avoid them. A woman flirts with Turner, but he doesn’t listen to her, which prompts her to continue to harass him. The Shadow is knocked over by a some guy fighting over a girl and it catches the attention of Samson. The Shadow checks on his device and it looks like it’s working again. He runs to the bathroom and he teleports back to the present. Turner and Samson kick down the stall and find out he’s gone. They try to intercept him again, but they can’t find him. They end up appearing in the present just outside Booth’s office, where Samson tries to put the blame of their failure on Turner, to the amusement of Booths. On his end, the Shadow chose to appear in Julia’s apartment.
Julia now knows the whole story of what happened. She connects the dots at the same time as Al Grimsley, even if they are not in the same room. They insurance company are aware that Julia is seeing the Shadow and they were suspicious after her father sudden death. So, she decides that if they change the insurance contract in order for one of the Grimsleys to be the beneficiary, the insurance company would not see anything wrong with that, since, for example, Martha isn’t affiliated with the Shadow. Julia calls Al, and they find out they had the same idea. Julia calls Guy to set up a meeting between the groups.
Julia, the Shadow and the Grimsleys arrive at the same time at Wilson Corp, where Guy unlocks the door. They sit down in a room, where Guy explains the plan. Al and Martha will go in the past to change details on the contract to make it look like it’s Martha who wants the money, while Julia and the Shadow will go in another time period to lure the agents away in case they’re still unto them. They all agree that it sounds good and they gather supplies to not look out of place in the historical setting. As she’s preparing, Julia receives a call from her mother, who’s drunk. She reminds her daughter that she told her she could call every time she needed something and she needs her now. She doesn’t know what she’ll do in the next few hours and she has suicidal thoughts. She needs her daughter now. Julia says she’s absolutely sorry, but she really can’t right now, to the chagrin of her mother, who drives her car recklessly on the freeway. She shakes the thought out of her head. Once they are all ready, Guy wishes them luck and they all leave, they'll see each other on the other side.
At Booth’s request, both Samson and Turner were posted in front of Julia’s apartment to watch her every move, so they evidently saw her leaving with the Shadow, all the way down to Wilson Corp. They alerted their boss who tell them to wait for them in the interdimensional space until they see them travel to another time period. They want to go in and arrest Wilson, but Booths declines. He’ll take care of Guy Wilson himself. What Guy is doing is inexcusable, he uses his honest business as a cover to fraud the insurance and who knows what else. Samson soon follows the Grimsleys and Turner takes care of Julia and the Shadow. They wish themselves luck, they'll see each other on the other side.
Al Grimsley needs to change Julia’s contract to make sure that Martha is the one receiving money when Arthur dies at a later date. It doesn’t change anything in the contract himself, as Guy explained. You only need to prove your link with the insured person when you’re the one paying the insurance, but you can arrange the contract to give the money to whoever you want and that’s what they want to do, so this way, they’ll have the money, because they won’t think the Shadow is involved when Martha will cash in the check. Well, that’s what they think. Martha plays her part really well. She plays the perfect victim, she gathers the attention of everyone by speaking loudly and crying. She catches the attention of everyone by claiming that her father just died and that the agent can’t find the insurance she had on her father, calling her names and everything. During this time, Al takes a computer and finds Julia’s insurance on Arthur’s life, days after she bought it and days before Arthur’s death. Everything is going so well, but he can’t see Samson tranquilizing his wife on the other side of the room.
Julia and the Shadow landed in the 60’s. They play the part of a young couple who wants to have dinner in a fancy restaurant. The waitress takes their order and they start to discuss innocently. Simon Turner enters the restaurant and he gets a table just across the room from them. He asks for a black coffee and nothing more. Julia and Tom think their lure is working and they even stop thinking about everything, they just want to enjoy a date together. Julia looks in her purse and put on lipstick. Turner laughs as he knows what’s coming for them and they don’t seem to realise it at all.
Al realises that Martha isn’t screaming anymore and as he exits the cubicle after completing his part of the job, he’s grabbed by Samson who drags him in the bathroom, where he hits his head on the sink, who breaks on the impact. He says he better cooperate or else his wife will die. He opens a cabinet to reveal Martha unconscious on a toilet. Samson promises a monetary reward for Grimsley if he helps him on the case. Al accepts but he wants to check on his wife first. He crouches near her and discretely reaches for her purse, where he pulls out a handgun. He turns around quickly and kills Samson with a bullet right between the eyes. He wakes up his wife and they go back to the present before anyone else enters the bathroom. However, it doesn’t work. Al and Martha are in the interdimensional zone and they’ve never been there before. Al looks at his wristband and it’s broken, unresponsive, Martha’s too. It looks like they’re going to be stuck there forever.
D’Angelo Booths breaks in the Wilson Corp building, only to find Guy playing with a Rubik Cube in his office. Booths asks Wilson what he’s doing this time. Guy explains the plan the Booths, which is, long story short, insurance fraud. Booths says it’s clever and brilliant, he would have never taught about that. He then tells Wilson that his share will need to increase, because it’s harder than ever to keep the heat away from him. Wilson disagrees. They then come to terms that the only way for Booths to keep covering for Wilson is for Wilson to cut ties with Julia, the Shadow and the Grimsleys. Wilson smiles and agrees, but before they proceed, Booths wants to know why Julia hates her parents to much. Wilson and Booths travel to a precise instant, at a fundraiser, where one of Arthur’s colleague made a speech about how proud he was of his kids. Then, Julia, who was supposed to be at the bathroom, overheard his father and his mother say that Julia was a deception, that she was a nobody, a no life who always disappointed them. Booths says he understands why now, but now he needs to cut ties.
Simon Turner goes to Julia’s table to tell them their fate. He knows what happens to the people who do this kind of thing. He signals the waitress that he wishes to pay for the couple’s diner. She then goes to their table to tell them and she recognises him. He goes over and he starts by saying that he means no harm.
During this time, Guy and D’Angelo go back in time to the moment, when Guy gave the wristband to Julia, but this time he doesn’t. If you look closely, you see D’Angelo as part of the tourist group. They travel back in time to the moment when he gave one to Al, Martha and finally the Shadow. Guy is the one in control and they have one last stop. He travels back to the moment where he gave Simon Turner and Jules Samson one. They come back to the present and they shake hands they are both equal. They’ll separate the insurance check 50-50, no need to talk about it ever again. They'll see each other again.
Turner tells Julia and the Shadow to look for their wristbands and they can’t find it. They both start to realise that they’re stuck here forever. As they panic, Turner goes to the bathroom, only to find out that his wristband is gone too. The camera focuses on his look of despair as the credits start rolling.
No comments:
Post a Comment