Most movies that have time travel as a key element work from the foundation that time is plastic-think Marty McFly or Bill and Ted-that anything in any time line can be changed at will without there being any serious side effects. Although Prof Brown was often worried about there being an end of the universe event, that never seemed to happen. My favorite of the plastic universe movies is Groundhog Day, in which a heartless and self centered Bill Murray turns into a benevolent hero to virtually everyone in Punxsutawney.
The other kind of time travel is the concrete determinism type of universe where everything stays the same no matter what you do. The Time Machine movie of a couple of years ago had this kind of universe and so does the current season of LOST in which you can save someone’s life, but they will still end up dead anyway. This is not a very popular form of time travel in the movies, in fact, I can’t think of a single movie that takes it as far as Premonition does.
This movie looks like it will be the standard bad things happen, but its ok because she is going to fix it movie. But Sandra must have never seen Bill and Ted or Back to the Future as she witnesses horrible things happen and once she is in the past and can change them, does nothing of the kind. Having said that, it is not giving away anything to say that the end of the trailer is the end of the movie-she watches her husband go up in smoke.
So this is not a feel good time travel movie, it is a feel bad time travel movie, feel powerless, feel useless. There was an episode of Quamtum Leap about the Kennedy Assination where our time traveling hero is not there to save the President, but the First Lady. So there is a tiny bit of that feeling at the very end of this dreadful bit of business, but not nearly enough.
This movie lets you feel like a powerless cog in an uncaring universe-and quite frankly, I get enough of that without having to go to the movies for it.
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