It’s a hard thing to write a believable time travel story. Plenty of people have tried and failed, but not many have tried and succeeded. H.G. Wells, because he stuck to multiple visits to multiple time lines, might have hit the formula for success when he wrote the novel, The Time Machine. I love the movie by the same name that was released in, say, 2001 or 2002, but they took reduced the trip by several stops, and kept the forward momentum in play, which helped create a continuity that would otherwise be missing. That lack of continuity is the problem for most time travel movies. Jumping back and forth at various points along the same time line creates a number of problems, all of them witnessed in The Jacket: (1) past trips to the “future” made irrelevant because of later trips to the same place and time, (2) micro-changes to “future” characters causing confusion along all aspects of the story line(s), and (3) a “confusion event” through which not much is completely understood nor considered logical by the average moviegoer.
Parts of this movie I enjoy immensely. I like the depiction of care for injured veterans, because I think it’s largely accurate, and as of the current year, might be an improvement upon the treatment that many folks in the veteran's care system get. I find it mind boggling that there are Americans who claim to support our troops that also seem to throng around politicians who want to cut benefits to those same veterans. Agree with our current involvement outside of the US or not, and I don’t particularly agree with it, I won’t vote for a politician who has even hinted at supporting a "cut veterans’ benefits" at any point in their careers, Democrat or Republican (and rhetoric aside, both parties occasionally give voice to this). We tend to forget that active duty service members give up their lives and most of the rights the average American enjoys in order to serve our country, and our repayment plan for that voluntary sacrifice manages to be begrudging at best and downright miserly at worst.
I also like how it highlights the poor treatment of mental health care patients in this country and the burden and resulting burn-out syndrome in people who specialize and work in mental health facilities. The grungy, gritty atmosphere seems a perfect setting for the insanity that’s going on throughout the story line. There was also a certain chemistry between Keira Knightley and Aiden Brody that I liked. I’d like to see them work together in something else… a little more thought out.
I also like how it highlights the poor treatment of mental health care patients in this country and the burden and resulting burn-out syndrome in people who specialize and work in mental health facilities. The grungy, gritty atmosphere seems a perfect setting for the insanity that’s going on throughout the story line. There was also a certain chemistry between Keira Knightley and Aiden Brody that I liked. I’d like to see them work together in something else… a little more thought out.
The Jacket’s story is too convoluted and back-tracky for me to follow it easily. Even Memento had a reverse-logical flow that you could follow without too much work. Little things occasionally happen throughout the movie that led to me scrunching up my face and wondering what had happened to support the dialogue and action that was happening on the screen. It’s not that I couldn’t figure out where they were headed, it was how they got there that bothered me. Eventually, I just learned to stop asking that question. Despite my problems with story flow, I think the characters and the dialogue have an edgy realness to them. The details are well-crafted, it’s the big picture that could use some work. It’s a rarity in film, but there it is. It’s the “anti-Monet.”
There are worse ways to kill a couple of hours, and if you’re a fan of Brody or Knightley, this is worth the trip to the vid store or the time to place it on a DVD-by-mail queue. If this doesn’t sound like you, or you want less thought and more action in your thrillers, I’d skip this and move on to something in the Michael Bay milieu. Oh, if you’re lured in by the poster where “terror has a new name” or whatever the poorly written tag line is, there’s not much “terror” to be found. Vexation, maybe. Angst, surely. But not terror.
