And it's while observing murder victim Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton) that he starts to formulate the idea not to solve the mystery of her death and the ghastly bombing, but to prevent those crimes from ever having taken place, though the projects tech heads Denny (Adam Goldberg) and Gunnars (Elden Henson) have no idea what would happen if they tried to send matter - let alone a human being - through their very arbitrary and irreplaceable wormhole. Indeed, it's higher tech than that: this mysterious operation is actually an honest-to-God time window, and what Doug is watching isn't a record of past events, but the actual events unfolding in real time. Intuiting that the smart money is on trying to solve her murder and not the bombing, Doug is ready to get to good old nuts and bolts policing, when FBI Special Agent Paul Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) brings him along on a very special task force using high technology to stitch satellite imagery into a video loop that can be explored with unprecedented clarity and versatility, with the caveat that it can only display exactly what happened four days and six hours ago. It's he who finds the evidence proving this was a bomb it's he, too, who discovers that one ravaged corpse in particular was killed long before the explosion, with her body left behind to be wiped out in the devastation, removing evidence of whatever separate crime left her dead. Among the many government agents brought into to figure out what the hell happened - at this point, it's not even clear that it's a crime or accident - we meet Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) of the ATF, a New Orleans native and savant at reading crime scenes. Taking place in New Orleans, Louisiana, in February, 2006 (that is to say, just under half a year after Katrina devastated the city), Déjà Vu opens with a massive explosion on a ferry that kills more than five hundred innocents, whose deaths are depicted in appallingly tender detail for something that is meant to be horrifying, and it is easily the worst part of the whole picture. Scott's shtick was to make things look like a TV commercial for violent lifestyles, and he was good at it, but that is maybe the worst possible tone to bring to a film seeking to pay any kind of appropriate tribute to two great tragedies. Look at it this way: the year prior, Steven Spielberg brought overt, explicit 9/11 imagery into War of the Worlds, a Tom Cruise action movie about giant alien spaceships blowing things up, and he made it feel legitimate and meaningful, because wrenching the viewer's tenderest heartstrings is what he does - his shtick, you might even say. But it would be even more okay if Déjà Vu wasn't, in fact, a Tony Scott film, since whatever charms that filmmaker has, emotional sincerity is not one of his strengths as a filmmaker. And maybe that's even an okay thing, as such, for it is the privilege of art to help a culture work through its psychological issues. Though you could easily write a plot synopsis without bringing it up, there's no way to sum up the feel of Tony Scott's 2006 time-travel action picture Déjà Vu without noting that it is a pretty straightforward attempt to marry 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina in one all-encompassing delivery system for America's 2000s-era national PTSD. I certainly don't want that to be my final statement on the matter, and this review, though changing little of my thoughts, greatly changes my expression. A re-review: I have mellowed somewhat in my feelings toward Déjà Vu since it was new, but not enough that I'd feel the need to revise anything I said before, except that my original review, however fair or not fair at the time, has become unspeakably tasteless in light of the manner of Scott's death on 19 August, 2012.
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