Jacket

When The Jacket came out in 2005 I watched it at the theater. The theater was almost empty. Looking back at the box office take for this film, I don't think you could consider it a smashing success. Yet this movie is an excellent film that you really should rent if you did not see it when it was released. The Jacket takes a fresh look at Time Travel and the concept of destiny.

Can you change the future from the past? How about changing the past from the future? What if you are not physically in the future, but merely mentally transported? These are interesting questions that were first raised in 1915 when Jack London released his book with the same title in England. The book was called The Star Rover in the United States. Loosely based on these concepts, writers Tom Bleecker, Marc Rocco and Massy Tadjedin adapted many themes from the book to create an interesting Science Fiction film that doubles as a Psychological Thriller.

The writing in this film makes the difference for me. The film is sort of gray and moves at an interestingly slow pace. The dialogue is filled with subtlety. Although elements for this movie were borrowed heavily from London's book, it is nice to see a film that gives us something with a fresh perspective. Time travel has been done over and over again. HG Wells holds the prize for The Time Machine which was in a class by itself. Yet the concept of time travel absent your body gives this film an interesting twist. We have a character that escapes from a straight jacket locked in a morgue drawer to travel thirteen years into the future where he learns about his own demise. From his straight jacket drug induced mental state he must travel to the future to affect his pending doom in the past. An interesting and complex twist to the concept of time travel. The writers do a good job of selling the idea.

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