Thursday, August 28, 2014

The Jacket

Oooh, more wacky time travel. Having just read The Time Travelers Wife, this was more than I expected. Adrien Brody is a recently returned from the gulf war (1991 version) veteran who gets mixed up in a bad situation and sent to an institution for the criminally insane. While there, his treatment leads to episodes of time travel, where he goes forward a few years to enlist the help of Kiera Knightly in finding out about what actually happened to him back in "the present". This is quite well done, making us think about time loops, cause and effect, and how to jump out of loops. I also appreciated the portrayed true confusion and altered mental state that returning from combat results in. Perhaps this is because I am in the middle of reading Naked in Baghdad by Anne Garrels and recently read Baghdad Diaries by Nuha al-Radi. Both of these books give insight into the gulf wars from the Iraqi point of view and raise non-combat mental trauma of citizens in war. So I have war trauma on the brain and this film gave a particularly interesting (to me) perspective.

4 stars (out of 5)

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