My wife dragged me to see Premonition, despite my protests about the RottenTomatoes rating. I was very pleasantly surprised to see a quite enjoyable movie.
I don’t understand the complaints about confusion. If you’ve ever seen a time travel movie, or a Quentin Taratino movie, you should be able to handle this one. The movie makes it clear what’s happening. It doesn’t explain how or why, but that’s not necessary. Why did the kid in The Sixth Sense see dead people? Accept it and watch the movie.
The movie starts on Thursday morning when Linda (Sandra Bullock) learns that her husband died in a car accident the day before. (It does seem unlikely that it would take that long, but we eventually learn that the body was very badly burnt.) With the help of her mother and her friend, she spends the day dealing with grief and shock, and telling her two children what happened.
When she wakes up the next morning, it’s actually Monday before the accident. How can she convince her husband not to go on the sales trip? Is she in a delusion caused by denial?
The next day she wakes up an it’s Saturday. She experiences some confusion from skipping Friday, and it colours her actions when she gets to Friday. She continues to bounce between days before and days after the accident, until she finally arrives at Wednesday, the day of the accident.
The only attempt at explaining why ends up with "because it happens sometimes", but I don’t have a problem with that. Accept it an watch the movie.
The ending of the movie is not one of the more obvious endings, but it’s consistent with the implicit set of rules for time travel established in the movie. It’s no quite the wonderful a-ha finish of The Sixth Sense, but it does feel like it fits. It’s not a deus ex machina, and it’s not some pathetically stupid "plot twist" that is tacked on for surpise and shock value. It feels right.
There’s actually a huge continuity problem with the ending, but it didn’t hit me until after I left the theatre. Using the Entertainment Weekly scale I’d give it a B-. Its an above average movie that successfully tries something different.
I certainly feel that I got my money’s worth.
