Premonition is another time-travel film. Well, not time-travel in the sense that you’re transported to 1325 and must survive and get back to present time. Rather it’s a case of time warping in weird ways. Remember “Groundhog day” ? Bill Murray waking up to find that every day is Groundhog Day – a sort of time loop from which there is no escape. Going into Premonition I had no idea that this was a “time-travel” theme. And even though am a big-time sucker for above said theme, I have to say that Premonition is not all that great.

The film hinges around Linda (Sandra Bullock) who wakes up one Wednesday and is going around doing her house-wifely chores (drop kids off to school, clean house, do laundry) when she receives news from a policeman about her husband’s death in a car accident. Distraught Linda deals with the day, telling her kids about the tragedy etc, and sleeps exhausted. She wakes up the next morning to find that instead of it being a Thursday, it’s the previous Monday – time has somehow rolled back. And only for her. Which means that her husband is still alive, and rather surprised to see her sudden outpouring of affection. Every subsequent day for Linda is in jumbled and non-chronological order. The only thing she knows for sure is that her husband will die on Wednesday, and the big question is : Can she prevent it ? Can destiny be changed ?

OK, so the story looks like it would make an edge-of-your-seat thriller. And the acting is good and the direction fairly competent. The film though, suffers from inconsistencies. Time travel has certain “fictional” rules. And you can either respect them (like in “Twelve Monkeys”) or let them drift off into the wind (like in “The Lake House”). You have to pick a side. Premonition chooses to straddle the fence, making it a time travel film with holes. Not so good for people like me. In “the Lake House” I didn’t care because the film hinged around romance, not time-travel, and the film was no nice and sappy that I didn’t give a hoot if someone broke a few rules. Premonition, on the other hand, hinges on time-travel so the film needs to do THAT well to succeed.

The film left me dissatisfied with the tame ending, and the whole believe-in-a-power-greater-than-yourself philosophy. I get that often enough in real life ; must I see it (and pay for it) on screen too ?

I mean the film’s not bad, really, but it’d be so much better on DVD. Instead I’d recommend these films :

– The Lakehouse
– Twelve Monkeys
– Sliding Doors

and these books :

– The Time Traveler’s wife
– Time-line
– Doomsday Book
– Kindred