This one held up pretty well.  It’s a time travel story in which the survivors of a biological terrorist attack that killed five billion people attempt, not to change history, but to gather a sample of the virus at its origin, before it mutated, in hopes of developing a cure that would allow the remnant of humanity to return to the earth’s surface.  Much of the movie is about piecing together the mystery of what happened in the first place; the clues the sur­vivors are sifting through are fragmentary and misleading, and turn out to be largely artifacts not of the original timeline but of their own forays into the past.  This would be interesting enough on its own, but the ethos of the film is play almost nothing straight and instead to pack as much invention and weirdness into every frame as possible.  This could be the visual design, with the surviving humans’ underground warrens crammed with tech that is all a crude kludge à la Brazil; it could be a young Brad Pitt in cockeyed contact lenses, chewing the scenery like he took acting lessons from a tape of Robin Williams playing on fast forward; it could be odd touches like a mysterious voice who addresses the protagonist, whose name is James, as “Bob”.  Some of these elements make the movie better, some make it worse, but you can’t accuse them of making it more boring.

Then:

Wow!  What a convoluted mystery!  Jumping around in time and whatnot!  With an unreliable narrator, no less!  And what a hard­core villain!  So chilling!

Now:

It’s not really about anything other than its own convolutions, and hanging out with a bunch of nasty criminals is not a very pleasant way to spend two of the finite number of hours I have remaining to me.

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