According to this mind-blowing, intellectual exercise from renowned space-time continuum experts Tony ("Top Gun") Scott and Jerry ("Let's blow something up") Bruckheimer, the next time you experience that feeling of eerie familiarity commonly known as déjà vu, it's because you've been shot back through time in what resembles a large, metal gerbil ball.

What I'm amazed about is how similarly ATF agent Doug Carlin's (Denzel Washington) journey through time is to Kyle Reese's (Michael Biehn) trip through time in "The Terminator." The main difference is that Reese drops out of the air completely naked, but Carlin ends up on a gurney almost fully clothed. I guess that's progress. Actually, it just goes to show you what an actor with clout can accomplish despite the fact that Denny (Adam Goldberg) tells Carlin that it's important that he have as little mass as possible. Would you really take the chance that you'd end up a lump of sizzled, mutated flesh just because you didn't want your private parts out for all to see? Carlin ends up in a hospital. It's not like those people haven't seen a penis before. But Denzel must have his pride. Since Biehn had about as much pull on the set as the caterer, he got to be butt naked.

This is one of the first films to be shot entirely in and around New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I wondered why they didn't go back in time to warn everyone about the impending hurricane, but apparently the filmmakers addressed this by limiting the time travel to only four days in the past. It's kind of like buying a 30-gig iPod that only plays ten songs. The FBI's time machine sucks.

Carlin is apparently a New Orleans native and after a ferry blows up killing hundreds of people, he begins investigating, which leads him to the murder of Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton) and the FBI agents with the time travel machine. Agent Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) invites Carlin to help the FBI out and shows him the time travel machine, which really isn't a time travel machine until Carlin gets in it. It's a machine that folds space, which allows the agents to look back in time as if they had cameras stationed everywhere. Amazingly, the agents try to hide the nature of the machine, but Carlin quickly figures out that it's not just an elaborate computer system of digitized satellite imagery.

And to think I thought the Einstein-Rosen bridge was how one got from Manhattan to Brooklyn.