Timebitch
We
start off in France in the year 1789 in the Royal palace ballroom. The court is fawning over Marie
Antoinette. We see Jo (played by Ellen
Page) enter the front gates and start to move slyly through the crowd. We keep cutting back and forth between the
costume ball scene in 1789 France and a control room in the present (the year
2038). The control room is a typical
control room like one at NASA or whatever with a bunch of little console desks
and a big wall with giant screens.
Sitting at the highest command post is Tobias Appleton (played Elijah
Wood). The control room people all wear
futuristic spandex outfits and Appleton wears a business suit.
The
control room team just keep verifying her location in time and geography and
bunch of other shit they’re monitoring like her vitals, commenting on her pulse
and whatever. We get a pair of longshots, one of the French Royal palace in 1789 where Jo
is and an identical one of where the control room is now in The Pentagon, which
is now in the year 2038, risen to 80 stories high with huge tanks and a moat of
acid around its perimeter to protect it from anarchist street gangs who are all
rioting in the streets below.
Jo keeps
whispering to herself about her progress saying stuff “The target is in my
sites.” while looking at Marie Antoinette and we see that the control room
can receive her audio and talk back to her broadcasting across time through
some speaker in her ear. Jo approaches
Marie-Antoinette and the crowd whispers about how bold she is to just casually
strut 
up to her throne.
Jo says some cocky shit like “Sorry to be doing this to you a tad
prematurely, but I promise to make it clean.” Marie-Antoinette looks confused as Jo whips
out a modern machete and in one deft move Jo decapitates her. The control room instruct her to get out of
there. Jo starts using all sorts of judo
tactics to fight the Royal guards and bolts out of the ballroom and as she’s
running down the hall rips off her big uncomfortable costume to reveal a more
flexible modern outfit underneath and does a flip out the window, lands, makes
a face like she’s really concentrating and then vanishes into thin air.
The control
room guys say the mission is complete, but don’t seem very happy about it. The control room guys immediately start
checking statistics from present day about the economy, environment, etc. They all report to their middle-manager named
Chan (played by B.D. Wong). Chan reports
to Appleton that his team couldn’t detect any major difference in the present
and quietly asks him what effect altering the French Revolution could’ve had on
life in modern day American that his research team couldn’t detect. Appleton just looks
apathetic and answers that they’ll never know and walks off.
Jo reappears in Harlem in 1985 where a group of breakdancers are having a dance off in the streets to hip
hop music. Jo walks up and joins the
group of spectators enjoying the show.
She looks past the breakdancers and focuses on
a little girl blowing bubbles and looking happy. One of the spectators turns around and
recognizes Jo and hugs her and asks where she’s been and she makes a coy reply
and watches the show until the sun goes down then she goes up to an apartment
where she looks at a dresser top with all sorts of trinkets she’s gathered from
different times and then lies down to take a nap. She wakes up, stretches and then disappears.
She reappears
in the kitchen of a Moscow apartment where she can see a man shaving in the
bathroom down the hall while his wife in the next room complains. Jo reports in to the control room dictating
her actions “The date is July 24th 1964, I am in
apartment number 217 on Prekrasnaya Street in Moscow,
USSR. This residence is occupied by the Minkov family and I am eating Mr. Grigori
Minkov’s sandwich. Out.” She opens a lunchbox by the door, takes the
sandwich out and eats it. The control
room thanks her for the report and we see them entering it.
The research team go to work seeing if stealing the
common man’s sandwich caused any kind of effect on the present but find
nothing. One member of the research team
(played by William Fichtner) gets really frustrated
saying that this is all pointless. Chan
tells him to shut up and then signals across the room to Appelton
that nothing has changed, but Appelton’s not really
paying attention, he’s just sitting in a morose pose with a disillusioned look
on his face.
They tell Jo to
proceed to 431 B.C. in Ancient Greece and start working on Operation:
Alcibiades. Jo lingers in the Moscow
apartment hiding in a closet just long enough to see Minkov
pick up his lunch box and kiss his wife as he leaves for work. Jo then disappears and reappears in Greece
431 B.C.
The guy on the
research team (Fichtner) gets into a big snit about
how pointless and wrong this all is, he shoves Chan out of the way grabs Chan’s
lazerpistol out of its holster and starts storming
across the room and jumps into the giant timewarp
booth and a bunch of bright flashes comes out of it.
Fichtner reappears
behind Jo in ancient Greece, only he’s suddenly become a very old man with a
long grey beard and he starts vomiting.
Jo notices his futuristic clothes and he starts hollering about how what
she’s doing is wrong and aims the lazerpistol at
her. He chases her through ancient
Athens firing the lazerpistol and alarming the
locals. Some big Greek guys with spears
try to subdue him but he just shoots them.
Jo reaches under her poncho and pulls out a lazeruzi
and does a John Woo style dive and rips Fichtner
apart with the lazerbeams. She gets up, grabs his lazerpistol
from his hand, throws it into the ocean, and takes off.
Jo screams at
the control centre asking what the fuck happened and they just tell her to
proceed with the capture of Alcibiades.
We cut back to the village and see that Fichtner
isn’t dead and uses his final breath to tell the villagers that she’s going
after Alcibiades. We see Jo riding
across the Greek country side on a dirtbike and
pulling up to a port where we see Alcibaedes planning
to betray Athens. Jo stalks him from
hill above and takes out her machete when somebody clubs her from behind. She starts grabbing her head in pain and
staggering around and losing control of her timewarping
powers. She starts jumping all over the
place as she staggers around trying to regain her sense of balance. The control room starts going all fritzy and all the computers get overloading and the
Pentagon experiences a blackout which a bunch of anarchist street gangs outside
use as an opportunity to briefly penetrate the building and kill a bunch of
g-men and start some fires before getting mowed down. Of course we get a couple of shots of the
street punks getting shot off their motorcycles as they try to jump over the
acid moat and they fall in and burn to death.
The ancient Greek guys just stand around wondering to
where she vanished. She finally stops
jumping around and passes out it a field.
A group of samurai find her and take her in. When she wakes up, she finds the lead samurai
Tana Ken (probably played by Ken Watanabe since he
seems to be the only Japanese actor willing to work in Hollywood) is studying
her futuristic weapons. He notices she’s
awake and calls for a servant to bring her some sushi. She eats it and then offers him a Snickers
bar, which he eats and likes. He asks
her what kind of warrior she is, she says she goes
through history disrupting things with the hope of making things better for the
future/present/2038. He asks her who her
master is and she replies the government of her country. Tana Ken expresses
disgust, saying that a warrior who serves a master is by definition a believer
in order, but that her master commands her to inflict anarchy and this is
dishonourable. They argue, about the
nature of her work and he convinces her that the way to a better tomorrow is a
strong today, not an altered yesterday. Tana Ken elaborates on how his village prepares for war and
raises strong children so that the children who’s parents die in battle are
ready to live without them and it has always brought them strength and
prosperity.
Tana Ken asks for a
demonstration of her weapons and the two spar, Jo
using her machete and Tana Ken using his samurai
sword. Tana
Ken wins and Jo becomes angry. She gets
up and fights him again with more fury and eventually her futuristic machete
chops through the blade of Tana Ken’s sword and they
start using martial arts to fight. Their
sparring goes on for a long time until they agree to stop. Tana Ken asks her
if she’ll join the samurai clan and Jo agrees.
We cut back to
the Pentagon where the director of the CIA (played by Robert Patrick) is
informed by an aide that the cause of the blackout originated from floor 32,
room 3219. Patrick asks what’s on that
floor, and is told by his aide that he didn’t have security level access to find
out. Patrick storms down to the control
room and bursts in demanding to see who’s in charge. Chan points to Appleton who says his name and
rank to which Patrick expresses alarm calling him just a punk kid, to which
Appleton retorts that he’s actually 67 years old, to which Patrick makes a
confused face and says that he wouldn’t believe it if it weren’t for the era of
Appleton’s suit. Appleton invites him
into his private office to speak.
Patrick seems
all furious asking Appleton what the hell goes on here. Appleton explains that back in the 1980s the
Pentagon started experimenting with time travel. That initially they could send things and
people into the past but couldn’t bring them back. Appleton explains that they then made a
breakthrough in 1998 when they could bring people back as well as transmit
radio communication across time. But the
results were disastrous. Appleton
explains that the human body tries to adapt to the timewarping,
frequently resulting in people physically resembling a totally different age
after each jump. Appleton explains that
he was such a case. Appleton recounts
when he was 39 years old in 1999 when he journeyed back to the distant past and
he experienced mild nausea but was fine, he did some valuable reconnaissance on
Lincoln’s assassination, but when he returned to present day his body had
reverted to its four-year-old form and that’s why today in 2038 he is 67 years
old but doesn’t even look 35.
Appleton
elaborates that his case was one of the better ones, that some of the
scientists returned in the physical state of somebody 100 years old and that
most of the people who timewarped, regardless of
whether their bodies changed age, suffered from severe mental problems
afterwards. Most of
the men who returned, if they returned from timewarping,
immediately displayed signs of severe depression, paranoia, and dementia. Most committed suicide.
Then back in
2005, President George W. Bush ordered that a being be engineered who could
withstand the timewarping and that when it was able
to work as an operative that it be sent back to different eras and locations
altering various events in history with the hopes of solving global problems of
the present such as natural resource shortages, economic problems, and
environmental instability. Thus the time
travel directorate create Jo. Appleton
himself took an infant orphan and implanted the time travel technology directly
into her head as well as trans-time radio communication. The CIA raised her
giving her a first class education in history, languages, and combat as well as
advanced genetic therapy.
Patrick looks
at Appleton in shock for a moment. Then
asks what kind of events he has altered.
Appleton answers that they sent her out to alter things of all scales,
that it may be something as big as redirecting the course of a war or as small
as giving somebody a free biscuit with hopes of the trickledown effect making
the present a better place. Patrick asks
what the results have been. Appleton
looks embarrassed and answers that they can’t really say anything for
sure. Appleton says that they have
considered the possibility that when the course of history is changed that
their minds in the present all instantly update to accept the new present and
therefore have no way to gauge if anything’s actually changed.
Patrick becomes
furious asking why they bother to continue with this project, to which Appleton
simply replies with disillusion that they continue because the funds were
earmarked and therefore it’s where they’re paid to be. Patrick says he wants this whole sick circus
shut 
down immediately and that he wants Jo brought back and
executed. Appleton informs him that
during the blackout they lost contact with her and all they have is her last
known timewarp location in feudal Japan.
Patrick calls
in two assassins played by Scott Adkins and Lucas Black and orders Chan to
accompany them in hunting down Jo and terminating her. Appleton tells Chan he’s going to stop this
whole thing before it starts. Chan begs
him not to try it saying “You know what happens when people try to confront
themselves in different points in time!” but Appleton replies that it’s a
risk he’s got to take and jumps into the timewarp
booth. Patrick asks where the hell
Appleton went, and one of the control room team tells him it was to 2005. Patrick says “Awww
fuck him, you three, go to Japan, kill the girl.”
One by one,
Chan and the two assassins climb into the giant timewarp
booth and appear in feudal Japan. Chan
instantly becomes nauseous, delirious then suicidal from the timewarping and throws himself off a cliff. Lucas Black has become an infant and only
Scott Adkins is left unscathed by the timewarping
side effects, he reports to Patrick on the condition of the team and sets out
looking for Jo.
We cut back to
the samurai group and clearly several months have passed. We see a moment of Jo training with the
samurais. After the training the rest of
the group disperses to be with their families and Jo and Tana
Ken share a romantic moment showing us that these two have fallen in love. They go back to his tent and roll around
making love. Jo starts crying afterwards
saying she doesn’t think she’ll be able to give Tana
Ken children because she fears all the experiments and timewarping
have left her barren. Tana Ken says that she has no reason to believe that and
that he knows she’d make a good mother.
Then more stuff about children being our future blah blah
blah. Then an
alarm horn goes off and the samurai all scramble to defend their settlement from
raiders. We get a long hack ‘n slash
battleground sequence where we see Jo and Tana Ken
and the others working their way through the raiders. Ultimately they fight off the raiders but Tana Ken gets killed in the strife.
We get a long
sequence of the cremation of the fallen samurai and we see Jo admiring the sons
of the fallen samurai inheriting their fathers’ swords and swearing to uphold
their honour. Long after everybody else
has gone back to the village, Jo is at Tana Ken’s
grave still mourning.
We cut back to
2005, where Appleton is trying to confront his younger self. We know that his body was de-aged back in
1999, so his 2005 self looks like an eight year old boy wearing a suit and tie
and driving a sedan and his 2038 self only looks thirtysomething. The 2005 Appleton is driving his sedan up to
the Pentagon, with infant Jo in a baby seat.
2005 Appleton is babbling on his mobile phone about having found an
ideal specimen and that they should implant the technology that day. 2005 Appleton pulls up out front and takes
out Jo and is walking towards the Pentagon when 2038 Appleton jumps in his way
and the two have a heated argument about how this whole experiment will prove
fruitless when both their eyes start to bleed and their skin starts getting
pale. 2005 Appleton asks what the hell
is going on and 2038 Appleton explains that most humans can’t withstand being
confronted by themselves, only Jo was engineered not to have these conflicts. 2005 Appleton begs 2038 Appleton to go away
before they both die, but 2038 Applton refuses,
saying not until 2005 Appleton agrees to abandon the project.
We cut back to Jo in feudal Japan at the burial
grounds when Scott Adkins comes over the hill.
He starts firing an assault rifle at her but she deflects the bullets
with her machete until he’s empty and the two have a machete fight. Until Jo beheads Adkins. Jo looks around then vanishes.
She reappears
in 2038 in the control room at the Pentagon and throws the head of Scott Adkins
right at Patrick’s feet and says “I’m not your timebitch
anymore.”.
She and Patrick have a John Woo style acrobatic shootout that results in
huge destruction and the death of all the other remaining control room workers
who all get caught in the crossfire until only Patrick and Jo are left both
taking cover behind consoles on opposite sides of the room. Patrick lets out a string of panic fire while
making a dash for the timewarp booth. Jo does a sideways dive with a grenade
launcher that blows him into the timewarp booth and
we see his dead flaming body land in an American prohibition era speakeasy.
Jo notices all
the fires around the control room seeing it start to explode and Jo says to
herself “Time to stop this thing before it started.” We cut to a shot outside the Pentagon as
the windows of the control room all explode to the cheers of the street gang
anarchists below. We then dissolve back
to 2005 showing the Pentagon back at its original height and with no crazy
anarchists below and no acid filled moat.
Jo walks
through the Pentagon parking lot and finds the two Appletons
lying dead on the ground looking all dehydrated and with all sorts of blood
leaking from their eyes, ears, and mouths.
2005 Appleton’s corpse has Jo’s infant self in his arms. Jo picks up her infant self and the two
vanish back in time to Harlem in 1985 and her friend from the street earlier
sees her with the baby and says “So that’s where you’ve been. Congratulations, new mama!” Jo thanks him
and heads up to her apartment and puts her infant self in a crib and says “I’m
going to raise you to be a good person, the future is
going to need one.”
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