Note: the following discussion includes heavy spoilers for the Netflix film In the Shadow of the Moon.
We open with an empty shattered office building with no sign of life and as the camera tracks along we see outside another building that has been almost completely destroyed and small fires still blaze at its base. A flag flutters down and it is similar to the Stars and Stripes but we know this flag is slightly, but crucially different. There are fewer Stars. Something is very wrong; the screen goes black and then there appears the time and place: Philadelphia 2024.
Next on the black screen, we are given another date: 1988. But we are now in a past Philadelphia. We witness various people going about their lives. A pianist plays to an audience, a bus driver drives and a cook, well, cooks. We zoom in on the female bus driver and we are shown the book she is reading; it is a biography of Thomas Jefferson. A person in a hoodie is seen in the alleyway and they begin to run. Suddenly, blood starts to pour from the orifices of each person we have seen and they slump down and are dead.
At the same time a cop, Thomas Lockhart, with a pregnant wife, prepares for his ‘graveyard shift’. They are obviously very much in love. He meets his partner outside and they drive to the scene of the crash when the bus driver lost control of the bus as she died. He notices puncture wounds on the back of her neck. Even though he is only a cop he follows up on his discovery to find that the others had the same puncture wounds, three to the neck. A call comes in, that a woman has just been attacked and has the same marks on her. But she is still alive.
On arrival they question her. But within moments she has bled to death like the others. However, they now have a description of the perpetrator which is circulated. On their patrol of the area they spot the suspect and give chase. This leads them to a subway station where our hero confronts the suspect. She is a female. She tells him information that only he can know. They fight and as he shoots her, with the device she dropped during the chase, she falls into an oncoming train and is splattered everywhere.
However, the suspect returns from the dead, nine years later in 1997, to continue to kill, seemingly random people. Our hero is now a detective and once again goes after her with little success. At the station he is confronted by a young physicist who suggests that the moon is responsible for creating a bridge between two different worlds. He is ignored. In the original autopsy in 1988 a bullet is found in the girl’s arm. But no gun has been fired.
She returns again in 2006, but he is no longer a detective and his life has fallen apart because of his obsession with finding her. His daughter is living with her uncle. She mentions her boyfriend to him but he doesn’t even remember that he has met ‘George’ twice. He is not in a good place physically nor mentally. However, he is closer to the truth then ever before. He has discovered that the killings are not random but involve the deliberate murder of people involved in extreme political views and who are planning an uprising in America.
He again comes across the girl, who has killed again and is still in their home. They have been sent propaganda by the erstwhile leader of the future insurgency. They are on his mailing list which Lockhart now has. Our hero shoots her in the arm. There is a chase where she escapes via a drainage tunnel that leads to a machine that is obviously from the future. He watches helplessly, as it fills with liquid and she and the machine disappear before his very eyes and ours.
It is now 2015 and we see our hero on the beach where he last saw the girl disappear from in the machine. He is studying the moon with a telescope and obviously waiting for her to return, as the nine-year cycle has now elapsed. However, he is being watched very closely by someone. It is the crazy young physicist. We have seen him working on the toxin that the girl has implanted into people via the three puncture wounds. They are therefore linked.
Our hero receives a phone call from his daughter who wants him to be at the birth of her baby. He is going to be a grandfather. As he finishes the call the not so young anymore, crazy physicist, turns up and kidnaps him. When our hero wakes, tied-up in a van, being driven by the physicist he gets an explanation as to what has been going on, although most of us should already have figured it out. It involves going back in time to prevent a future civil war that takes place in 2024, hence, the opening shot of the, I assume, huge bomb going off in Philadelphia.
The now ageing physicist begins with a question for Lockhart: to stop the first American Civil War who would you decide to kill? But would killing just one or two major players in the decision to start the war be enough? As of course there were thousands of people prepared to die for the cause whether from the North or South. So to stop another Civil War is the reason for the now, not so random murders, occurring over 27 years. They are not random, these people are significant, but we are not told how or why. We have serious reservations and doubts about the enterprise, just like Lockhart. Can the end ever justify the means? As the physicist tries to justify the means, our hero manages to untie himself and escape from the van as it crashes.
As she arrives back to 2015 our battered and bruised hero is waiting for her. He intends to kill her. He has not been persuaded by the arguments or excuses put forward by the physicist who is responsible for creating the device that the assassin will use to murder these ‘patriots’. But as he aims the gun at her she pulls off her hood and we see her properly for the first time. She tells him that he will not shoot her at which he laughs. He has spent 27 years to get to this moment. He has been going forward and she has been going backwards from today. She knows what is coming. As she starts her speech on the beach it slowly begins to dawn on him and us who she really is. She is his — about to be born — granddaughter?! Wow. We knew they were connected, but that they are related, is a brilliant twist and does give this film an added dimension which I for one was not expecting. It is a powerful and highly emotive scene.
She explains the purpose of her mission. In a riff on one of the Terminator themes she tells her grandfather that he is going to make her into what she is now; a highly capable assassin. Much like how Sarah Connor makes her son capable of leading the resistance against the machines and the cyborgs. Yet, Lockhart will eventually kill his own granddaughter in another 27 years time. But we are in the now and we witness our hero at the hospital holding his newly-born granddaughter and everything returning to the way it was and the building in Philadelphia that we saw at the start of this film is undamaged. No bombing attack will now take place as those responsible are being terminated, remotely, from the future. Simple really. And for me far too easy, both practically and morally. Not even a future trial?
The variation on the time travel trope of returning to kill Hitler was most intriguing and in this iteration very original in its internal timeline configuration. This idea has always been controversial and has involved much moral debate. It has also been famously lampooned by the mischievous and irreverent ‘Deadpool’. So which version of Hitler would you terminate? Hitler as a baby? Hitler as a medic in World War One? Or perhaps, the easiest morally, Hitler as Fuhrer?
But of course, the killing of Hitler trope, raises one of the most fundamental moral problems regarding such an enterprise and is a serious moral and ethical issue for In The Shadow Of The Moon. For what crime are you condemning the individual to death for? Killing Hitler, as a baby, is for a future crime. Killing every individual in the film is for a future crime. One could only kill Hitler with some justification when he has committed a heinous act. Of course ‘‘heinous’’ will mean different things to different people and political persuasion. Perhaps the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923 when Hitler was charged with treason could suffice. Hitler was extremely lucky to escape the firing squad. The world was not so fortunate. Yet, until the bomb goes off in Philadelphia in 2024 these individuals have committed no crime. They are all innocent.
This is I believe tacitly acknowledged through the continuing attempt by our hero to track down and arrest the murderer. He spends 27 years of his life which almost destroys him and his relationship with his daughter trying to apprehend the suspect. However there is a massive U-turn at the end when he realises who the suspect really is. Of course this is a highly human response. How could he kill his own granddaughter? But why not? She is traveling through time assassinating individuals who will, we are told, take part in a violent overthrow of the United States of America because of their political position and views. The evidence?
We have come a long way since the now iconic film, Terminator (1984) showed us a man sent back in time to save the leader of the future resistance and sacrifice himself in the process, and, not forgetting of course, actually creating that resistance leader as well. Feels like a lifetime ago. It is not a good sign that a human this time, in a narrative created in 2019, is returning to kill other humans, who might be involved in a second American Civil War. Killing not to save the human race this time, but killing over the definition of, and who is most worthy, to be described as, a true American patriot.
Politics in America as it is in Britain is dangerously divided. Pre-emptive murder is not the solution. It may even cause the very war it was intended to eradicate. There are, for me, just some things a man or woman (in a hoodie), from the future, must not do, to save a nation.
Marc Barham
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