Following on the surprise success of The Sixth Sense last year, here we have another people story built around an SF premise, with a crime subplot. This film is equally well done, and — without having seen the figures for the opening weekend yet — I suspect it can, given word of mouth, make an equally strong showing at the box office.

This is not, however, simply a ripoff of The Sixth Sense, though the two have much in common. The gimmick here is the old SF question: what if you could, somehow, change the past? What if you could “make it didn’t happen, Daddy!”? And, beyond that, what would the inevitable side effects be and how would you deal with them?

John Sullivan (James Caviezel) was a young boy, enthusiastic about baseball and interested in the police, back in October, 1969, when his father Frank (Dennis Quaid), a New York City fireman, was killed in a warehouse fire. For him and his mother, life went on; he was unable to make it as a baseball player and so became a New York City cop instead. Now, thirty years later, his life hasn’t worked out quite as he’d hoped; the love of his life (Melissa Errico) has just walked out on him after he tells her that it’s simply impossible for him to change. Then, on a night when an extraordinary auroral display is flickering across the sky — just as it did thirty years earlier at the time his father died — he finds his father’s old ham radio, heats it up (sheesh! were they still using vacuum tubes in 1969? or is that an anachronism?), and starts conversing with … his father, on the night before his death, thirty years earlier.

It turns out not to be difficult to convince the old man of what’s happening, and to warn him about the warehouse fire (it helps to have a phenomenal memory for sports events that happened thirty years ago). But once Frank has succeeded in coming out of the warehouse alive, things start to go awry. John, who suddenly has memories of two different pasts in his head — including a new one in which his father, a chain smoker, has died of lung cancer only ten years ago — realizes that an old, dead serial murder case involving the corpses of three nurses, has suddenly become hot, now involving as it does not only a total of ten nurses, but also his own mother (Elizabeth Mitchell), who has replaced his father in a thirty-year-old grave; Frank, it seems, has made some misstep, after the warehouse fire, that allowed the killer to continue his spree. Now John and Frank find themselves cooperating across thirty years to attempt to stop the killer and wipe away the new list of victims, especially Frank’s wife and John’s mother. And, as history changes again and again, John finds himself doing something that he never thought he could do — changing along with history. Maybe he could win the love of his life back again … if it were not the case that, in this new history, she has never met him …

As an SF book, this would have been pleasant, enjoyable and thought-provoking, but overall nothing spectacular. As a movie, IMHO it stands head and shoulders above (the relatively few) movies of a similar type. Catch it if you can. Like a few others I’ve reviewed (notably Ever After and The Sixth Sense) it truly deserves a paying audience.