Wow, it seems I interpreted the movie completely different from everyone else here.
WARNING OPEN SPOILERS IN THIS POST (most of it has been already stated though.
Remember, the scientist has ALREADY released the plague. He did it when the baggage inspector opened his vial. He is now going to carry it to several other loacations to ensure it breaks out everywhere at once, making it next to impossible to stop.
Two important points. 1) They said one of the things they wanted was an original unmutated version of the virus as that would it make it much easier to come up with a cure and 2) the woman sent back from the future was one of the ruling elite in that time.
My take on it is that she is in “insurance”, ensuring that he releases the plague as is suposed to happen. That way the the future she comes from occurs, they have an unmutated version of the virus they can use to get humanity back on the surface of a world in which she is one of the leaders. The people sending Willis back have no vested interest in preventing the plague, only in controlling it in the future.
Dammit! That is what happens when you open a thread and only come back and read it a while later, then post without reloading the page to see the more recent posts. Dumb.
It has been a little while since I have seen it, but as I recall he was becoming a problem. He didn’t want to go back to the future and was being rebellious. I think they may have given him the gun specifically to get him killed, but I think the whole being seen by his childhood self thing was a coincidence.
Some reviews suggested that the loop where he sees himself being killed and dreams about it was some sort of mechanism whereby others can be sent to the past which seemed odd, I like the explanation above.
And I thought of the problem of changing the past just after I posted by spoiler box review. If someone picked up a sample of the virus and took it to the future, it would avoid nasty temporal paradoxes, as opposed to killing the nutter with the virus.
Would have to agree, and also suggest two other Hitchcock films besides “The Birds” which is on the list:
The Man Who Knew Too Much : the end is just surreal, as Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart return to their house party full of by-now-tired guests, gaily shouting “Here we are!” as if they hadn’t just frantically saved the city & a loved one from a terrible fate completely unbeknownst to the party-goers and most everyone else as well. I remember laughing my ass off at that fantastical ending the first time I ever saw this movie.
Rear Window : LOVE this movie, love the ending! Jimmy again, biting off more than he can chew when he lures the murderer away from Grace Kelly, ends up with the bad guy in his apartment, and attempts to blind him with flash bulbs (somewhat in vain), as he has no other defense, being wheelchair-bound due to an accident. The events following this climactic scene are equally fraught with terror and hilarity, something HItchcock excelled at.
I think all three of the endings of these movies beat “The Birds” for memorability, but just a personal opinion of course.
I also want to mention that while I for the most part love North by Northwest, I’ve always thought that the ending was too abrupt. But to each their own…
AHA!!! The look on Walther Matthau’s face is absolutley priceless. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. If not, well, there are worse things you could do with 90 minutes than find out.
