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Now on Netflix: "The Shadow Of The Moon" evolves from a gritty thriller to a sci-fi thriller with a time travel enigma. We explain how the present and the future are related to the film.
Attention, Spoiler to "In The Shadow Of The Moon"!
Locke (Boyd Holbrook) and Rya (Cleopatra Coleman) meet again every nine years over 36 years in "In The Shadow Of The Moon." Rya as an assassin who travels back in time and wants to prevent a future civil war through her murders, Locke as an investigator who kills the time traveler at their first encounter, then she meets nine years later and finds out more about them - until he finally finds them in the future warns of her death by his own hand. But how exactly should that work?
"In the end, their story is going backward and its history is going forward," says director Jim Mickle to the industry's Collider. "Her first encounter is the first time for him, but for her the fourth time that they meet." So Rya knows what's going to happen because her murderer (and, as it turns out, grandfather) does it to her in the future ( her past) already told.
But the crucial question in any journey through time from "Looper" to "12 Monkeys" may be: How do time travel change the present and the future? Are the events predetermined? Are there new branches in the timeline, or will anything in an ominous-philosophical way come as it should?
THAT'S WHY RYA MUST DIE IN "THE SHADOW OF THE MOON"
The character Rya explains it himself: "Time travel is a one-way street." While it is apparently possible for Rya to avert a civil war in the future through her intervention, she can not prevent her own death at the same time.
Decisive is, therefore, the objective (or historical) course of time: The time traveler can change events in the time traveled by acting in the present. But events in the future (Locke's warning) can not affect the present (Ryas death) since this presence has always passed at the time of the warning. Rya's life is mandatory - she will die by Locke's hand in 1988, no matter what the future looks like in 2024.