Plot synopsis
Donnie is sleepwalking when he meets a ghost wearing a Halloween bunny costume, called Frank. He tells Donnie that the world will end in 28 days.
Meanwhile, a jet engine falls off a plane and passes through a portal in the sky. This causes it to travel 28 days back through time to the present. It crashes through the roof of Donnie’s house landing on the bed where he would have been sleeping.
This artefact causes a tangent universe to split away from the primary universe. Frank continues to haunt Donnie, urging him to save the world.
Donnie asks his science teacher for advice about wormholes, who gives him a book to read, called The Philosophy of Time Travel, which helps him to understand what is going on.
After several ugly incidents and a couple of deaths, Donnie is able to reverse time until he is again lying in his bed at the start of the film. This time he is laughing, either because he believes it was all a bad dream, or because he knows that he was meant to die this way.
The jet engine lands on him, and he dies a hero because if he had allowed the tangent universe to collapse, it would have taken the primary universe with it.
My comments
As Donnie is on medication, we might ask ourselves about his sanity, as the story is told from his perspective.
But on the soundtrack of the Director’s Cut version the film, director Richard Kelly says, “There is no insanity, this is a science fiction story for me.”
Kelly is asked about where the jet engine comes from after the tangent universe has been collapsed. He says, “Any time you do a time travel movie, you are going to have a paradox of some sort: something that can never fully make logical sense how it could occur.”
Summary of time travel
When Donnie returned to his past, he made a different choice. This created a different future for everyone and hence a different timeline. My interpretation was that he restored the original timeline.
Roberta Sparrow’s book explains that the tangent universe is highly unstable, so it will eventually collapse upon itself. This would cause a black hole to be formed within the primary universe capable of destroying all existence.
The tangent timeline is certainly an alternate timeline, but there is no evidence in the film to suggest that it could have existed in parallel to the primary. It is more likely that the primary timeline collapsed and the tangent timeline replaced it from that point on.
Donnie then travelled back to the point of divergence and restored the original timeline by taking himself out of the equation, which was probably his original destiny.
The model of time used in this film has an open past, open future with a diverging timeline.
Category of time travel
Science fiction: finding portals.
Model of time
Open past, open future with a diverging timeline.
The jet engine falls through a portal and arrives 28 days earlier, which creates a tangent universe:
Donnie travels back in time and restores the original timeline by allowing himself to die:
