Le visiteur du futur (2022)

In the near future, a nuclear power plant owned by the Chinese firm Axomako is on the verge of a catastrophic explosion. As two engineers, Galabroche and Defunax, try to save the plant, a man who says he comes from the future appears beside them by teleporting and tells them to press the right button to prevent the explosion. But as he explains himself, he is found by agents of the “Temporal Brigade.” The “Visitor” has to flee in a hurry. To preserve the course of time, the agents tell the two engineers not to do what the Visitor told them. After the agents leave, the engineers press the wrong button, causing the plant to explode. In the present, Gilbert Alibert, a member of parliament, announces at a press conference that he is signing a contract with Axomako to build a nuclear power plant. His daughter, Alice, confronts him, reminding him of the risks of entrusting the plant’s construction to Axomako and its outdated methods. Alice is then arrested along with her two environmentalist accomplices, Charlie and Lucien, who filmed the scene. At the police station, Gilbert comes to collect Alice. On the way home, Alice parts company with her father after an argument. Charlie and Lucien call her back and blackmail her: if she steals her father’s computer to try to create a political scandal, they won’t release the video of her interruption at the press conference. Alice reluctantly agrees, not wanting to be recognized. That night, Alice breaks into her father’s home to steal the computer, but comes face to face with the Visitor, who was trying to do the same thing. Alice knocks the Visitor unconscious with a bottle, while the Temporal Brigade arrives at the same moment, comprising Louise, Mattéo, and Victor. While trying to apprehend the Visitor, Victor accidentally shoots and wounds Gilbert. To carry out his mission, the Visitor grabs hold of Gilbert to take him with him into the future, but takes Alice along too. While Gilbert is kidnapped by the Visitor’s accomplice, Alice tries to escape but finds herself looking out over a ruined Paris. In shock, she faints. She wakes up in a room and meets Raph, a young adult who is a video game fan, who, like her, comes from the present and has been recruited by the Visitor for his time-travel missions. Alice and Gilbert then get to know the Visitor better, along with Professor Henri Castafolte, who explains that many disasters have occurred in the future and that the explosion at the Axomako plant created a radioactive cloud that not only caused zombies to appear but also kills half the world’s population each time it passes through. The Visitor takes Gilbert to face the radioactive cloud to show him the consequences of his actions, then tries to kill him, but Raph and Henri stop him, believing this would have too great an impact on the space-time continuum because of the risk of a paradox. Alice is convinced Gilbert can change his mind, and Henri raises the possibility of an “internal change”: if Gilbert decides of his own accord not to build the plant, the Temporal Brigade will be powerless to stop them. On the way back, they also learn that the only person who could ever change Gilbert’s mind was his late wife, who died giving birth to Alice. As Henri returns to the laboratory, the other four go to a bar. Seeing the strange people from the future, Gilbert has no desire to change his mind, given what the future has become. Gilbert and Alice manage to escape from the bar just as the Temporal Brigade finds the Visitor’s laboratory. Henri, still inside, sees them arrive and triggers the self-destruct sequence before fleeing. The Brigade then searches for clues to track down the Visitor. Outside, Gilbert and Alice come face to face with zombies. The Visitor and Raph catch up with them, and the children of the “Burrow,” a tribe of children led by Weasel, a close friend of the Visitor, save them. As the group of four sits down to eat, Henri Castafolte arrives following a time jump to warn them that the Brigade is about to arrive. Despite the children’s efforts to defend themselves, the Brigade throws an explosive grenade to get rid of them. Henri jumps on the grenade to protect the others, sacrificing himself in the process. It is revealed that Henri was actually a robot. In shock, the Visitor tries once again to kill Gilbert, who seems to accept his fate this time. But the Visitor hesitates again, and the Brigade manages to immobilize him, as well as Raph. Gilbert and Alice are taken away too. At the Temporal Brigade’s headquarters, Constance, the Brigade’s president, tries to persuade Alice that taking action to change the course of time will only have harmful consequences. To convince her, Constance brings Alice face to face with her older self: the future Alice explains to the present-day Alice that signing off on the construction will give her a better life and that, in any case, her father is doomed because he has consumed so much alcohol since her birth and her mother’s death. While the Visitor and Raph are put on trial for their time-related crimes, Gilbert and Alice are returned to their own era by the Brigade. The Visitor explains to Constance that he, Raph, and Henri have already managed to make several changes to the timeline without the Brigade noticing: only those who took part in a change to the timeline retain memories of the previous reality. Just then, a massive change to the timeline is detected: in the present, realizing how courageous his daughter is, Gilbert has finally decided not to sign the construction contract. Unwilling to risk breaking the space-time continuum, Constance orders Mattéo and Victor to force Gilbert to sign the contract, threatening to kill Alice if he refuses, and tells Louise to imprison the Visitor and Raph. Meanwhile, the radioactive cloud sweeps across Paris, killing everyone in its path. Henri is still functional despite the grenade blast, but is in pieces; the children of the Burrow try to repair him so they can make a time bracelet. At the Temporal Brigade’s headquarters, Louise, on an impulse, decides to help the Visitor and Raph after all, and manages to get them time bracelets. The Visitor tries to stop Mattéo, who is supposed to force Gilbert to sign, while Raph tries to overpower Victor, who is holding Alice hostage. After fights involving time jumps, Alice finally manages to knock Victor unconscious. Unfortunately, the Visitor fails to stop Mattéo, and Constance herself has come to witness the signing. As Gilbert is about to sign under duress, he begins to cry: his memories start to blur, and the world around him begins to change radically. Alice, having retrieved Victor’s time bracelet, puts her plan into action. Knowing that only her mother was able to change Gilbert’s mind about the environment, and having always thought he would have had a better life without her, Alice decides to cause an immense time paradox by preventing her own birth: in the delivery room, she points a gun at the doctor and orders him to save her mother. This causes a massive upheaval in time. The Visitor briefly catches up with Constance and shows her that he has won, while telling her she will remember nothing in the new reality that is about to be created. Gilbert vows not to forget Alice and wakes up at home in an alternate reality: the one he would have lived in if Alice had not been born. He finds his wife alive, along with the two daughters he would have had with her afterward. His wife tells him he signed a contract the day before for a renewable energy plant. In the future, following this immense change to the timeline, the Visitor, Henri, and Raph now realize that anything is possible, especially since Louise’s help during the change to the timeline—which means she has retained her memories of the previous reality—now gives them a double agent inside the Temporal Brigade. Alice then joins them at the table, still alive: in the Visitor’s words, she is now a “reality homeless person.” Since she carried out her act of erasing herself from reality, the fact that she did so nonetheless allows her to exist in the future. She joins the Visitor, Henri, and Raph’s team to try to keep making the future better. Above them, Paris is still in ruins, but this time it is covered in greenery: the radioactive cloud has finally disappeared.