Of course, all mankind is at stake, so why is Milly harrassing some lowlife for help? Is there no time for her to go through standard channels, the police, the military, the government? Actually, no: She arrives with barely days to spare before the onset of hostilities. But beyond that, in director Takashi Yamazaki's world, the Chinese Triads and the yakuza are already four steps ahead of everyone else, right down to having operatives in the top secret R&D facility where the first Daggra crash wreckage (and pilot) is brought. Hence it comes as little surprise when Mizaguchi himself muscles his way in to act as Earth's badwill ambassador, kidnapping our visitor, and stealing his ride for its weapons tech. To time travel aficianados, this is the moment one realizes that Milly's brave journey to the past has only allowed the inciter of the war to survive long enough to get the ball rolling– although the movie itself doesn't focus sharply on this particular nicety of the genre.

Thus Milly's choice of hero not only works in movieshow terms, it even makes some temporal sense, since who would be best to stop the instigator of an interstellar war, than his most ardent sworn enemy? ...Okay, so it mostly works in movieshow melodrama terms. The actual steps which Returner takes to reach its hero's victory will be as clear as precognition to any action flick junkie. But this entertainment leaves us free to pay greater attention to Milly's troubles. We wait for the slipknot of paradox sneaking up on her while explosions, speeding vehicles, and the expected Japanese consumerist scenes of eating and shopping, mark the little hours she has left.

Now for our inevitable spoilers. The ultimate fate of Milly is tied in with her agony-wracked post-apoc childhood, which she both wants to rewrite and revisit. She muses idly over "returning" but of course has no explanation as to how this is to happen, save silence. Once the bad guys are pasted, and the ETs go home smiling, Milly starts to fade away in the morning light. In a scene more poignant than its counterparts in BTTF or Farscape, the issue of Milly's "return" takes on a Shinto finality, as she and Miyamoto refuse to directly acknowledge how her vanishing spells her end; what "returning home" really means, when you torpedo your own timeline.

But then Miyamoto is rescued in a well-orchestrated and -foreshadowed denouement by a Milly who is using a plainly more sophisticated time machine than the one she started with. Us time buffs are left, as usual, with more questions than answers at the end, but that seems to be the emotion Yamazaki has been aiming for all along. He borrowed thunder from a dozen other pictures, and braved the recognition each reworking would incite, and it all seems to lead to this simple ending, about the act of reworking itself. It's like he wanted everyone to relive that feeling of frustrated wonder one felt the first time one heard about time travel, or saw a time travel story on the silver screen, and this is the closest he could come to rewritng our own familiarity. And he comes remarkably close; close enough to watch it melt back into the morning of one's mind.