Created with an exceptionally unconventional style, La Jetée is less a story of time travel than an avant-garde meditation on the fragility of human memory. After World War III, the Earth becomes uninhabitable; people retreat underground, and the habits of former life vanish into history. The underground laboratories seem suspended between life and death, between the past and the future. In this uncertain world, scientists develop a new method: experiments in time travel. These mechanical trials conducted on prisoners replace the warmth of human gestures such as walking in a park, laughing together, or looking passionately at one another. Yet these journeys are not free; every step forward and every return is predetermined. Hence, La Jetée depicts time as a completely closed loop, and the end of this dark cycle reveals an image imprinted in the hero’s childhood memory, which is in fact his own death.