Forget about the eye puns for a moment

[prog]

I just saw Minority Report.

This made me very happy. A PKD-based movie that not only didn't stink, but was very good. As I heard someone else note, the film can be considered a meta-PKD movie, containing themes found in other stories he wrote, particularly with personalized, intrusive advertisements. (OTOH, there were no friendly but misguided aliens and at no point did Cruise's character question his own sanity while reality fell apart around him, so it fell short of being a full Phil Dick tour de force.)

I really liked those ads, too. Yes, I know that they were, in fact, genuine product placement, but they also served as a very real glimpse of the future; maybe the most real one the film had to offer since it chose not to try predicting changes in fashion 50 years from now (or changes in corporate logos, for that matter), and I can't really comment on the far-out mag-car highways. (I will comment that my friend and I both sang the Super Mario Bros. song during one of the car-related scenes, though. You'll know which one.)

Oddly, the most unbelievable thing in the movie may have been the super-cinematic fight scenes, which just looked out of place. There's at least a couple of scenes where Cruise punches someone, or is punched, in the face several times, and to no apparent ill effect to either combatant; it's just something to do until the fight is advanced through environmental effects (ladder falls on you, I leap onto a robot arm passing by, etc).

That said, there's a wonderful fight early on where Cruise's character faces off against a group of his fellow police officers, who are reluctantly trying to capture him. He cares about all of them, but also wants to get away, and so he must shake them off as gently as he can (modulo all the aforementioned face-punching). At one point, when one cop misses his leap and is left clinging to a ledge, Cruise stops to verbally confirm that his friend and pursuer has a good grip on it, before resuming his flight. That's awesome.

The story's endgame was very interesting. You could see (in a way the main characters couldn't (well, except maybe the precogs, ho ho)) how two threads were going to converge into the climax, and yea verily they did, but then the resolution spun off in a completely unforeseen direction (well, except maybe [etc.]), and the story kept going for another very welcome half hour or so. Yeah, that won.

***[SUPER SPOILERS BENEATH THIS LINE, WHOOP WHOOP]***

Things that were unclear to me:

• Were all the "echoes" that the precogs saw after the fact the result of tampering, or were some genuine psychic artifacts? I'd lean toward the latter, since there didn't seem to any foreshadowing around the "echoes" we see after the first introductory/expository arrest.



• When the spider scanned Anderton, did it destroy his exposed eye, leaving him monocular? The movie makes a big point of showing us that only six hours had passed (out of the 12 he needed to heal his new eyes) and the process clearly hurts him, but then he has no troubles thereafter. Not that mono-vision would have necessarily prevented the rest of the movie from taking place as it did, but I was expecting the story to use it as a plot complication.



• I totally missed the point where Anderton realizes the relationship between Agatha and Lively. Was it during Agatha's telling of Shawn's non-future? Shrug.



• And, it's a little creepy that Agatha chooses to keep a film clip of her mother bleeding to death as a loving memento... but now that I think of it, I can believe it. And still find it creepy.

Comments

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

Just saw this movie tonight. Yes it was good; yes I enjoyed it, but... well, I'm not alert enough to make a review in a comment. But...and I don't know how Dick handled this in the story (it's been a long time since I've read it, but I realized fairly shortly into the movie that I had in fact read it), it really, really bugged me that Anderton, on the run, is still able to use his retinal scan for access. I mean, I find both ubelievable (in terms of details consistent with the fictional world--should we believe this pretty ace looking police force would be that sloppy?) and believable in terms of true human lameness, that his ability to access secure areas wasn't removed once he became a wanted pre-criminal, and that there wasn't some huge alert that he was attempting access.

[prog.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that bugged me too, and I recall trying to rationalize it in the same way. If they had a later shot of some police gaping in disbelief at the failure, I'd have been ready to accept that dumbass security holes are just as prevalent in 2052 as they are now.

Other things that bugged me:

Why was the chief immune from the precogs, allowing him to kill the investigator unhindered? Did he have a lead-lined office or something? He clearly wasn't himself invisible to them, or his earlier murder of Lively would have been much easier.

Why did Anderton's foreseen murder of Crowe get a "brown ball" instead of a "red ball"? Once he got into the hotel room and saw the photographs, it was no more premeditated than the cuckolded husband's murder attempt at the beginning of the movie. Unless... the brown ball meant that the premeditation was on Crowe's side, since he was planning on Anderton killing him. Ooh, twisted.

[arfur]

IIRC, the reason the precogs (and thus the whole unit) weren't onto the chief's murderous plans was that Atherton had just stolen Agatha from the "temple": thus, the precogs couldn't function the way they were supposed to. (May have also had something to do with the fact that Anderson had just drained the temple's nutrient-bath, but prob'ly not.)

I really liked those ads, too. Yes, I know that they were, in fact, genuine product placement, but they also served as a very real glimpse of the future...
Seconded. I think the ads, and other incidental scifi-type predictions, were quite possibly the best part of the movie. Even if it means that our efforts today to block spam and consumer profiling are futile. ;-)