BEFORE: For the last week, I've been inadvertently skipping back in time - or, I should say that the movies I've been watching have been doing that. From "Sophie's Choice" (post WWII) to "Cider House Rules" (pre-WWII) to "Legends of the Fall" and "A River Runs Through It" (set about 1920's/1930's) and then "Far and Away" (1893) and "The Last Samurai" (1876 or so). But tonight I rocket ahead to 2054. Tom Cruise carries over, and it's time for another Birthday SHOUT-out (#50!). Yes, the star of "Born on the Fourth of July" was himself born on the THIRD of July. Go figure.
THE PLOT: In the future, criminals are caught before the crimes they commit, but one of the officers in the special unit is accused of murder and sets out to prove his innocence.
AFTER: Predicting the future is always tricky - and so is making a film that's set in the future. Directors have to try to be pre-cognizant about what life will be like in, say, 50 years - what will cities, cars, computers look like? This has been going on at least since H.G. Wells first wrote about trips to the moon - of course, some writers/directors get it right, but also benefit from the influence of their own fiction. Sometimes life imitates art, and comes out just like the sci-fi writers predicted. Which is why some of today's cell phones look a lot like Star Trek communicators.
This film is filled with future-tech - policemen using jet-packs, cars that seem to be computer-controlled, essentially driving themselves (reducing car accidents, nice) and most prominently, the power to turn pre-cognitive visions into searchable images. But the future isn't all perfect - there are still illegal drugs, but can we assume they're more powerful, with fewer side effects? Probably still addictive though. Sadly, it seems like in the future no one ever invented a better type of umbrella, they're still using the same old fabric ones that tend to poke other people in the eye, turn inside out in a stiff breeze and drip water down the back of your shirt. (That would be the first thing I'd like to improve, obviously) Shouldn't people in the future have individual force-fields to keep the rain from hitting them?
And you'd better believe that people in the advertising industry would LOVE to develop that technology that scans you and pitches holographic ads to you, inserting your name into the pitch...
What's nice about this film is that it shows that as police tech improves, so does criminal technology. After police invented fingerprint recognition, criminals started wiping things down or wearing gloves. (I'm sure criminals watch "CSI" to pick up tips)
So here an accused cop on the run has to think of creative ways to beat retinal scans, and facial recognition software - and his methods sure aren't pretty.
One quibble I have here, and this annoys me about a lot of movies and TV shows, is what happens when we see a portrayal of a person's dreams. Here they just happen to also be a peek into the future, but essentially they're dreams, or visions. How do they look? Exactly like little movies, with three-camera coverage and professional editing. Now, human dreams have been around quite a bit longer than movies - I think it's a fallacy to say that our dreams look like little movies. If anything, it should be the other way around. But my dreams (the ones I remember, anyway) tend to be more P.O.V., of course they have a tendency to shift, and not make coherent sense...
But let's assume that the pre-cogs in this film have a unique gift, and they have dreams which can accurately predict the future, and they just happen to look like they were shot by an award-winning cinematographer, who used three-camera coverage, and met with his editor about when to cut to a close-up, etc. etc. A dream is just a set of electrical impulses and random eye movements, right? How the heck do you convert that into a playable, screenable format - what is that, an MP8? I call shenanigans.
There's a paradox at the end that tries to wrap things up - balancing destiny and free will and precognition into an either/or. It kind of made my head hurt, and I'm not sure they got it 100% right. It seems to be based on evidence that the characters didn't have at that point in time (they were making an assumption that the precogs had already predicted the situation they were in).
Also, someone in the film questions stopping crimes before they happen - since the crime is prevented, how can you prosecute it - and it's likened to a ball rolling off of a table. You catch the ball because it was about to fall - but in doing so, you prevented it from falling. Nice try, but murder is not gravity. Gravity is a certainty, while murder is a choice. But since the movie (eventually) makes this same point, I'm prepared to let this one slide.
A neat little thriller, based on a short story by visionary Phillip K. Dick, whose stories also provided source material for "Blade Runner", "Next", "Total Recall" and "The Adjustment Bureau". Still want to see those last two before I'm done.
Also starring Colin Farrell (last seen in "Crazy Heart"), Max Von Sydow (last seen in "Three Days of the Condor"), Samantha Morton (last seen in "The Messenger"), Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "The Darwin Awards"), Kathryn Morris, Neal McDonough (last seen in "Flags of Our Fathers"), with cameos from Arye Gross (last seen in "Mother Night"), Mike Binder, Peter Stormare (last seen in "Happy Campers"), and William Mapother (Tom Cruise's cousin, he turns up in a few of his films, like "Born on the Fourth of July")
RATING: 7 out of 10 billboards
No comments:
Post a Comment