The thing me and my husband were, um, loudly discussing about this movie-- if Agnes and the boys had not “preseen” Anderton killing whathisface, then there would have not been a crime in the first place. Agnes presaw herself there, which would not have happened if she hadn’t. . . presaw herself there.
My husband tells me this is adequatly explained in Max’s old murder. I say “how?”
The car was awesome though. You gotta admit, it was funny seeing his getaway vehicle being built around him.
Still, they should have stuck to the plot of the original short story. It was a lot more cohesive, and the ending made better sense.
We rented this one and watched it last night. I gotta agree with TeleTronOne and the other naysayers. I hated this flick. I can tell, because I have no desire to watch it again.
I love Spielberg generally, and I love science fiction, and I think Spielberg knows how to handle fx and sf. So why do I hate both Minority Report and A.I.?
The eyeball thing bothered me – my wife and I were making fun of the “follow the bouncing eyeballs” part. The thing about the eyeballs still working the security systems bothered us, too. My personal theory – Spielberg syill has a lot of “little kid” in his makeup, and he’s got a kid’s love of gross-out, especially eyeballs. Remember the Eyeball Soup in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? For that matter, the whole gross-out feast from IJatToD was recalled in the rotten-food-in-the-fridge scene in Minority Report. If that wasn’t Spielberg’s intent, then what the hell was that scene even doing there?
Too much gratuitous pointless technology. You don’t need Rocketeer cops or Mastrix-style Spiders for this film. They’re just there for the gee-whiz factor. Get rid of 'em.
The moving plants were another pointless distraction. It looks neat, but it’s not really related to the story. No, it’s not. It just looks cool.
I’m getting fed up with using computer technology to leech all the color out of photography and calling it “art”. I don’t like the look of Minority Report, with its gray-blue future any more than I like the look of Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? with its yellow-brown past. I hated the red future of Hardware just as much, but I think they did it all with only color filters.
I’m also tired of people taking a short Philip K. Dick Story and adding 90% new material to it, and claiming the result is Dick’s. I’ve long said that sf stories were so complex that filmmakers would be better off expanding a short story than trying to cut down an epic like Dune into movie-sized pieces, but what they’ve done with Dick is absurd! At least with Bladerunner they had a whole novel to work with (even though they chucked most of it out). In Total Recall they exhausted most of Dick’s story in the first ten minutes. I’ve said before that most of the rest looks as if it was lifted (without acknowledgement) from Robert Sheckley’s “The Status Civilization”. I haven’t read “Minority Report”, but what I have read convinces me that by far the bulk of it ain’t Dick’s stuff. There are one or two other movies nominally based on his works:
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Dick,+Philip+K.
but, again, I think they don’t accurately portray Dick’s ideas.
The end gimmick was clever – how do you commit a successful crime in a future where such PreCogs exist?, much like the queries about crime in the novels of Alfred Bester (The Demolished Man, The Stars my Destination). This should have been an interesting, involving film. But it wasn’t.
Well with Blade Runner, I don’t think Philip K. Dick really cared how they changed it. One of the books you’ll find out there is a collection of writings that Dick wrote as correspondence. It includes a letter he wrote to the BR screenwriters. The gist of the letter was “There’s one subplot to this story that fans love and it really gets into what it means to be human . . . but the subplot is kind of on its own and you can easily get rid of it if you need more room for violence and nudity.”
As for Total Recall – the story that’s based on is one of the worst things I’ve read by Dick. It makes even less sense than the film version of Minority Report. Any change would be an improvement.
Minority Report, however, was a great short story and one of my favorites by Dick. And Dick didn’t chicken out on the ending either.
As for Impostor, I’ve seen the movie but not read the story. It seems the sort of thing Dick would write though, and it is the only movie I’ve seen that goes out of its way to drop the writer’s name so the audience would know who was behind it.
Yeah, Impostor did go out of its way to namedrop. Too bad that in the commercials they couldn’t be bothered to atually spell it right.
“Phillip K. Dick?”
I remember that ‘Screamers’ publicity played up the fact it was based on a Dick story.