Maybe, in this light, you could view it as a cautionary tale: “Look what a heavy-handed system, justified or not, drove this guy to do. / The human spirit can be indomitable, even when it’s not following a good idea.” (Note: I haven’t even seen the movie. 
)
Say, almost getting off the subject, what would the opposite of this thread subject be? Like, a really well-thought out and executed story based on a fundamentally stupid premise? A few monster movies would seem to work, there.
I understand Weekend at Bernie’s is based on a treatment by Jessica Mitford.
That would be an interesting movie, but I don’t think that’s what it was. It felt way too much like “hero vs evil system, hero triumphs” for me to think that we’re supposed to ignore that and treat it as something else.
Tremors would fall into this category for me. On the surface it looked like a bad b-type monster movie. But it was well thought out and smartly executed.
Primer: a movie about two guys who accidentally invent a time machine.
But what is the point of punishment? Why do we punish in the first place?
Because we don’t want the crime to be repeated, and if people know they’ll experience negative consequences for their crime, they’ll refrain from committing the crime.
Except, if we have some other method of preventing crime–like, say, I don’t know, psychics who can see the future and we send a SWAT team over and they stop the crime before it occurs–then what’s the point of punishment? If we’re dealing with a serial killer psychopath who just enjoys killing and won’t stop no matter what, then we can lock that person up.
But what about someone like the pre-murderer from the movie, who walks in on his wife having sex with another man, and snaps? He wanted to commit murder, but he was stopped before he could. Is this guy likely to go on a killing spree tomorrow? No. And so what’s the point of freezing him? In today’s penal system, we don’t give people who commit this sort of crime (voluntary manslaughter) life imprisonment. So why do we do it in the future? When he hasn’t actually killed anyone, because we’ve prevented it, and if he plans on killing his wife again, we’ll prevent it again.
Not that he shouldn’t get therapy and an ankle bracelet or something. The purpose of the consequences should be to keep the rest of us safe from murderous criminals. If we aren’t in any danger from this guy, then why do we need to punish him?
The point of my problem is that the movie postulates two big changes in criminal justice. The first is pre-crime, where murders can be stopped before they happen. The second is that criminals are summarily frozen without a trial or a hearing, and they never get a chance to defend themselves or rehabilitiate themselves.
But the second part is just stuck into the movie to ramp up the stakes for Tom Cruise. If the future people had a reasonable justice system then Tom could explain things, and the complicated frame-job that drives the story wouldn’t work.
And so the movie is an example of a second-order idiot plot. That is, one “in which not merely the principals, but everybody in the whole society has to be a grade-A idiot, or the story couldn’t happen.”
If the point of a story is about how people are idiots and therefore society is made up of idiots, then this is acceptable. But that wasn’t supposed to be the point of “Minority Report”.
Like you I’d have to re-read the story, but I’m pretty sure there were only three precogs in the story too (Mike, Donna, and Jerry?).
Not quite. That pre-murderer was incarcerated because the mitigating circumstances were not considered to be relevant, not because of the lack of a trial. They already knew the circumstances that caused him to attempt to kill his intended victim, they simply didn’t modify the sentence because of that knowledge.
I nominate Deterrence, a movie in which the President of the United States tricks Iraq into launching a dud nuclear attack on the US, allowing him to retaliate and nuke Baghdad. From a Colorado diner in a snow storm in the middle of his re-election campaign.
Yeah, and that’s dumbness on the level of Season 1 ST:TNG, with the planet of Aerobics Instructors who want to execute Wesley for stepping on the flowers.
But they were hot, slutty Aryans! It is wrong of us to judge them.
Well, one reason we punish people is in theory to deter them or others from repeating the crime. I think there is plenty of evidence that this just plain doesn’t work, or works at best in a very erratic manner.
But this is not the only reason we punish. We punish for punishment’s sake. We punish to exact a cost for the act whether or not we expect the perp to repeat the behavior. We punish to give some degree of satisfaction (or revenge) to the victims or the families of the victims.
You seem to have the idea that if we can stop someone for committing a crime, there is no point to punishing them for trying. I would remind you that it is and has always been a crime to attempt to commit a crime.
And no, I don’t agree that this was all put in as some kind of artificial obstacle for Tom Cruise to triumph against – 'cause he lost. His wife got him out. It wouldn’t really matter whether he was frozen or just put into a jail cell, IMO.
This is an interesting enough question for it’s own thread.
Uh-oh. I have *Crash *and *Babel *in my NetFlix Queue…
Whatever you call it, I’d put *Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey *somewhere on that list: a broad, silly comedy about a pair of morons that also happens to be one of the most finely-tuned time travel stories ever written
hopefully you mean bill and teds excellent adventure… Bogus journey was the one where they died and had alien robot bodys from alien heaven.
In the “example” murder depicted, though, it looks like an otherwise normal guy is about to kill his wife and her lover in a moment of anger. That situation calls for intense family counseling, a trial separation, one spouse leaves town for a week or so as a cooling off period. Just packing the husband off for what appears to be a life sentence without trial is ridiculous.
I can understand why the movie does this - it allows Cruise’s eventual “jailor” to be one nerdy tech guy who can be sweet-talked into letting him go, whereas if he was in a conventional lockup, there’d be at least a dozen prison officials who’d have to play along - but it’s kind of offensive from a civil-liberties view.
Well, that and the idea of taking Pre-Crime “national”, as is hinted several times, is problematic if your primary mechanism is just three people who can’t easily be replaced and who have limited lifespans. Do they have the psychic “range” to cover the entire country? And sooner or later, one of them is going to die of natural causes. What then?
And it also occurs to me that Washington D.C. metro should vastly increase the number of street signs it has, putting them every two hundred yards or so, or mandating unobtrusive address information be posted inside apartments and hotel rooms. That way, the precrime cops wouldn’t waste time with “What neighborhood is this? It’s, uh, got a swing! And a park! And somebody who owns a brown dog!” Instead that could just look for the now-ubiquitous street/address markers and narrow it down instantly. For hotel rooms, have a bar-code mixed in with the wallpaper pattern, instantly giving the location and room number.
Anyway, it was a dumb movie with some mildly interesting moments.
Right.
Little Buddha - Keanu Reeves plays Siddhartha. Tibetan Buddhist monks come to Seattle looking for the reincarnation of one of their important lama. They find a young boy and somehow convince his parents to go to Bhutan to have this child tested, even though the parents aren’t Buddhist, apparently aren’t any religion. Directed by Bernardo Bertulucci.
StG
I nominate Paranormal Activity. The ads were far better than the movie.
I thoroughly enjoyed Artificial Intelligence.
The trouble with that is that if the film makers actually knew anything about DNA, they’d know what a crock that premise is. Knowing the statistical probabilities doesn’t tell you how an individual will develop.
Now, if he had something like Huntingtons disease they could diagnose that and I would have been satisfied.