It’s the last thing that Anderton’s son says to him in the dream. He’s “apologizing” for the “betrayal” of forgetting his father and believing the abductor when he said that he was his father. So dream-son accepts a simulacra father, as Anderton comes to accept a simulacra child.
The last thing that Agatha tells Anderton is that she always wanted to see the outside world, but now that she’s seen it, she has to go back to Precrime, or the others would die. She’s looking at the scenery go by and is overwhelmed with beauty. Anderton says that she doesn’t have to go back, but she says that she’s seen her future and that it’s in the precog tank.
Somehow, she never saw that whole “living out the rest of her life on an island paradise” happy ending coming. She saw everything else well enough. She never had any previsions of life on the island? Just more life in the tank?
Well, I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree, Cliffy. You claim that Spielberg gives his films empty artificially happy endings on purpose, and that the evidence is so overwhelming that it can’t be coincidence. Could you cite some of this evidence? I’m sorry you’re tired of the merry-go-round, but I really want to understand this.
For myself, I freely admit that I can’t really prove what Spielberg’s intentions are. Maybe I take his films at face value and they’re more subtle - and he’s more cynical - than I realize.
To repeat myself yet again - If the ending is a dream, why did Agatha set everything in motion? I just can’t reconcile the set-up of the movie with the ending.
The trouble with the “dream” interpretation is where it leaves the actual movie. If the “real” movie ends with Tom being stuck in a pod, then nothing is explained. Tom is set up inexplicably, the patsy is killed for no reason, Agatha’s mother was really killed by the homeless guy, Tom was never betrayed by his mentor, the mentor never killed Agatha’s mother to get her for precrime, and on and on. Where does that leave the movie, if we claim that the last act is just a dream? It leaves it a complete mess. Sure, life is sometimes a mess, but is that the real theme of the movie? It just makes no sense for the last act to be a dream, since the last act explains everything.
If there were to be a “real” ending to the movie as an alternative to the happy ending where Tom is cleared, he and his wife have another child, and the precogs read books on an island, it would be the one outlined by Tom when he confronts Lamar…Lamar kills Tom to prove that precrime works infallibly. Yeah, the happy ending seems tacked on, but the “dream” can’t start when Tom goes into the pod since the whole last act would be a dream.
The old guy got away with murder by taking advantage that sometimes the precogs would see a murder twice. Sort of an instant replay but like 10 minutes later.
So he hired a homeless guy to go and murder the female precog’s mother. (he plans this outside of the zone of the precogs) Then after the PreCrime guys show up and save the day, the old guy goes ahead and murders the woman, disguised as the homeless guy. So even though the precogs saw this murder coming, it looked like the murder they had already stopped. So they don’t go to stop it again and he gets away with murder.
I’m not sure I follow you there. Agatha’s mother really was killed by the director–she had those visions before Tom went in the pod. Tom was betrayed by his mentor, because the director set up the chain of events that would lead to him killing Crow. As for why–did he worry that Tom might figure out what happened?
What do you mean when you say she set up the chain of events? She had been having those flashbacks for years, it just took a while before someone (Tom) realized that they weren’t true deja vus (or whatever the tech called the phenomenon of the precogs reseeing a murder). And the only reason Tom found out about them was because he had heard of “minority reports” and thought that one might be a way to prove his own innocence.
I’d be curious to know if there’s any correlation between the way folks feel about the nature of the post-detention part of the film and their familiarity with the body of Philip K. Dick’s work.
I personally don’t approach the movie as a Spielberg movie o
I’m a big PKD fan… I have several dozen of his books, 2 biographies, and used to get the PKD Society newsletter until Paul Williams stopped publishing it. I don’t claim to be a PKD scholar, but I am familiar with his work.
I can’t recall any time that Phil would skew the whole plot for a mindtrip with 2 or 3 chapters left. Or even with just the last chapter. He was more the sort who would write something in the last paragraph that made you go "now wait a second… that means… but… "
I can’t offhand recall any time tho that he pulled a Dallas and just made everything a dream or hallucination or anything as means to tie up the story or as a revelatory gotcha.
Phil was pretty unsure of what was real. He felt that reality had shifted on him a number of times, and unexplained events were always open to new interpretation. But he wasn’t a gotcha kind of guy. More like a “huh? what the hell…?” kind of guy, IMO.
None of that is in the movie. I don’t exactly know if you’re talking about the movie, but some of the people here are getting confused.
The movie never tries to explain this, but that doesn’t make it impossible. Lamar could have planted evidence in Anderton’s office or sent a message of sorts telling him about Leo Crow. The only thing Burgess had to do was that: let Anderton know about the guy who kidnapped his son. Perhaps just settling on telling him was enough for the future to be conlcusive so Agatha could see it. It’s not that much of a stretch. Anderton hears about this guy, by whatever means, and when he finds him he kills him. Agatha sees it and so does Anderton. He escapes and a new future is written, one where he takes Agatha away and one where it’s no longer necessary for him to have read about Leo Crow on, say, an e-mail. That gives Burgess the opportunity to get rid of any evidence linking him to Crow because it doesn’t matter anymore: Anderton already saw himself kill Crow and he’s determined to find him.
Of course, Lamar released Crow from prison and cut him a deal. I’m assuming this was known.
Anderton was being overly inquisitive in regards to Agatha’s mother. At the time he didn’t know who Anne Lively was, but sooner or later he’d find out and could’ve probably cracked the minority report the way Danny Witwer did (the ripples in the water).
I’d be curious to know if there’s any correlation between the way folks feel about the nature of the post-detention part of the film and their familiarity with the body of Philip K. Dick’s work.
Personally, I don’t approach the movie as a Spielberg movie or as a Tom Cruise vehicle – for me, it’s primarily a PKD adaptation.
The screenwriter shows a certain amount of familiarity and affinity with Dick, and many elements in the movie that aren’t present in the short story (which arguably outweigh the elements that are from the story) are either lifted directly from other PKD works or at least consonant with his recurring themes – and probably the most defining thing about his writing is its preoccupation with ontology and the difficulty of sorting out authentic realities from manufactured ones. So when the text of a PKD adaptation contains things that could be related to those ideas, you pay attention.
Eesh-- sorry about the aborted post up there. One of those SHIFT-TAB->ENTER dealies, and I got called away.
Missed this, too:
Obsessive PKD fan since about 1987. I’ve read the holy all of it, with the exception of the unpublished bulk of the exegesis, and been reading and posting to alt.books.phil-k-dick for 5 or 6 years. (Not that bona fides are required to watch a movie. ;))
Surah, but Phil didn’t right the screenplay – and with exception of Confessions d’un Barjo, there hasn’t been a Philip K. Dick adaptation made yet that isn’t profoundly different from the source material. (I have high hopes for A Scanner Darkly, though.)
Anyway, if intertextual stuff is allowed for the purpose of this thread, it’s worth noting that there are reciprocating connections between Minority Report and Vanilla Sky: In Minority Report, Cameron Diaz and Cameron Crowe make Anderton on the subway, when the e-papers start carrying the manhunt story – and in Vanilla Sky, Spielberg attends Tom Cruise’s character’s party, wearing one of the promotional “PRECRIME” caps that Burgess is autographing at the climax of Minority Report.)
I couldn’t recall a lot of the things that Larry listed either, so I just watched the movie again.
This isn’t in the film. There isn’t even really a dream sequence, unless you mean when he’s doped up after the eye surgery and he remembers the last time he saw Sean, at the pool. But this line is not in the film. Not from Sean or anyone else.
Someone pointed out they could not recall this line and Larry replied:
This does not happen. There is no apology, no forgetting his father, no abductor saying anything. In fact, there is no abductor. Anderton is underwater, his watch is dropped into the pool, and when he comes up to the surface, Sean is gone. I have no idea where the simulacra came from, as there are none in the movie. Perhaps Larry was thinking of A.I. (although I don’t recall anything like this in that movie either).
This does not happen. Agatha makes no mention of the outside world, other than to remark “It’s beautiful” as they drive to Lara’s house. She has no line about needing to go back, nothing about the twins dying, and she doesn’t say that she has seen her future etc., etc.
Prolly because it didn’t happen that way in the movie. She never had a precog of living the rest of her life in the tank. And it isn’t exactly an island paradise, as it appears on the closing shot to be a small island in a chain, presumably off the coast of Virginia, as much of the location shooting was done in that area.
I wasn’t trying to jump all over ya there, Larry, but as The Hook mentioned, lots of us were getting confused.
And now that I’ve watched it again, I gotta say… it’s not all a dream. Most of the movie makes no sense if you think that some part of the film is a dream. Even the sequence when he loses his son is more unconscious remembering than a dream sequence, as there are no elements of un-reality that allow us to recognize it as disconnected from the real world. And no, the whole thing isn’t Agatha’s dream either. It makes even less sense that way.
I like this movie a lot. I’m not a big Spielberg fan. He’s just too adept at getting the emotional response he wants out of an audience, and he knows that the sappy boy-finding-his-lost-dog-as-we-watch thing is a surefire hit, so he tends to go for that in a lot of his films. This one he gives us a happy ending, but it isn’t quite so maudlin as, say, E.T..
I also don’t care for Tom Cruise; this is the only film with him in it that I own. He did a great job here, letting his voice really convey a lot of depth and pain. It’s a good thing, too, since we can’t see his face a lot of the time, and he’s dirty and cut up when we can.
All in all, on my prolly 30th viewing, this is still a great film. But it’s not a dream.
I mean that everything that happens in the movie is because of Agatha:
Agatha grabs Anderton and shows him Ann Lively’s murder. IIRC, this is the first time Anderton or anyone besides the pre-cogs caretaker has been in the pre-cog chamber.
As a result of Agatha’s action, Anderton begins to investigate Ann Lively’s death. There’s is no way he would have done so except for Agatha.
Burgess sets up Anderton in order to prevent him from finding out the truth about Ann Lively’s death. Exactly how is unclear, but he probably did not foresee that Anderton would be able to escape from Pre-Cog HQ and continue his investigation. Agatha, of course, *would * have been able to foresee it.
As a result of Anderton’s actions (assuming the ending isn’t a dream), Burgess is killed and the pre-cogs are freed. Agatha benefits.
I’m going from the script. You’ve got me unsure of myself now, because I don’t recall reading the script before, and yet I have pre-existing memories of these scenes-- particularly the dream sequence, which is what I was looking for.
Here ya go, from when Anderton is first put in the tank:
Not simulacra in the We Can Build You sense – simulacra in the literal sense of being unreal representations. The abductor isn’t a real father – if the post-tank part of the film is delusion, then his wife (and the child she is carrying) are unreal.
From the script:
I didn’t mean to invoke the image of palm trees and wild parrots, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s an island, and it’s paradise because it’s remote and the precogs are free from their psychic impressions crowding them.
No worries, I probably ought to know better than to refer to the shooting script by now.
The one thing that is bothering me is that I know I’ve seen the bit where Anderton and his dream-son make peace. This isn’t on the DVD? Special Features, mebbe?
If it’s a false memory altogether, it’s certainly a Dickian predicament. :smack:
At the least, it can be taken to speak to the writer’s intent.
I have been reading this thread with increasing interest. Such that last night I went searching online for proof one way or the other that the ending was a dream. I looked for interviews with the principal film makers and cast as well. Nada. (As for as the dream ending). The only thing I could find time and again were pages of fan interpretation.
What I did come away with is the reminder that movie making is a huge collaborative effort. That the final release is shaped not only by the director but also by the writers, special effects teams and especially the editor. As well as many, many others. And even with all these professionals involved, huge movies are still released with continuity errors.
So I think that in this case the dream ending interpetation is simply a matter of reading too much into subtle “clues” by fans.
Movies are collaborative efforts shaped by many people.
They are somtimes released with errors anyway.
There is no proof(not that I could find*), even this long after the release.
I mean, heck, the references to dreams could just be a marketing punch for Dreamworks.