Why do they have a Rube Goldberg contraption to carve the next killer’s name on a billiard ball, when a line of text on a screen would convey the same information?
Also, if the ball lists the killer’s name, how did anything in the entire movie happen? The “echo” deception wouldn’t work, if the ball names didn’t match.
They tried to print it on a screen but Tom Cruise kept swiping it away with all his hand movements. The precogs then tried to find a carrier pigeon but, since they’d all gone extinct in the Great Birdhunt of 2032, they made due with what they had available. From 2042-2045, our primary export was billiards tables. When the bubble burst on that venture, we were left with warehouses full of supplies just begging for a use.
It all makes sense if you just learned your future history.
The reason given in the movie is that the unique structure and grain of each wooden (not billiard) ball makes faking it impossible, but I’m not sure that explanation does anything besides push the nonsense one step back.
Maybe I should note that I enjoy the movie (I’m a sucker for sci-fi), but that wooden ball thing was just silly.
I think for story telling purposes, the writer(s) had to make a way so that Cruise can see the ball with his name on it, but the “witness” Judges could not. If it were a data stream they all received simultaniously from the Seer, Cruise would have had damn little time to get out of the building. Stylisticly, it’s a memorable gimmik, too.
In-universe explaination, I dunno. I don’t remember if they explained how the images that existed in the mind of that precognitive human got “read” and converted to data other people can somehow use. They had a viewscreen on the ceiling of the pool room (the temple?) that showed these mental images, and the precog is shown verbalising names. Voice recognition software may be at work, but that doesn’t anser why it need to be wooden balls, and not a computer data file with encryption and certification hashes.
Funny, I just rewatched this a night or two ago…
My understanding from the movie is that the system is built to expect these echos and either it dumps them automatically, or the technician does, and a ball is never generated.
Wait, of all the plotholes, that’s the one you focus on? I know it’s memorably silly, but still!
The movie makes no sense, but is entertaining nonetheless. Having one’s getaway car built around you is amusing, I admit, but the whole “halo” imprisonment process is odd - indefinite zombie lockup without trial or release? In the example case at the beginning, wouldn’t some emergency intense marriage counseling and a trial separation be more appropriate?
Some reviewer thought that everything that happened after Cruise was “haloed” was just taking place in his head - he never escaped, he never exposed his old boss as the murderer, he never hooked up with his ex-wife to have another kid, etc. I like it.
For myself, the bigger plot hole is how Precrime is going to go nationwide. They only have three precogs, and they seem plenty busy just with the prospective murders in the Washington, D.C. area. How are they gonna handle all the bad vibes of several hundred million Americans?
Still, a fun movie.
Franchising!
But, yeah, you’re right - there’s no explanation of what “going national” even means. At one point a figure of “200 miles” is thrown out describing the precogs’ range for premeditated murders (i.e. “how could anyone within 200 miles…?”) which would cover a sizable chunk of the eastern United States, possibly a quadrilateral from Trenton/Philadelphia to Pittsburgh to Roanoke to Norfolk, but if that’s their maximum range, how do you extend it “national”? Move them around a lot? Put them in a plane that constantly zips back and forth across the country?
And when these precogs eventually die of old age, what then? Does “going national” include some effort to clone the precogs? Given the level of medical tech on display, this looks feasible.
On reflection, I realize this is true of a lot of Phillip K. Dick adaptations. The high concept is cool, but the execution makes no sense. Total Recall made no sense. Impostor made no sense. Blade Runner… well, I really like Blade Runner, but it didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Anyway, brain switch off, look at pretty pictures, eat popcorn.
It’s a fairly commonly held interpretation and actually makes more sense, in many respects, than thinking it’s real.
Huh, I was just looking at Wiki’s list of Dick adaptations. I didn’t realize Next was among them. That movie made no sense! Cool idea, though.
I see there’s a 2012 reboot of Total Recall in the pipe. Maybe it’ll make some sense. Either way, it’s got Kate (arrooooo!) Beckinsale in it, so I’m sure I’ll see it next August.
You know what plot hole really bothered me?
The moral of the story, the lesson learned from the whole thing, was that the pre-crime program is evil. But it’s not! It’s great! It saved hundreds of lives! The only evil thing was the punishment. I.e. turning people into zombies for crimes they didn’t manage to commit. But the concept of stopping a particular crime before it starts is made of win.
So why the hell would they scrap the whole program just because the punishment is unfair?
Did they actually scrap the program because Tom Cruise proved that the precogs were fallible when they incorrectly predicted the bad guy would commit a murder at the end? That can’t be true because they know that pre-cognitions don’t apply when the subject is aware of it (Agatha says so when pleading with Tom Cruise not to kill the guy).
So why? Why shut down the whole program when all you need to do is quit halo-ing people? Maybe offer them counseling instead. Or go with the “all in Tom Cruise’s head” explanation.
I haven’t seen this movie since it first came out, but wasn’t part of it that the precogs were basically slaves who never got to do anything else?
It’s best if you don’t think of them as human.
I’ve read a ton of PKD and hadn’t realized they adapted something else of his. I went and read the synopsis of Next on Wikipedia. Wikipedia points out that it is “very loosely based” on one of his stories. I’ve actually read that story, (“The Golden Man”), and now I’ve read the synopsis for its movie, and can assure you they’re almost nothing alike.
The short story is about a post-human mutant thing that can see infinitely into its own future, and anticipate how any of its actions will influence that future. It can thus select actions that will create an absolutely ideal future for itself, and its kind will eventually supplant humanity.
The movie is apparently about Nicholas Cage, who can see exactly two minutes into his own future, and needs to save the world from terrorists. And it makes no sense.
Yeah, PKD’s works make good movies, but the subtleties are often lost. Let’s just say the stories tend to make more sense than their adaptations.
That’s true, but that didn’t seem to be why they scrapped the program in the end. IIRC, they implied that the system was broken because it punished innocent people, not because it enslaved teenagers.
My point: if you don’t like it, don’t punish them! Just stop them from committing their crimes and then send them on their way.
But each precog has their own bedroom, television, and weight room! It really is wonderful to be a precog! The tour guide said so!
IIRC (it’s been a while), in the book there were dozens or maybe hundreds of pre-cogs in different cities. I don’t think they were actually breeding the pre-cogs, but they had some way of finding them at a very young age. In the movie it was trimmed to 3 pre-cogs in one city for some reason. Also [minor nitpick] Pittsburgh to Philly is a lot more than 200 miles.[\minor nitpick]
Yeah, but they’re both more-or-less 200 miles from Washington (well, Philly a little less, Pittsburgh about 245). I was just eyeballing a map and picking significant cities that were roughly in the “200 mile” radius as implied by the movie, which is a significant chunk of territory but still a fraction of the U.S. overall. Oddly, the movie also kept referring to just “the District of Columbia” being murder-free, suggesting the precogs’ range was actually quite limited. Heck, the first case we see is to stop a double murder in Georgetown (just a short hop from the capital region), and the Precrime cops arrive barely in time.
Of course, it seemed to me that if they just wanted to prevent the crime-of-passion murders, just blasting a police siren announcing their presence to everyone on the block should be enough.