I just saw Paycheck yesterday, and there was one thing I couldn’t figure out, or simply missed. Rethrick and his henchman seemed to have used the machine to see Jennings die in some way, apparently at about the time he was in the custody of the FBI. The henchman is eating pie, looks at his watch, and says something like, “Goodnight, Mr. Jennings.” Then Jennings comes running out of the FBI building. Later on Rethrick and his guy are talking about how someone must have changed something for Jennings not to have died when he should. How was he supposed to have died? Did I miss something almost happening?
It is my guess that he was supposed to have died during memory extraction (brain temp surpassing the critical level). That’s what I thought while watching the film anyway. I’d have to see it again to be sure though.
Boy did I have issues with this movie. Here’s the one that sticks in my craw.
It appears that while our hero was told that he would not be allowed to leave campus, that Uma has an apartment on campus AND one off-campus. This must be, because her epiphanal moment with the message in the mirror happened in her pad on campus- but the stuff near the end where Bennifer finds the clues in Ben Franklin’s eyes by using a High School’s microscope obviously happen off-campus in a more conventional apartment. Is she the rare one who is allowed two domiciles? I thought the whole point was that nobody leaves campus while they work on projects. Hmmmm.
It was entertaining enough, but I sure wish it’d been written with the care given to , say, Minority Report.
What a piece of hoo-hah this movie was. Maybe they could have cut a martial arts extravaganza or two and put a few semi-smart people in a room with the plot points and a slide rule.
Here’s my biggestquestion, although it may relate directly to Dick’s premise (I haven’t read the source story).
Spoilers, I guess.
How can he look into the future and know all of the possible branches in advance? For example, once he uses the cigarrettes and glasses to exit the FBI detention room, he has changed the future. How can he know before he sent himself said items that he will need to escape via the train, blow up a henchman via the third rail, and on and on down an increasingly impossible-to-predict line?
The wrench for this is that it seems the machine still gives the “standard version” of the future to the badguys until it has been actively changed.
Did Dick deal with this hole in the story? How faithful is the movie to the source material? Why is John Woo considered anything but a melodramatic hack?
Spoilers
They bad guys saw the future and saw him die at the FBI.
He saw himself die at the FBI and then realized that he needed to set off the fire alarm. So he looks at the machine again and he sees the alarm and sees that it is too smokey to see.
So he decided to give hims self the glasses.
So he looks again and sees the next time he gets killed or caught and sees what item he needs and then he looks again.
I thought of that, but up until that point Jennings hadn’t done anything specific to change his future, except send himself different items. Maybe that was enough? But I don’t see how that could have effected the brain scan. And speaking of the brain scan, didn’t the attitude of the FBI agents seem just a little bit cavalier concerning the potential of cooking an only suspected person’s brain?
I don’t think it was. Jennings’ original fleabag hotel had a neon sign outside his window, didn’t it? And it didn’t look like a suite, the way the second place looked. I assumed that now that he had Uma with him, and her bank account, they got a better hotel.
I have read the PKD short story. Oh and it’s really short.
So the movie draws some things out and adds a lot.
But the multiple views is pretty much the only way he could map out the puzzle. His learns to trust his ‘not remembered’ self that there is something useful at each time he’ll really need it.
She wasn’t working on the kind of a project that required brain wipe. She was working on something ‘classified’ with plants. Remember she could leave the campus because they first meet at the party. She was not working on the see the future machine. The principles working on that project requied the no leaving campus rule. So, she could have a place on campus, when she started to get serious with Jennings that he can visit, and her real place off campus that’s across from the school.
During the interview they take a break. The main guy wants a cigarette. No cigs though, they try harder to read Affleck’s mind and accidentally kill him. Ben puts the pack of cigarettes in there so that the guy can smoke during the break thus setting off the alarm. It works…uh oh, now Ben can’t see. They shoot him and he dies(?). So he puts the glasses in there…etc, etc.
This movie plot line had such promise, and they put two of the biggest peices of vanilla in front of the camera.
Ben, please stay a character actor. YOu don’t have the range to do bigger roles.
Uma, dear God, you have the bod and the googly eye thing going like you are Osama’s love child, but frankly, did you phone in that part or what?
What just slays me about this film is the fact that she kinda knows what is going on and agrees to help him work out everything, whilst under gun fire and henchmen attacking and * she never quibbles or argues anything*.
I mean, c’mon. No woman in the history of film stays put when she is told to stay put by the hero. If they were so much in love ( and they had all the chemistry of a pile of poo.) they would have those little power struggles or at least big heaps of sarcasm. ( “That would be the Red Sox.” was, I beleive, the best line in the film and that isn’t not saying much.)
The Evil Bad Guy meglomaniac looked like the second cousin of Crispin Glover, only with lighter hair.
[QUOTE=FlyingDragonFan]
I And speaking of the brain scan, didn’t the attitude of the FBI agents seem just a little bit cavalier concerning the potential of cooking an only suspected person’s brain?
[QUOTE]
The short story, like a lot of PKD stories has a fairly opressive government. In the story he has to get back into the company and be an employee because individual citizens have very few rights, only corporations have rights.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I highly recommend to everyone reading the short story if you get the chance.
It’s very short, and far better (from what I’ve heard) than the movie.
The short story also has a FAR different ending from what I’ve been told is the ending in the movie. If you’re curious, spoilers regarding that below (includes description of endings in both book and movie, you have been warned)…
Jennings is not on any noble mission to destroy his machine, preventing the horrible future. He does not win the lottery.
In the book, he breaks into the laboratory, and takes diagrams and photos of the machine (not destroy the machine). This information he gives to Rachel to hold onto, and then he goes (with Rachel) and meets with Rethrick. During that meeting, Jennings describes all of the information he has about the machine, and demands he be given half of the company to not release the info publicly. At this point, Rachel steps forward and tells Jennings this won’t happen. She explains that she is Rethrick’s daughter (!), and has put all of the information in a safe place. Jenning’s is surprised at first, but then remembers the final item he had. He names a package number. Rachel is stunned, wondering how he got the information, and pulls a stub out of her pocket. The story ends with a claw appearing out of nowhere, taking the stub out of her hand.
(Forgive any inaccuracies. It’s been awhile since I read the story).
There is a nice tribute to the end of the short story in the film. Basically a robot arm comes out and turns things to the hero’s advantage at one point. I busted up laughing when I saw it. I did like the fact that he used the machine to win the lottery. He is motivated by human greed, just like the character in the story, only he doesn’t take over the company.
In the movie, it seemed to me that the sequence was like this:
Rethrick & co. have set Jennings up to build the machine, then to release him and let the FBI take him.
Jennings builds the machine.
Rethrick uses it to make sure that his plans work – yep, Jennings is going to be killed by the FBI.
Jennings uses the machine sometime – or even just looks at the saved file (it looks like they have these saved as files under peoples names, in the movie), and sees what happens to him. So he realizes he’s going to have to do something to get out of it. This must be when he “works an all-nighter”, according to Thurman’s character. I can see it happening as Zebra described.
“Okay, I get away… I’m being chased… D’OH! I get run over by a subway train. Hmm… what to do about that… I need a quarter… Let’s run this again and see what happens…”
He’s got this all set up, and to save himself, he has to put all these items in an envelope and send them to himself. Which means he also has to agree to not take the paycheck, in order to get the envelope. The last thing he does (after he’s done using the machine) is disables the machine, in a way that he can fix it if he wants. (And includes in the envelope information to help him fix it, without being so obvious that the records of the stuff in the envelope will help the company fix it.)
So Rethrick never has another chance with the working machine to look into the future again and see the changes he’s made. In fact, he doesn’t even try to use it until Jennings survives, which is his first clue that something’s going wrong. And to Cartooniverse’s point, they’re definitely in a seedy hotel room at that point, not another Uma apartment.
