I just saw this over the weekend and I really liked it.
*For some reason, I thought there’d be more of a discussion/debate on it here, seeing the number of Minority Report threads that I’ve seen. Go figure.
First things first-
Yepper. Right before he took the pills he saw an ad for LE and checked it out online (It ties together the ‘I met him online’ comments he says about the mysterious guy). Presumably, at that point, he made the necessary when, hows, and whys.
Personally, I think it was all a dream. All of it.
To begin with, how is a person supposed to be able to have consciousness in a suspended state? It doesn’t make sense. It’d be like a coma when one minute you’re awake and alert, and the next minute you’re not, then you’re awake again-- no sense of time loss whatsoever (From what I’ve heard of coma patients- there’s no sense of time loss). So that, to me, was a biggie, but not the necessarily biggest hint that it was all a dream.
Early on in the moviea, right after the initial run around Times Square, Cruise’s character voice-overs something along the lines of, ‘The worst part of my dreams- and I have a lot of them- is that I never know when I’m really dreaming or awake. Sometimes I awake, only to still be in my dream.’.
That, to me, was very revealing and possibly the biggest hint to the whole thing being a dream. And since they never show his entire face at the end- the jerks- you never know if his face is messed up or not, which would essentially answer the question of it being a dream or not (That’s what I was waiting for the whole time at the end-- ‘Look! See? His face is normal, he’s just waking up from a killer dream.’). Damn.
The other part of this that leads me to believe it was a dream was the different bedrooms he keeps waking up in. There were definitely two – one was the uber posh condo thing that was seen most during the movie (Where he had the party, the guitar, and all that). The other one was seen less often but seemed to me to be more real-- it had the bed in the middle of the room, a kitchen right behind it, and basically looked pretty cheesy (But probably $1500 a month in New York City).
That gave it away for me. Think about it- in the opening scene (Impressive as hell, btw) is obviously a dream- the streets are empty, there isn’t a sound to be heard, and, and, he’s driving a tricked out Ferrari. He (Supposedly) wakes up from that dream, and back to reality, and is then driving the rather nice Mustang. Ask yourself, why? Why, if he had all this money and everything else, would he need to be dreaming of the Ferrari? He could afford it, he didn’t need to be dreaming of it as if it was unattainable, did he? Nope. Add that important clue to the ‘I never know when it’s a dream, and never know when I wake up if it’s still a dream’ line said later.
Subtle clues, that in my opinion, add up to it all being a dream. If it weren’t, then why not show his whole face at the end? It would have answered the question without a doubt, because if it were* all a dream, he’d never had been in the accident and his face would be fine, and we’d know by seeing his face. Nope, not showing it only furthers my opinion that you had to wonder why it wasn’t shown, and it wasn’t shown so you’d have to go back a figure out why.
Dream city, people!
*Please forgive any grammer, technical errors above. I don’t want to wait twenty minutes just to preview the sucker. It’s iffy enough if submit reply will even work.