Rating:  -
[War-Crime Revisionist Perversion Films Marvelously]
One of the best science fiction in years, quality special effects, acting, sets, transition and action choreography. Still, nothing will ever top `Blade Runner'. That was also a crime detective story, set in a more surrealistic future accentuating the nighttime urban metropolis, altogether a different story than one involving the psychic detection of violent murders before they occur. Is there really such a thing as precognition, or is the phenomena much stranger, because you know, the same paradox plagues time travel going backward or forward and it is only corrected through the steady progression of time; which for all we know will continue indefinitely. In other words, the future from any past has to have happened...naturally...in order for the paradox to be avoided. It would be paradoxical with respect to our time, for time travelers to have moved from any time ahead of us to an earlier time ahead of us on through to times behind us. The other thing is, if anything did move through time it would be quantum information, just like those graphic foreshadowing precognitions only the information would be imbedded so as to metaphorically semaphore a plausible symbol mapping preserving zero knowledge protocol. It's the idea that some dreams are strange, so you search through your memory for reasons or event that may have triggered them; and then something that hadn't yet happened seems to align uncannily in the symbol decryption, as if it was the cause of that dream, long after you'd had the dream. There's just no way to know for sure; however it will seem improbably steganographic given the random variables. Is it logical for now to posit our own stead as being past, relative to another time ahead, the same way we look at the past and can identify similar relative positions? Perhaps it would require a technology to capture that edge out in front of us, even as bizarre as the networking of precogs floating in a sensitivity deprivation environment.
I liked the realism of this film, real in how it has a built-in purging mechanism that would flush the precogs into a reservoir. Now what event would motivate that erasure of record? Probably high crimes of state. There's more than enough rumor to suggest this sort of thing's been implemented for some time now. Secret facilities, human experiments, government remote viewing programs, psychotronics, even the absence of artificial intelligence. I think it would be far more likely some kind of game is being played on human populations with real weapons systems, used to wreak havoc and conduct torture on them arbitrarily; as a form of reprisal, a political infliction on incorrectness of conformity, or even to fabricate the framing of crimes on blacklisted state suspects, a way to brainwash a confession into them. If this were happening, what signs might we see of it on the surface in the news, events of the day? There would be a roguish, no account effort to pass torture off on the American people like that was just standard military operating procedure. And it would keep peddling its public offering in post releases of more of the same. Dissent would become targeted for the language of suspect mental health infirmity, any questioning or criticizing of the news propaganda. The public may or may not, (seeing as this is a difficult question to resolve), have been struck with what is called an `exotic weapon of mass destruction', one that is virtually untraceable, one that attacks the psychic pre-consciousness on the boundaries of sleep; and it may have been too painful and strange for anyone to feel comfortable talking about. Imagine that for a form of totalitarian state crack-down. Nobody wants to be called `crazy' or mentally ill--it's just like warning the prisoners not to confer with each other something is wrong, that they were attacked with an energy in their mind that hurt them. I guess there is no need to ask under what conditions such an infliction of mind control would be found most desperately needed as a population control measure.
There might even be a secretive, weird religion with all sorts of interesting claims about `memory engrams', it might even be a cell of government intelligence community public relations offshoot. And it would drive at convincing the public they were irrational, impulsively violent, cruel, and basically without control over their tempers. It would have access to a lot of government developed and spy agency utilized memory affecting drugs, compounds etc. Sodium pentothal, who knows? People would have to be hypnotically regressed to get them `clear', or possibly to program them with all kinds of crazy ideas or paramilitary agenda.
Pre-crime is a most interesting judicial concept. But be careful, you know with today's computer animation and wherever the government's huge A.I. efforts were absconded, and if they had the ability to tap into the publics' minds, group or individual, they might make up any number of kangaroo protocols for their kangaroo FISA kinds of courts that all went down in complete secrecy, sealed record or no record. They would simply place you in your dream, with the weapon and the victim, and run the movie from both ends: the puppet string forcing function, and the measurement gathering the state's evidence. Hypnotic regression is used for trial evidence, for cases involving traumatic, early childhood victim memory reconstruction. There is a protective mechanism that helps the mind to block early developmental traumas. Maybe the idea of pre-crime ought to be associated with crimes in human memory yet to have been unlocked by psychic science. That would seem more on the level. That and the earlier idea mentioned about how berserk crimes might be part of a behavioral conditioning program--so many suicide bombers, so many freak atrocities just in America in recent years. Have millions of Americans blocked the memory of traumatic sleep suffocation struggle while in natural deep sleep paralysis (the brainstem's idling)? The Autism-SIDS epidemic is the state's `pre-crime' by marginal-lethality fluoropoisoning.
Rating: -
This is very interesting action movie. Doesn't matter if you are a big fan of Tom Cruise or not, because after this movie you might start liking Tom. YOu really have to watch from beginning to the end and try to put yourself in the real 21 century, then you will understand it completely.
Rating: -
The movie starts out revolving around a drug-addict Tom Cruise is the lead cop on a special type of crime force. What this squad does is watch crimes happen before they are commited, there are 3 "special" children that can tell the futute. How the police got their hands on em is a whole nother story. So there is a new advisor of some sort played by Colin Ferrel, right when he enters the story, Cruise is watching a crime happen so that he can go stop it, but he sees himself committing the crime. The movie flips the switch here and this is your warning to put your seatbelt on.
A great movie by Spielberg where he is at his best.
Rating:  -
I resent when films like "Minority Report" or "The Cell" are classified as "science fiction" rather than as "fantasy". The idea of "pre-cogs" doesn't bear more scientific plausibility than the idea of "time-machines", and it probably bears less.
It makes me wonder if Spielberg's inspiration for the screenplay came on the toilet, while reading a story in a yellow magazine about a girl who saw future crimes. (I've read that kind of nonsense years ago myself).
I sense Spielberg's wants to address two main philosophical questions:
1) What is the "free will?"
2) What should be the role of government in providing security?
The first one wasn't addressed successfully in the film. If as Spielberg's seems to suggest, we have a choice, how is anyone able to foretell what we would have chosen ? For example, if a "pre-cog" foretells that someone will inevitably murder and is apprehended by the police, is that apprehension inevitable in itself ? Then how the murder and the apprehension of the murderer before the murder could both be inevitable?
Of course someone could argue that there are infinitely many scenarios that could happen, with various degrees of likelihood. But then why have we went to so much trouble with a "precog" to figure out the obvious? For example I can safely predict by using statistics that in a city where a murder is committed by a homeless young man every month, and there are a thousand homeless young man in that city, one possible scenarios for any of those young men is to commit a murder that month. Thus if we arrest all the homeless young men in that city we saved a life that month.
I understand that to be able to predict crime and prosecute criminals accurately we need more than general crime statistics. And in that case one possible sci-fi (and maybe not even a sci-fi but already done in a government secret lab) solution would be to recognize brain waves that are produced before someone is ready to commit a serious violent act. Then we need to implant in former violent convicts and in those with genetic predisposition to act anti-socially (or perhaps in all of us) a sensor with a chip that detects that wave and disables the to-be-offender (by knocking him unconscious or paralyzing him) until the law enforcement officers arrive.
It is questionable whether the proposed technology will work as intended or it will disable anyone who vehemently wants to kill a cop in the "Grand Theft Auto". And even if it works flawlessly, would we really want to be subjected to this kind of invasiveness?
Spielberg would answer no, as it clear from "spider episode". (Spielberg cunningly used crawling spiders that nastily scan eye's iris", rather let's say, "flying by" butterflies who seamlessly scan eye's iris, to exploit spider-phobia of many people, including me)
I would answer a qualified yes. While I consider myself a progressive by supporting strong social safety net, and personal freedoms including the right-to-privacy, when it comes to crime prevention I am all for it. Government should not have a right to frivolously look at the adult pornography someone downloaded. But when it comes to apprehension of a serial killer that terrorizes community, the government should employ all available technology.
If that means sending electronic butterflies for scanning eye's irises of all residents of a certain building, so be it. Spielberg failed to convince me otherwise. He would've had a better shot had he used more plausible scenarios to make his points.
Rating: -
This film satisfies on all levels: acting is great, the story complex yet believable, deliciously quirky details on life in the future from personalized advertising via retina recognition to scurryng intelligent police robots, and even philosophical issues about fate and choice and service to the state. While the plot is that of a murder mystery, the themes are the choices that new technologies and a re-made society offer us.
Cruise is really a wonderful actor, in spite of all the weird stuff written about him that may even be true - just look at this performance. He is super competent, athletic, and a natural leader, but also a tormented soul, completely convincingly. This is one of his best performances, which made me a genuine fan. Colin Ferrel and van Sydow are also excellent, as are many of the other characters. About the only weakness that strained credibility for me were the pre-cogs - their parts were too weird and their powers unexplained, essentially magical. Nonetheless, there is an extremely well developed vision of a future society here, right down to every detail. It makes for an intricate plot and many many ideas, so that it can be viewed many times, which is the key to a great film experience.
Though I had already seen it several times, upon reviewing I was once again enthralled by the vision - you can view it on many levels. It is a masterpiece and indeed one of the best scifi films I have even seen, destined to become a classic on the level of Forbidden Planet.
Warmly recommended, if hard scifi is your bag.
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