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Title: Minority Report
Rating: 4/5

It was always going to be good, this one. So much money has been spent on this film that it can't fail.
Also helping it along was the fact that it has been based on a very good book.
The plot races along (at least until the last half hour) and twists all the way, the guy who you think is bad turns out to be good and vice versa, and it features some of the best product placement in a film ever.
It is also the only film to feature a singing, animated cereal packet.
Watch it.

The nokia ads are awfully distracting, but the ceral packet is perfect. and the auto ads in gap are great

i concur with the 4 out of 5 rating

"John Anderton! You look like you could use a Guinness!"

I had NO idea what it was about, or that it was directed by Spielberg.. I went along expecting a run-of-the-mill action, and was plesantly surprised.

ps. Does anyone else think "John Anderton" is a little suspectly close to "Tom Anderson" (Neo's real name in 'The Matrix') for coincidence? Paying homage, maybe?

i thought that ell. also reminds me of "john spartan" (the way that sandra bullock says it) in demolition man

I have not seen the movie yet, but do plan to do so.

I just want the car. It is awesome.

mmmm lexus :D

"Does anyone else think "John Anderton" is a little suspectly close to "Tom Anderson" (Neo's real name in 'The Matrix') for coincidence? Paying homage, maybe?"

A homage in which direction? The story that the film is based on by Philip K Dick was written in 1954 and John Anderton features in that.

Also I saw a Lexus concept car a lot like the movie one a few years back - only on paper then, wow it's damned cool! I guess the movie gave them a great opertunity to try out the design.

Also did you spot Cameron Diaz in the train!

Nope, she did a cameo?

And paying homage in the sense that someone thought it up after seeing the matrix, and didn't realise it'd influenced them, probably. :P

that WAS diaz? i thought it was

Lexus are going to market that car, although it probably won't have the auto-drive or 'drive whilst facing any direction' features =]

ell: yes she was behind the man with the newspaper. And maybe the Matrix guys were influenced subconsiously :)

cal: yep it was! :)

squirrell100: wow I want one of those. The cars in the city were different from the one in the country though weren't they? The country version was very very cool. :)

How long before they market them? and how long before we can get those cool glass screens. and those Spiders. Come to think of it, a sick-stick could be great fun at parties!

Oh and were the little glass disks just glass versions of the Iomega click disk thingys? or pocketzip or whatever they are called?

They are gonna market it? Thats damn cool!

i think you'll find that lots of pseudonymish names sound the same, all johns and toms...
anderson, thompson, anderton....

but a thoroughly enjoyable movie.

i cannot review this movie without this comment though:
the car jumping scene sucked. i don't know why they used it in the previews. the effects were second rate, and the physics of the situation made the action very improbable. really didn't like that bit.

but the rest was fannnntastic.

my problem was why the hell did his "eye in a bag" let him access the Temple to get to Agaetha? Considering that his eye scan on the train allowed them to pinpoint his location instantly are they seriously saying that they wouldn't have locked out his access to the building let alone the temple. Or at least raise the alarm when it registered his iris. Plus the fact that iris scanners even now require a "live" iris, as in chop of someones head and it won't let you in cos it registers live blood vessels or something. I know the eye bit had to feature somewhere but that was sooooo stupid.

Also, when the brown ball came down Cruise said "Brown ball? I didn't think anyone was still stupid enough to get a brown ball."
However, his murder was (or would have been) a crime of passion, as he hadn't planned it in any way, so it should have been a red ball.

I agree with the car jumping bit - when he jumped from the car going down onto the car going up it would have been human jam time...

squirrell100> Aha, but TECHNICALLY it was premeditated cos he admitted himself that the only things he could think about were "what his son would look like now, and WHAT HE WOULD DO to the man who took him" or words to that effect. So he had been thinking about the murder for ages!!! even if he didnt know who the victim was!!! Dont you just love time based paradoxes. Cos if he hadn't seen the image of the murder then he wouldn't have ended up in the appartment where he commits it. etc.

Are you sure the car he jumped onto wansn't going in the same direction only slower? cos if that was the case then the laws of physics are ok, cos he would only be jumping relative to the cars, so the force would not be too great. doesn't he decend the cars like steps? I'm not sure but I didn't see it as a problem. :)

Oh and the one that clinched it for me. What was all that about making it a national project?

1. They only had 3 precogs "a gift from god" if you will. they obviously didnt have reliable ways of making new precogs, cos they were so upset when Agetha left.

2. Based on the size of Washington DC against the size of the USA. they would not be enough time to see all these murders and stop them, bearing in mind they almost didnt make it to sissor man's house in time.

3. The precogs must only have limited RANGE. They only seem to "dream" about murders in DC, so unless they have been told to ignore all future murders outside of their area, which is unlikely, the system wouldn't work. They could not possibly go National cos they wouldn't see murders outside the city limits.

4. If they did go national then they would need many more precogs, assuming then that this was possible, the DC programme would not be taken away from Mr Cruise and Co cos they would still need him to run the DC one, or maybe transfer him to another one like LA or NY.

That just goes to show that I have way too much time on my hands to think of stuff like this.

PS their range MUST be limited cos their island retreat is supposed to be miles from anywhere, so that they can find peace. if their range was limitless or even as wide as a continent then the island wouldn't help to stop their nightmares.

I really must go to bed.

also how come the stupid lottery machine can print the names of the people on the balls? Agetha etc are just getting image data. so where do the names come in, they cant manage an address most of the time. Also if they can pinpoint the time exactly using their special know how then how come they didnt spot that the drownings were at different times, and not have to base it all on stupid wave directions. Hmmm. God I'm sad

Still a good film though

wow here's a good point:

"if they had all this eyeball-tracking technology, why did his kid get that far away (lost/killed/etc) in the first place?"

surely he would be registered about a zillion times before the bad man got away with him

Why did they have disks to transfer data? THE COMPUTERS IN THE PRECOG ANALYSIS CHAMBER WERE IN THE SAME BLOODY ROOM. Wireless Network anyone or even CABLES ON THE BLOODY FLOOR. Why waste time with disks?

Why did the Temple have people sized drains? when would you ever need to flush a human down it (apart from the obvious need in the movie) It is stupid, what is wrong with a plughole?! It defies logic!!!! its not like the matrix where they chucked the bodies out intoa pit when they didnt work anymore!!!

This is the coolest idea about what happened (from a forum post elsewhere):

"Regarding the last twenty minutes, which were undeniably worse than the rest of the film, I'm of the school that everything which happens after Cruise is halo'ed and imprisoned is a fantasy, a la Terry Gilliam's Brazil. For one, O'Brother's Tim Blake Nelson basically says as much when he enters Anderton into the system, sonething along the lines of seeing your dreams come true. For two, there's a Cruise voiceover from then on, which wasn't any part of the earlier film. For three, I believe the wife shows Tim Blake Nelson a bag holding TWO eyes, even though one was obviously irretrievable. For four, the last line of the script - "The following year, there were 116 murders in the District of Columbia" - was cut, perhaps because it didn't jibe with Cruise's final fantasy. For five, the last shot of the film mirrors the last shot of Sam Lowry's dream in Brazil. And, finally, the film descends into really hoary cliches in these last few minutes (unmasking the villain at a party, for example), and I prefer the film if I can just write this denouement off."

Brazil is indeed a great film

umm.. how about the wife still gaining access to the secured facilities with Anderton's eyes AFTER he's been incarcerated? Wouldnt his access rights be revoked by then

where in the world was Lemar's brown ball when he killed Agatha's mother? Even if the technicians didn't recognize that it was a different murder, the brown ball would have indicated that it was.

Lamar took steps to carry out an incredibly complicated murder of Ann Lively, a 'nobody' who would hrdly have been missed. Yet, the pre-cogs could only visualise murders within the DC area. Why would he go to such lengths when he could have simply lured her oustide of the DC area and then killed her with no chance of discovery. Otherwise, why kill her at all? Why not just pump her so full of drugs that you fry her brain- as she was a recovering junkie, no-one would be suspicious.

eyeballs do not roll like golf balls

thanks chandler, absolutely dessimated a perfectly enjoyable film.

everything chandler has said is a good point though - the plot was full of holes and non-sensical story diversions.

let me address of a few of those points:

* why did the kid get lost when there was the retinal tracking? the kid got lost many years ago. maybe the system wasn't invented or as wide spread.

* why did they use discs? this annoyed me alot. especially when they had difficulty putting discs in etc.

* why did the temple have people sized drains? seems dumb, but maybe the milk stuff had to be changed regularly. but still, but a grill over it so you can't lose a precog. sheesh. or maybe it was meant as an escape hatch for the precogs...

* using eyes/security being revoked. well, as we've already seen, most systems don't seem to be connected properly - the retinal tracking in stores doesn't seem to link back to the police fully. so it's possible to assume that the time police people don't control access rights to the prison building. besides, while he's unconsious it doesn't matter what his eyes can do.

* as to why lemar didn't have a brown ball - because the balls were generated by matching a face from the cumulative precog vision. since the vision with lamar was thrown away, he wasn't entered onto the system, so wasn't brown balled. I believe that the ball-name identification was done via face image matching, hence no address either. knowing the time was just a facet of the way precogs saw the event

* the ann lively murder WAS silly. why not make her OD. why not hire a bum to do it? why not just frame her for something and lock her up? after all - they frame anderton, sort of.

* eyeballs may roll like that, but it's pretty unlikely. they wouldn't bounce quite so much either. they don't have a very rigid surface.

reitsma: sorry to pick holes, it is still a great film.

cal: "I believe that the ball-name identification was done via face image matching"

impossible, because if you remember they got the name of the sissor-murder man on the ball, and then had to look up all the people (8 in all) with that name, then collect the police records of them on a silly disk and Cruise looked through each one by hand to find a match! so the names must be found by "magic"!

ahh, magic

i hasn't considered that as a possibility

yes. We have finaly solved it! It was all done by magic. Any gaping plot holes were sealed up with special magic thread. Hooray, I can sleep easy now.

do i detect a hint of sarcasm..?

11 posts in a row... that's worse than me. :-S

cal: No! I love magic. I have just decided that I shall use it as an excuse for everything. It will help lower my blood pressure. I won't get stressed by this sort of thing anymore!!! Magic!

ell: do I get some sort of prize! Hey I had a lot of thoughts. and forgot to put them all into one massive post. Well I guess I just put them into bitesized chunks!

much more readbale. apart from for the list subscribers ;)

I liked the film, it was enjoyable - but again - it was a film.

However Resident evil is the most amusing piece of crap I've seen in a long time :)

* the ann lively murder WAS silly. why not make her OD. why not hire a bum to do it? why not just frame her for something and lock her up? after all - they frame anderton, sort of.

she was cleaned up so she wouldn't have ODed.
If he'd got a bum to do the second murder then it might have been difficult to describe how to kill the person as it had to be pretty similar.
I reckon it was quite easy for Lamar to set Anderton up cause he had an easy pressure point to hit.

but sal - ann lively didn't have to be murdered in the same way, since it wouldn't have needed covering up.

she wouldn't have been able to be murdered- the precogs would know she was going to get murdered and the cops'd get there first.
assuming it's all inside DC though. mind you, I don't think she'd be stupid enough to leave lol

but but but but but, they could just kidnap her and take het elsewhere. the precogs don't deal with kidnappings

"much more readbale. apart from for the list subscribers ;)"
~ Cal

Almost as 'readbale' as your spelling recently- what happened, Cal? ;P You're gonna hafta install a spell checker for yourself if this continues!

my spelling is fine - it's just that my fingers keep hitting the wrong keys (in the wrong order)

So, you're saying it's a mental problem?

i have a motor-neural disorder

(or perhaps i'm just stupid)

We're all guilty of #2

See, this is how I like the site- full of life, and lots of new replies to posts every 15 seconds. :)

and to keep replying fast, i need to make mistakes :)

hehehe :)

=]