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***NOW THERE BE SPOILERS.***
>>>i didn't say she was drowned." ah, for fuck's sake. <<<
EXACTLY, Gypt. That bit drove me fucking insane. I've read that stupid slip-of-the-tongue device in bad children's detective novels when I was 10.
The script is full of lazy, lazy contrivance such as that. During the entire chase through the car factory not one of the dozen cops chasing Anderton thinks to close the giant front door so he can't just drive out. When Anderton is tagged for Pre-Crime and becomes a fugitive, his retinal patterns are NOT immediately erased from the police computer system, or put on a "most wanted" list (I've known people here in 2002 who have been fired from their menial office jobs and have had all their security badges immediately confiscated, computer passwords changed, etc etc) - he (and later, his wife too!) can just walk right into the deepest security levels, with only an eyeball in a baggie.
After Anderton is arrested and put in suspended animation, his wife is given a box of his personal effects. Among these are his gun and his severed eye - but it doesn't make a scrap of sense why she should be given those two things (particularly the gun - presumably in a world where they were trying to totally eradicate violent crime they would have some pretty harsh gun control laws, and the gun would be either impounded or destroyed, not just chucked in a box of junk and handed over to a civilian), but of course, she needs them to bust him out of jail. Laziness prevails.
I also hated the depressingly mundane, by-the-numbers, cliche-ridden Hollywood thriller final act, when the "plot" is revealed. Such great care has obviously been taken to create this extraordinary world, and the murder mystery plot is as ordinary as can be.
A far better ending, in my opinion, would have been when Anderton confronts Leo Crow in the hotel room. Finally faced with the man who abducted his son, Anderton decides not to kill him. He stops himself from becoming a murderer and proves that our futures are not predestined, but he does it at the expense of everything that drives him as a person - he loses both the chance for revenge that he's been craving for 6 years, and his unshakable faith in the PreCrime system which he had believed to be infallible and is now revealed to be fundamentally flawed. The system doesn't work, it is dismantled, the end. Would have been simple, elegant, and would have provided the audience with some philosophical and ethical questions to ponder on the drive home. The scene in the hotel room is easily the emotional zenith of the film, and I thought it was quite effective, until the crushingly stupid twist where Crow reveals he's just a patsy. I literally slapped my forehead at that part. Everything after that is just extraneous, boring bullshit, and as Gypt says, does absolutely nothing to explore the alleged themes of the film.
I also hated Spielberg's insistence on giving us little jokey bits to chuckle at - oh! The flames from the jetpack cooked all the hamburgers! Ho ho! Anderton falls into a yoga class! Chortle! Look, he grabbed the wrong sandwich! Tee hee hee! There go your eyeballs, John, better catch them! Big laffs! None of these worked for me and only served to ruin scenes that would have been much more effective without them. Particularly the spider-bot sequence, which I thought could have been very creepy and tense but was killed by the silly gag with the couple fighting who stop only long enough to let the spiders scan them, then pick up right where they left off.
The overwhelming praise for this film totally mystifies me. Critics everywhere are hailing it as a masterpiece, on par with Blade Runner, 2001, and saying it's the greatest film Spielberg has made since Raiders of the Lost Ark. I do not understand it, because it really is junk, and the more I think about it the more I find to dislike... |
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