I would imagine not a few people here have seen it - what's your opinion?
I give it a C+, mostly for set design and a few excellent scenes of action and drama, but it fell apart towards the end and only slightly implied any useful social critique (which is inseperable from any passage of Dick's work). Any forays into cognition theory vis a vis the precogs are ignored, an area ripe for exploration in modern sf. Barely glanced at is the ethics of using their creation, and society's chemical manipulation of genetics and destiny. Instead we get another dose of technological fetishism and clever engineering problems to contribute more to a scene's dramatic tension than an ethical or sociological seriousness. A scene that would have worked especially well but just couldn't escape Spielberg's penchant for cuteness is the spider/eye-scanners spreading out through a slum tenement to identify all "warm bodies" within IR scan range. Instead of examining closer the chilling implications of this, the scene instead opts for a charm reminiscent of *batteries not included. I suppose Spielberg thinks we'll "get" many of those themes for ourselves, yet he feels it's necessary to show us a timer on a bed stand again to remind us that Cruise is jeopardizing his sight by removing the bandages too early to allow the scanner to read his new eyes. In the first scene, Cruise has to say "which one is it?" out loud, even though we already know that's what he's thinking. Is this cinema that respects it's audience's intelligence, and dares to take it farther than any sf movie has before? Did he learn nothing from Kubrick? The movie has many more logical errors, some so large as to be incredibly insulting, indeed large enough to render most of the plot moot, but I don't want to set aside a spoiler space at this point. Aside from the science, I would take issue with most of the plot structure, but perhaps that's for a different kind of forum altogether, or in case anyone wishes to debate on that point here as well.
On a hopeful note, the film was preceded by a teaser for Solaris, a film based on the the Stanislaw Lem novel (previously filmed by Tarkovsky in Russian back in the 70s, required for any true sf cineaste), to be produced by James Cameron and directed by Steven Soderbergh. It should have the production values and the intelligence, and I would be disappointed if it wasn't one of the best sf films in many years.
John Le Coq
I give it a C+, mostly for set design and a few excellent scenes of action and drama, but it fell apart towards the end and only slightly implied any useful social critique (which is inseperable from any passage of Dick's work). Any forays into cognition theory vis a vis the precogs are ignored, an area ripe for exploration in modern sf. Barely glanced at is the ethics of using their creation, and society's chemical manipulation of genetics and destiny. Instead we get another dose of technological fetishism and clever engineering problems to contribute more to a scene's dramatic tension than an ethical or sociological seriousness. A scene that would have worked especially well but just couldn't escape Spielberg's penchant for cuteness is the spider/eye-scanners spreading out through a slum tenement to identify all "warm bodies" within IR scan range. Instead of examining closer the chilling implications of this, the scene instead opts for a charm reminiscent of *batteries not included. I suppose Spielberg thinks we'll "get" many of those themes for ourselves, yet he feels it's necessary to show us a timer on a bed stand again to remind us that Cruise is jeopardizing his sight by removing the bandages too early to allow the scanner to read his new eyes. In the first scene, Cruise has to say "which one is it?" out loud, even though we already know that's what he's thinking. Is this cinema that respects it's audience's intelligence, and dares to take it farther than any sf movie has before? Did he learn nothing from Kubrick? The movie has many more logical errors, some so large as to be incredibly insulting, indeed large enough to render most of the plot moot, but I don't want to set aside a spoiler space at this point. Aside from the science, I would take issue with most of the plot structure, but perhaps that's for a different kind of forum altogether, or in case anyone wishes to debate on that point here as well.
On a hopeful note, the film was preceded by a teaser for Solaris, a film based on the the Stanislaw Lem novel (previously filmed by Tarkovsky in Russian back in the 70s, required for any true sf cineaste), to be produced by James Cameron and directed by Steven Soderbergh. It should have the production values and the intelligence, and I would be disappointed if it wasn't one of the best sf films in many years.
John Le Coq
