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Title: Next

Date Viewed: 5/5/07

Details:

Nicolas Cage

Julianne Moore

Jessica Biel

Director: Lee Tamahori

Score: Mark Isham

Score: +

The Review: Yet another Philip K. Dick short story ("The Golden Man") makes its successful transition to the big screen. It follows in the footsteps of previous adaptations including Minority Report, Bladerunner and Total Recall. The director of this current entrée is not quite in the same category as Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott or Paul Verhoeven (respectively), but the effort is at least creditable.

Cris Johnson (Cage) is a small-time, marginally competent magician who doesn't seem to be all that successful, but haunts the tables at Las Vegas and seems to be a consistent, if small-scale, winner. He's not obviously cheating, but somehow he triggers the attention of casino management, and in the ensuing shuffle trying to eject him, it becomes clear to us (the audience) that he has a specific, small and unusual talent -- the ability to see perhaps five minutes into the future, but only for his future -- and he uses this sense to stay one step ahead of the law. We see this in the opening of the film, and it sets the stage for a curious exploration of how such a subtle talent might be put to use on a larger scale, for somewhat more serious ends, controlled by the hands of the FBI (with Moore as the agent in charge). There's a bit of hand-waving to sporadically extend the scope of his talent -- when he engineers an encounter with an attractive women (Biel) with whom he's become obsessed -- but we might accept that for plot's sake, even if it does break the focus a bit. The anomaly does provide a puzzle to chew on while trying to follow what's happening on screen.

Personally, I think Cage is good with this type of Dickian character, aware of his difference and limitations, but not working beyond his ego. But you have to not get sick at the sight of Cage, for this to work. Effective score by Mark Isham.

Too often, a fictional paranormal trait is writ too large, an exaggerated and mechanistically unrealistic caricature of itself. Yes, it's fiction, but it's also science fiction, damn it, so take some care with the science! Dick's short story is an example of an approach that looks at the more moderate, almost "tiny" paranormal skill -- a gift that would seem to be almost too small, too constrained to be useful -- and works out its nuances and consequences. He offers no explanations, no nuts-and-bolts; he only shows what it is and how it's being used. His micro-skill shares this significant attribute with a few gifts described in various Pegasus stories by Anne McCaffrey -- most notably "A Womanly Talent" (edited and anthologized in To Ride Pegasus from an original 1969 Analog story -- which itself was given a stunning Kelly Freas cover illustration, so appealing that I still have somewhere after all these years the small poster made from it, and so unusually colored that it is spectacularly enhanced by covering one eye with a Wratten #12 red filter. Oops, RTI.)

Both Dick and McCaffrey offer deceptively subtle, suitably minute talents, curiously appropriate for the tasks they're being written into. One way of looking at this is -- a massive reduction in the magnitude of suspension of disbelief to enjoy one's entertainment. Another -- it is these smaller, more modest mutant talents that have a chance of (a) coming close to conservation of canonical physical laws and simple mass action, and (b) permitting mechanistic hypotheses near the edge of current realms of molecular & cellular biology, as well as neurophysiology. Perhaps it depends on how much suspension of disbelief you need to read a movie review.

(19-May-07)

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