Good movie... but definitely not great

Rating: 7/10 (1 July 2002)

I think with such a high tech, futuristic movie there is a tendency to really look for the flaws. I'm not a big fan of this genre for that very reason. I wasn't particularly impressed with the Matrix, because I found the plot so hard to believe. This movie has the same problem. It seems that some future advancements are actually a step backwards. But, kind of ignoring some the `futuristic' aspects of the movie, there are a few good actions sequences, and the plot held my interest as it turned into a murder mystery with a couple of twits in it.
SPOILER ALERT  You can't go any where without having your eyes scanned and being recognized for who you are. That seems reasonable enough for 50 years in the future. But, on the black market you can have new eyes put in, and now you can suddenly walk around with a completely new identity. And the same technology the mall and subway uses to recognize you by an eye scan is apparently the same technology that the most secure installations in the world use. I might have guessed that secure installations would have thrown in a backup thumb print scan or something But, I decided to look past those technological issues, and I found something that bothered me more about the plot. The `pre-cogs', those beings that could see the future, were described as being perfect predictors of the future. The visions that they see are the future. However, we see 4 events of their pre-cognitive ability. The opening scene, where we don't know for sure what would have happened, the murder that Tom Cruise's character commits, which we find out he doesn't commit, Tom Cruise's murder, which doesn't happen, and the murder of the pre-cogs mom, which was dismissed as an echo. So, 4 alerted murders 2 which the killers didn't go through with it 1 which was mis-read by the tech and 1 which we don't know the disposition. Seems like a system which had huge flaws. How did it ever survive testing? Seems like the system wouldn't have really survived to the point of about to go national.