Dick's "The Golden Man" has just about zero to do with this film.

I guess the producers just wanted to slap "Philip K. Dick" on the poster, so they picked one small element (seeing two minutes into the future) from a Dick story and they paid a gaggle of writers to hammer out a script based on it.

It's sad that Philip K.. Dick, a grand master of the science fiction genre, who wrote the most paranoid, anti-establishment stories has become a brand identifier for weak, Hollywood, action garbage.

The expansion of now is an interesting concept but two minutes seems a bit restricted and pointless. People can believe that they experience and instant now but it takes time for that stuff to be put together by the meat and it fools istself by not noticing the lag times and the resynchronization of sound and vision to play back a "seemless" reality. There are a lot of processes which occur that are way beneath the surface of our consciousness.

Controlling the range, filter and attributes of sensations is essential to control of the mind. It is a model upon which we project what we already know and expect. The other aspect is the degree to which we generate or choose a reality path and how predictable and how relaible the predictions are. l learned the esoteric take of it from Arica in the 70s. Everyone should have some sort of training or experince of controlling their mind and perceptions before they should be considered adult.

What is so special about thinking ahead?

Man bites dog!

Now that hardly ever happens now, does it?

What is now?

When I type this, when you read it and when the next person reads it. Cosmic.

Now what if the Nicholas Cage character turned to the screen and realizes that people are watching him in a movie?

Nah, been done too many times.

Now is what you think it is and what you can't think it is.

I believe that applying expectations of the "Blockbuster Futuristic Action" movie with the "Traditional Science Fiction" stories may not be a fair, especially in the case of "Next".

My opinion is that at its core, "Next" is an exploration of the cosmological concept of multiple realities and psychic concept of pre-vision. If one relaxes the rules a bit and accepts the premise, then it becomes the story teller's job to explore just how such a thing could actually work. I believe the movie scores on these points with much credit due to Tamahori and Cage. The exploration of the concepts "what is it like to experience a pre-vision", and "how could a human actually manipulate multiple realities to exploit these pre-visions" was a clever combination of action and smarts. Simply put: "Next" was like the most clever parts of the "Minority Report" pre-cog chase sequence, and reality-challenging "Momento" combined. A Billy Pilgrim - like character "unstuck" in time.

I respectfully disagree with Ms. Zacharek on the points she chose to criticize. The seemingly fleeting romantic and human interaction moments did not strike me as the result of inadequate movie making so much as they may be intended as subtle examples of the tragedy of how the Cage character is forced to interact with people as a result of his gifts; just as the non sequitur "Momento" was a risky but brilliant first person perspective. If I were to criticize "Next" it would have to be that Tamahori had to limit such a rich topic to an hour and a half. Also, color-izing "Next", as was done in "O Brother, Where Art Thou" and "Sahara", with digital-patina software was a questionable decision when compared with simply relying on good cinematography and lighting; jeez, everyone looked like had been sprayed with some syntho-tanning product. At least they didn't shake the camera a lot.

What is "Momento"? I don't recall this film.

I do remember a film named "Memento" though.

"Momento" was an art-house release about a soccer mom with chronal aphasia who is pertually driving her kids around in an SUV because she can't remember if she's dropping them off at a game or taking them home. *spoiler* The movie ends when the 15th consecutive trip through the same Taco Bell drive-through results in colon failure for everyone in the vehicle.

It's the typo thread. I wrote "pertually" instead of "perpetually", which made it sound like she was just bouncy and sunny.

Meanwhile, as for PKD, I'd like to a filmmaker tackle one of his more challenging works, like "Galactic Pot Healer". But only if it were done by someone of Andrei Tarkovsky's calibre.

I apologize for the misspelling. The name of the movie is "Memento"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/

It is a brilliant cinematic treatment of a medical condition associated with failure by the brain to store short term memories as long term memories. The story is from the first person perspective using a novel and confusing but illuminating out-of-sequence editing style to convey some of what it must be like to experience life with the inability to store long term memories. (It was nominated for an Oscar and won many awards (check out IMDB). (I saw a documentary about a musician who had this condition; he wrote notes to himself as a substitute for long term memory, but in his case he rarely believed he was the author.)

The parallel I was trying to make is that while "Next" was not quite as radically out of sequence as "Memento" or Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" (which follows the character Billy Pilgrim as he experiences his life "unstuck" in time an out of sequence), it is a similar first-person perspective and allows you to experience what some theorize as multiple-realities or multiple-timelines. (A concept still explored by main stream scientists.)

I have a friend with horrible taste in movies, yet he called me and said I HAVE to see this movie. Being the idiot that I am, I went to see this movie without reading the reviews.

I will admit Next is not a horrible movie, it is not a good movie. But in the end it was not worth the $5 I paid for it (thank goodness I didn't go in the evening), nor was it a particularly well spent 2 hours.