Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Bulkington (A) on July 26, 2004 at 06:59:21

In Reply to: Hi Bulkington. Please tell me what you think... posted by orejones on July 23, 2004 at 11:28:16:

Makes me want to re-view it. A lot of the parallels you mentioned escaped me. I particularly liked:

Water, that symbol of primal unconscious, is used wisely in this film: future seers are in a pool and, in the climax of a prediction, when images of a crime-to-be are being formed, Agatha goes under the water, as if she was drowning; and her mother, in one of the root knots of the film, died by drowning, too; and then, Anderton´s misfortunes, what almost killed his soul and kept him emotionally dead for such a long time, started when he was under water in a pool, when he momentarily went out of conscience about his kid.

Who wrote the screenplay, I wonder? I'm starting to think that maybe a lot of what's good about this film had less to do with Speilberg than with the screenplay, because one can imagine this film having been done better by someone else without the camp and maybe with some slight conceptual tinkering.

Another critique I forgot to mention above was the unlikely practice of pre-trial and -judgement. Perhaps they've stamped out organized crime in this world (though its illicit drug trade suggests otherwise), but certainly in this future, as in our present, there's an interest in, say, questioning perpetrators in order to apprehend potential accomplices in or, as we witness in the film, accessaries to a murder.

Also, the film opens by establishing a distinction between crimes of passion, which the pre-cogs foresee with short notice, and premeditated crimes, which they see far in advance. Anderton's crime is seen well in advance, suggesting that it's premeditated, but it isn't. Certainly he's thought often about killing whoever was responsible for his son's disappearance, but there's no necessary connection between the anonymous perpetrator in his mind's eye and the set-up who becomes that man only upon discovery and further becomes his son's murderer only after the false confession that drives Anderton nearly to the point of killing the man our of passion, not premeditation. And, again, there's no logical reason why Von Sydow's planting this guy in a hotel could result in Anderton's finding him and killing him--a causal chain absolutely necessary for a pre-cog to be able to foresee any such murder occurring. What if it were Von Sydow's premeditation that resulted in its having been foreseen so far in advance? That's interesting, and it was probably worth exploring, but Anderton still would have needed some kind of impetus outside of his crime having been foreseen to lead him to the crime in the first place.

I haven't seen Solaris in a while, but wasn't there something Solaris-like about the ending? And wouldn't that compound the argument that, like in Brazil, the happy ending occurs entirely in our hero's head?