Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
Well yeah. But I think a lot of the movie's problems came from taking that basic premise - particularly the ending, which is what makes the entire story hold together in the first place - and changing it to provide a more thriller/action-packed plot. The seed story itself is very solid.
I have my own issues with that movie, specifically that it manufactures a false binary with precrime - that it's either a flawless system or a constitutional nightmare - rather than a highly accurate warning system that the State could use to step in with measured preventative actions, like sending a trained official to confront them first rather than going whole-hog and convicting them of murder and tossing them in cold storage.

I will give Minority Report credit for this though - and why I don't regret seeing it personally - that it presents a fairly visually appealing and positive future with well-considered futurists elements underpinning it. Yes, it has psychics and such, but the crux of strong SF is to take the absurd and surround it with more believable elements and Minority Report does that well with its universe -- if not story and characters. While Dick's Minority Report is, well... par for the course as far as his settings go.

Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
On the other hand, I think Total Recall (the original) was a far better story than We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, which it was based on. So like everything, it's hit or miss.
Yeah, but We Can Remember It For You Wholesale was only a few pages and is basically just a fairly long joke... which is why the remake's claim that it was going to be following the source material more than the original was so confusing.