I just watched Next starring Nicolas Cage and Jessica Biel. Oh and Julianne Moore. I liked it a lot, mainly because it brought together a slew of my favorite elements: people who can see the future (precogs) and nuclear explosions. And other explosions. Plus it was based on a short story by one of my favorite writers of all time: Philip K. Dick. Now if they had only found different actors than Nicolas Cage and Julianne Moore, we might have had a more appealing movie. Spoilers beneath the fold. This isn’t so much a review as a statement of what I found cool about it.
So while Next had a few flaws, I found myself really enjoying Nicolas Cage’s character, Cris Johnson. The age old question for many geeks as children (and adults) is what super power they would like to have if they could choose just one. Would you like to be able to see the future? What if you could only see two minutes in advance, but you could try out many possibilities of how your actions would affect the future? One recurring theme in Philip K. Dick’s works were precogs. Precog is short for precognition, or the ability to see the future, and usually referred to people who had this ability. The film Minority Report, based on another Dick short story, also featured a precog.
Next demonstrated just how powerful such a person would be as he guided a team of FBI agents through a maze of death in a shipyard, escaped from a casino, escaped from an FBI base, and eluded pursuers down a mountain in the middle of a landslide. In Dick’s worlds, precogs (when they aren’t the villains) often lead a tortured existence, plagued by a lack of surprise. Imagine growing up with such a power, so that everything you see you’ve already played out ten different ways. Awesome power or terrible curse? We cope well enough with not being able to see the future, though we always try to control things as best we can in order to limit the futures we cannot see. Perhaps the reverse would be true for a precog from birth. They would dream of being surprised, but losing their second sight would be crippling. I think it would be different for a precog who gains his power later on. Such a person might be driven by a need to create futures that he cannot see, like Paul and Leto II Atreides from the Dune universe.
