Flashback: Rage against the Machine

Resurrecting a few posts from my old blog, circa 2002, which lasted for a month. Let me talk about my old blog for a minute. No, actually it'll just take a couple of seconds. I didn't tell anybody about it. I published it under the pseudonym "Teá Rosales". My email address was wormeater@mac.com. I started it around the time I was submitting my thesis, as a form of "AAAAAAGH THIS IS NOT HAPPENING TO ME I MUST DO SOMETHING UNRELATED TO MY RESEARCH OR I'LL EXPLODE!" Enough said. Here's an old post.

Spielberg does it again: an unsolicited review of Minority Report
30 July 2002
If you loved Saving Private Ryan and didn’t even see The Thin Red Line or if you thought that AI was the best science fiction movie you’d ever seen, then you might want to spare yourself from this rant.

Minority Report was amazingly stupid. Sure, the eye candy was impressive. But then again, visual effects are hardly considered spectacular any more. My first problem had to do with loopholes in the story the size of Shrek’s ass. Why did Anderton use a gun that could kill, when everybody else was using nonlethal weapons?* Why could his original eyes, that betrayed him in a shopping mall, not alert the autho-ri-tahs when he was breaking into the Precrime building to get Agatha? Or into the organ-piping jailer’s, both for him and his wife? And the biggest whoDUHnit of all, why would the old geezer, who could pay somebody to pretend to strangle somebody, not just pay somebody else to really do the job? And how could the old guy strangle Agatha’s mother in the first place? And why would the old guy give Anderton’s wife Anderton’s gun in a box full of personal effects?* Did they give her all the dope they found as well?

Secondly, the whole movie was a series of rip-offs from better sci fi movies from the past. The sleek lines of the Precrime unit building hinted of Gattaca. The scene with Tom Cruise getting his eyes replaced, with those little metal wires to keep his lids from shutting – Clockwork Orange. The joint where you could extract people’s memories? Strange Days. The bear contributed another one: Johnny Mnemonic with regard to the data embedded in a person theme, but I personally think that’s a bit too far off.

And was it just me, but was Agatha played by the “Childlike Empress” of The Neverending Story? Yet another rip-off …

*contributed by the bear


No, no, don’t make me watch another post-1980s Spielberg movie again!…