Why do people hate this movie?????

I did read the "book", actually a novella, along with every other short work and about 16 SF novels ones of Philip K. Dick, including all the "major" works. This encompasses everything as yet used in a movie.

That is why I hate this movie. Better not to look to closely at original here.

It uses a microscopic portion of the Dick work (only the seeing forward part), uses it for free and without any artistic control since the short works from the 50's e.g. Second Variety (Screamers), Adjustment Team (Adjustment Bureau), and The Golden Man (Next) are in public domain, and uses the Dick name for all it's worth to promote it. (Which gratefully in this case did not save it from being a major bomb at the box office.) There is so little of the original story and the original story was so much more interesting. It is not really such a terrible movie, it is the exploitation without an even remotely faithful rendering that I object to. It was stolen to make a Cage vehicle, period.

I also did not like Adjustment Bureau, another public domain name steal, for reasons other than poor adaptation, but did not bother me as much because it really wasn't such a great story in the first place, suitable for a half hour TV show perhaps but not a movie, but rather something gotten over the fence to put more horse meat on the table in the 50's between better efforts.

CB

Good Times, Noodle Salad

Please, there was NOTHING difficult to grasp in this movie... at all! There is no need whatsoever for multiple viewings to 'get it'. The movie sucked, plain and simple... one can easily determine that with a single viewing. The acting was atrocious, from the stars down to the extras. The story was barely even recognizable to the source... both of which left it not all that entertaining.

Stories by Philip K. Dick do make fabulous PREMISES and have the potential to make really great flicks... provided they (the directors, producers and screenwriters) actually stick relatively close to the source material. This however, was one of the most egregious mutilations of his work ever tranferred to film. The only ones that seem "intellectually incapable" in this situation, were the screenwriters. Most that have adapted his work have managed to stay true... at least thematically... to Dick's material, regardless of the changes they made in order to better suit film. Veerhoeven's Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Impostor, Paycheck, and perhaps to a slightly lesser degree Blade Runner & Minority Report, have all achieved this. Next failed... MISERABLY!

Seriously, as an implied reader of his work you should know why this steaming pile really failed... and it has nothing to do with the audience's inability to understand it!

um, because it is THE STEEEYOOPIDEST PLOT OF ALL TIME!!!

Okay - so for example, take the diner scene - he runs thru about 10 different alternate scenario's until he gets the one right so he gets the girl...
why wouldn't this apply to HIS WHOLE LIFE??
Why would ANYTHING EVER go wrong for him, if he can just keep adjusting it?

In fact - HOW DOES HIS LIFE EVER GO FORWARD????

Where is he when he is seeing 2 minutes into the future? Isn't he just another second into the next 2 minutes in the future?

And htf did the terrorists even know/ give a $hit about him?!??

And since when do 9.8s immediately fall for creepy hobo's with birds on their heads spouting stalker-esque destiny quotes??

WORST MOVIE E-E-E-E-E-EVERS!

His mistake was he was focused 100% on the girl, and the terrorists had set things up so that the bomb would be going off elsewhere while they would have the girl. That or they didn't and that's simply how things happened, but either way, in the future that we saw him see (and chances are he was able to see a lot more of them), he was focused on the girl and not on the bomb that unbeknownst to him was going to kill them all (he hadn't even done anything to figure out where it was going to be let alone when it would go off).

We don't know all the futures he saw that weren't shown to us, but presumably he'd have been able to focus on the bomb, find out where it would be and when it would go off, and do the same thing in the future that we saw, only direct the team to deal with the bomb. And of course the terrorists at that point didn't even know Biel was involved so with things done right, they'd not even know about her at all to be able to capture, which is of course why he said at the end as long as they leave her out of it.

Whether by accident or on purpose, the movie's a lot smarter than people give it credit for. It's not like super amazing, but sorta like Deja Vu, it's a slightly flawed playing out of an absolutely brilliant premise. It's a shame that both of those weren't written better and done by better directors, because done right they'd be as widely beloved as the likes of Inception or Memento.