Cruise doesn’t teach anything to Watanabe or his village, I don’t know where you guys get that idea from. (Well, except maybe for that baseball game…) He gives a little bit of military advice, that’s all. Otherwise he adopts the Samurai lifestyle and ideals pretty much wholesale. So helping Watanabe to kill himself at the end is perfectly in line with his new ideals, even if Cruise isn’t quite samurai enough to kill himself, too.
The bad guy officer speaks for the audience when he sees Cruise in that getup, and earlier in the movie when he asks Cruise “what makes you hate your own people so much?”. Good fucking question, one the movie doesn’t answer. Cruise’s character has some serious psychological self-image problems.
Were you sleeping through most of the film? Cruise starts out as a war hero who’s now a drunkard and has to earn a pittance doing some ridiculous salesman act. Then we get half a dozen lengthy flashbacks about how he and his company were ordered to murder helpless women and children. He has some serious psychological problems? No shit, that’s what half the film is all about!
The film treated Cruise’s problems a lot more lightly than they clearly were. Once he goes Samurai, he’s all better. In fact, going samurai is the curing agent. But this was a guy who was unable to have any contact with a non-Western civilization without deciding to adopt it as his own. The massacre worked to establish the asshole character as an asshole and Cruise as a good guy, but it didn’t really explain Cruise’s chameleon act.
And Cruise gives Watanabe a little speech about why not to kill yourself right before the last battle.
Anyway, Cruise needed to die for this movie to work. The whole heroic last charge thing doesn’t really work if you just get seriously wounded and captured. Also, man, Cruise’s character gets a lot of slack from the authorities in that movie. Didn’t he commit a ton of crimes? Why was he free to walk around?
And I won’t even go into the whole trade treaty bullshit. The movie was well shot and well acted(especially by Watanabe), but it was seriously retarded.
This is the thing that makes me keep walking by it at Hastings. I know my wife would love it, but I also fear that every time I saw that same Cruise face with the same Cruise pinched-eyebrow half-smirk he gets every time when he’s doing Serious Acting, I’d be jarred when the next line wasn’t, “Shut up, MacGuire-san. You had me at ohayou.”
How do you know? Thats what I thought, but most of the people I know that saw it think the ending is real. Inside the movie, is there really any way to tell if the end is a dream or not?
I watched the special features last night and Tom is a complete tard in them.
“Like, I trained and then my mind was moving my body and I was moving faster and thats samurai”
WTF, Tom?
So then I go to sleep and I dream Hollywood only allows Tom Cruise to act if he can represent his character with elaborate mime-like cardboard box demonstrations. He put on a pretty good performance.
How do you know? Thats what I thought, but most of the people I know that saw it think the ending is real. Inside the movie, is there really any way to tell if the end is a dream or not?[/quote]
OBVIOUSLY, it is not a dream he’s having in cryo. Guest says that “all your dreams come true” or whatever. But gee, Anderton’s kid is still dead. You’d think his fondest wish would be that right after he solves the case, the cops would find his kid, alive and well.
Besides, it’s not clear, and given that there is no twist based on “it’s not reality” you have to look at the film as being literal. I suppose if you are a postmodernist you can interpret it that way, but I believe Speilberg has denied that the ending is a cryo-induced dream.
Anderton also didn’t dream that he was 60 feet tall and made entirely out of gold. I think it’s entirely plausible that his brain would dream a somewhat reasonable positive outcome.
God forbid anyone make a movie with a subtle nuance, as because it’s not clear Bitterman decrees that I shall look at it as literal.
If you believe the ending is real, the ending is absurdly stupid. Cruise’s drug problem is completely forgotten about and the ending jars with the rest of the movie’s internal logic about the precogs. “My hypothesis” about the ending being a dream makes the entire movie make sense. How the hell did Cruise’s wife break him out of prison? After Cruise breaks in using his eyes, they’d still keep him on the allowed list? In case he wanted to kidnap another precog?
