| Overall Grade: |
A |
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| Story: |
B+ |
|
|
| Acting: |
A |
|
|
| Direction: |
A- |
|
|
| Visuals: |
A+ |
|
|
"Next" is about choice and free will,
by Jonathan (movies profile)
Nov 16, 2007
8
of
9 people found this review helpful
I completely disagree with the Critics' C- grade on Yahoo. This modern morality tale is a worthy film, especially if you are seeking more than light entertainment.
In "Next", our less-than-shining knight/hero, Cris, is faced with choices every moment in an oh-so-tangible fashion that few people experience. Using his psychic foresight, we meet him as a Vegas magician, gaming a blackjack table for easy cash, Cris is a self-centered, everyman trickster god with a talent for two-minute prognostication, an underdeveloped sense of compassion and the personality of a desperate loser, but driven by a desire to find redemption in love.
Of course, we are all given free will to choose our actions, but Cris can choose with the wisdom of knowing the outcome of his choice. Imagine living our whole messy human lives with the clarity and logic of a chess game, every permutation explorable, every outcome knowable. Cris is a perfect auto-didact, able to learn lessons before choosing action.
Ultimately, Cris has to choose some action and his imperfect, human choices are fodder for the plot: choose to help and he changes the world he was trying help, this film is set in a realistically relativistic universe. If time is just another dimension that some talented humans can explore, then no laws of physics were broken in the making of this film.
Love and compassion are the fulcrum for the entire movie. Redeemed in love, Cris sheds his limitations, shoulders his cross/responsibility, and in the finest traditions of the world's religions, our hero faces his responsibility to serve in compassion, in a plausibly human fashion. |
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