Maybe my expectations were a bit too high. With Ghost Rider, I kinda knew what I was getting into, but I thought Next (2007) starring Nicolas “the Mage” Cage would be right up my alley. Here was an entertaining Cage film I hadn’t seen yet that had a lot of promise. 

Mid-aughts sci-fi, time scrying, a Philip K. Dick story adaptation: surely it wouldn’t disappoint? 

After all, I loved Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Minority Report.

But now having watched it, even worse rented, all I have to say about it is:

“Next…”  

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OK, you’re not getting off the hook that easily. (And neither am I.) 

What Next Was About

Cris Johnson (Nicolas) is a Las Vegas “magician” who goes by the stage name Frank Cadillac (a mashup handle he came up with by thinking of two of his “favorite things: Frankenstein and Cadillacs.”) But Cris isn’t a two-bit charlatan as much as he is a 2-minute Nostradamus (but only for predicting his own experience: classic narcissist behavior.)

No joke; Cris can scry two minutes into his own future to get a jump start on everyone else, and with that two minute foresight do amazing things like win at blackjack, steal a car, evade hotel security, and drive faster than a speeding train. Yes, he really did most of those things in the opening scenes of the movie. 

If that sounds preposterous, it is, but it gets worse. Someone in the FBI / NSA, Special Agent Callie Ferris (Julianne Moore), gets wise to Cris and his low-fi psychic abilities and determines that he is their answer to a tough problem. Cris must be enlisted to subvert a nuclear bomb threat some random terrorist group wants to unleash on the city of Los Angeles. Callie and her crew chase Cris and his new bae Liz Cooper (Jessica Biel) around Nevada for a while, but as you can imagine, Cris is kind of hard to pin down. He sees around corners.

(Personally, I would have tried to time his capture to a moment when I knew he was probably in deep R.E.M sleep, but that’s just me being practical.) 

The main point of interest in the movie, other than Cris being able to see outcomes two minutes into his future, is that when he meets Liz, he can see longer into the future than his norm. I thought he said something like seven minutes, (but I may have only been paying half attention at this point.)

Eventually, Cris is coerced / convinced he must help Callie catch the terrorists because they have kidnapped his girlfriend and plan to blow her up along with the rest of L.A. In one of the worst scenes of torture on film, Cris is forced to watch a (gasp!) local news station (ala Clockwork Orange) including all the commercials, so that he can find out where the bombing is going to happen, specifically and therefore help prevent it from happening at all. 

Because: future casting up to 7 minutes. We all know you can’t get anywhere even a mile away in southern Cali in less than 30 minutes, so this whole shenanigan is complete and total science fiction, but hey, I watched it anyway.

Using his internal Infinity time stone, Cris finds his girl getting blown to smithereens at the top of a parking garage, so they swoop in to rescue her. Cris leads the SWAT team into the battle-that-isn’t-yet and points out bombs pre-detonation hiding around dark corners, and snipers above before they go a-sniping. He moves at the EXACT right time to avoid injury, and never stubs his toe once. He even took multiple possible time paths creating cool Cris Johnson ghosts in his wake, and through the power of time scrying, eventually found and freed his lover, Liz. Hooray! 

Only he did something wrong. He missed something. It was a mistake. And the bomb detonates on the city. Fade to black.

This would have been a cool, if dark, ending to the movie. I would have liked this movie (just a little). But it seems the producer, director, or someone in charge, looked two minutes into the future beyond this ending, into the the hearts and minds of the action movie audience as they were leaving their seats in disgust, chucking empty popcorn buckets at the unsuspecting screen, and screaming WTF was that?!?

The hero doesn’t win?

The terrorist wet dreams are accomplished? 

The beautiful Hollywood starlet is nothing but a pile of bone and ash?!?

This could not be. 

So the brain trust rolled the whole movie back–using the cheap “it was all a dream” device common amongst the middle school literati and Gilligan’s Island screenwriters. But this time they were using time’s relativity as the dream we were all waking up to.

Cris wakes up with Liz in the bed they slept in the first night the two hooked up. Why? Because I guess time is relative, and the butterfly effect makes it possible to change outcomes, and because of this Cris can see all futures at once (or at least those he’s involved in), and as soon as you look at the future, it changes that future. Blah, blah, blah. The end. Cris takes a different path from the one that leads to the explosion, or attempts to, into infinity.  I don’t really know. Like I said, I tuned it ALL out.

But that’s basically what happens in Next. Dumb.

The Problem With Next

I know there are a lot of time travel theories and explanations out there. I’m not going to unpack them all here. Just watch Back the Future, The Terminator, Loop, Groundhog Day, 12 Monkeys, The Avenger’s Endgame, Dark (Netflix), or Lost for a basic movie viewers understanding, or if you need a refresher on the many things that can get pretty fucked up when people start jumping around or messing with time.

Boiled down: paradox is the main problem that occurs when something that shouldn’t be there is there in linear time. Multi-dimensionality is the other problem. As soon as you interfere with an event that’s already (or is yet to have) happened, you create a split or a new timeline / dimension. You mess with the flow of time. Shit gets real.

But with Next some of the paradox and the multi-dimensionality is not an issue because it’s the future and not the past that Cris is accessing and attempting to change. However, I kept thinking about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle which says that: 

there is a limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known. In other words, the more accurately one property is measured, the less accurately the other property can be known.

And the often misappropriated but similar observer effect which basically states that in the act of observing something, you’ve already disturbed it’s ability to be measured. I’m not a total science nerd, but the above citations probably cast that opinion into doubt, HOWEVER, I just kept asking questions in my mind throughout the film related to uncertainty and the observer effect. For example:

• When does the two-minute of future vision start?
• Is it constant awareness of the future or is it two minute bursts? 
• How does the timestamp work?
• As soon as Cris acts (or doesn’t act) doesn’t that alter the timeline he initially saw? 
• Would altering his timeline create multiple possible timelines (in which case how many of these can Cris see at once and wouldn’t they split off into infinite possibilities?) 
• What about the inevitability of action or fatalism? (In the TV series, Lost this argument was adequately described as “whatever happened happened” Meaning there’s no point in trying to change the future because you would ultimately end up doing the things you saw in your vision anyway.) 

The other problem I had with the movie is that in the diner when Cris is trying to Groundhog Day his way into the heart of Liz by choosing the optimal future based on his not-yet completed actions, isn’t he seeing actual things he’s tried? 

Or is he also able to see possible future outcomes based on the 2-7 minutes that he can see for the present action? In which case, there’s an infinitude of possible reactions that she could give, and how do you trust “potential reactions” of another person as actual possibilities? 

To make it even more complicated, because he’s not able to travel back in time, like Bill Murray did repeating the same day over and over, all the other factors will change which creates even more improbability and uncertainty. The experiment can only happen really once with those same factors, not multiple times like we saw.

Cris was able to use the creepy ex-boyfriend’s behavior to find the right behavior that would make Liz sympathize with him (through multiple interactions…how? no idea!), but in reality he could only choose to do one thing…unless he’s able to see multiple possible things for one future action…which leads me to the biggest problem of all…

The Biggest Problem With Next 

Insanity. This movie was so distracting (and preposterous) for me because as much as I love Nicolas Cage and to a much lesser degree this character Cris Johnson, I don’t think Cris has the mind of a super computer. If anything they kind of downplay his gift even though the FBI would love to exploit it, E.T. style.

Let’s just say he can look into his own future by 2 minutes and with extended girlfriend WIFI maybe more time and potential timepaths, I don’t think his brain could literally take it. I’ve read a lot of comic books in my day (and PKD comes from that kind of storytelling I think), and insanity is almost always the outcome for these near omniscient type mutants who have the power to observe fate and still monkey with it. 

It would quickly break his mind having to see all the possibilities even with a short time frame. Because everything spirals out into the multiverse (just watch a few Loki on Disney+ about how variants work) and things get very complicated very quickly. You’d need a highly advanced AI hive mind like in The Matrix or something with a lot more horsepower to process all the permutations; and then if his awareness is constant, the processing load just builds and builds and builds until your tiny brain becomes this giant rainbow wheel of death that can’t load or process or move until the whole system crashes.

i.e. pan slowly onto Cris in the fetal position.

I just don’t buy it. 

What’s even more eye-rolly for me is how the movie itself tries to mention and explain some of these time problem realities at the end, when Cris talks about every decision or choice creating more decisions / choices (i.e. uncertainty). They were dipping their toes in the kiddie pool acting like it was Typhoon Lagoon or something. I realize that the “it was all a dream” rollback wasn’t intended to be seen that way. They were attempting to show that Cris could see multiple different paths and each one changed the next so there was some opportunity for him to rewrite the future’s history (that hadn’t quite happened yet). But it felt kind of lazy to me, and very much an afterthought given the set up. 

I expect a lot more from my time manipulation storylines! 

First for Nicolas Cage as Cris Johnson

• First job as a psychic / magician
• First time in a movie with Columbo (Peter Falk)
• At the Grand Canyon
• Appearing on screen in triplicate (or more)
• Orchestrating a SWAT team with hand motions and futuristic intel

Recurrences 

• Sporting a really bad hair style (Zandalee, Adaptation., Multiple)
• Appearing on screen in duplicate (Adaptation.)
• Racing a train (Racing With The Moon)
• In (or causing) a bomb scare (with a longer-than-reasonable timeline) (Face/Off)
• Messing around with geckos and indigenous people (Time to Kill)
• Driving fast (Gone in Sixty Seconds)
• In a movie with that guy I liked from Deadwood (Jim Beaver) who plays some kind of policeman / FBI agent (Adaptation.) 
• In / on the Vegas Strip (Honeymoon in Vegas, Leaving Los Vegas)
• In a movie with Jose Zuniga (Con Air)
• In a casino (Honeymoon in Vegas, Snake Eyes)
• In a terrible catastrophe that could have, but didn’t REALLY occur (Snake Eyes)
• Playing pool (Racing with the Moon)
• Wearing weird eye wear (Fire Birds, National Treasure)

5 Sorta Good Quotes from Next

“Do leprechauns get punched in the face or get their cars stolen?”

“I’d like to meet their shaman.”

“Did you hear the one about the Zen master who ordered a hot dog. He said, Make me one with everything.”

“It helps if you don’t speak right now.”

“You have one way out of this. That wasn’t it.” 

Next In Summation

Cris Johnson actually had a few prophetic words that resonated with me when he said, “I’ve seen every possible ending here. None of them are good for you.”

I just didn’t realize at the time, he was talking to me about the movie I was actually watching. Dude totally broke the 4th wall and my heart with this film.

And when Nicolas Cage starts talking to you directly on the WATC(H), that’s when you just smile to yourself, check the time, nod politely, and say, “Next!”