Premonition - I've got a bad feeling about this
Yesterday, I heard a radio commercial for the new movie Premonition. It contained this phrase: "Critics say, Premonition is a sensational supernatural thriller. Four stars." It didn't name the critics who said these things, I couldn't find them at the page for this movie at Rotten Tomatoes, though I did find phrases like "some sort of record for dreary ridiculousness" and "senseless, incoherent thriller." Since only 6% of critics give Premonition a positive rating, I'm skeptical that anyone, anywhere, gave it four stars, unless it was out of 100. Sony Pictures, which made Premonition, got in trouble once before for making up a movie critic; I'm thinking it's time for them to get in trouble again.
A larger question here is, what's this movie about? And I don't mean the plot - woman wakes up to find her husband killed in a car crash, wakes up next day to find him alive, realizes something has gone wrong with space and time and tries to save husband from the inevitable - I mean what's it really about? It's part of a trend - last fall's Deja Vu was also about preventing a death which had already happened, the upcoming film Next has Nicolas Cage seeing visions of a disaster he must prevent, the short-lived tv series Day Break worked the same theme, and one of the heroes on Heroes can change the space-time continuum to avoid tragedy. We're beyond coincidence here, and taking a peek at the zeitgeist. It looks to me like people are scared. They're looking at the tragic disaster in Iraq, at global warming and other ecological turning points, at how ill-prepared America was for Katrina, at the fact that Osama is still out there, and it becomes pretty clear that this is all not going to shake out well for us. And what some people, at any rate, want to hear is that the disaster that is clearly out there for us, isn't really out there for us.
