10 / 10
Official trailer
Next ranks among the most underrated time-perception films of the 2000s. Seen it three times. The critics trashed it on release, and they were wrong. It gets a 10 from me. Lee Tamahori directing. Nicolas Cage as a Las Vegas magician who can see two minutes into his own future. Julianne Moore as the FBI agent who wants to use his ability.
Jessica Biel as the woman whose appearance breaks his pattern. Based loosely on Philip K. Dick’s 1954 short story “The Golden Man.”
It works as an action thriller and as the cleanest use of limited precognition I’ve seen on film. I prefer it to most of the decade’s big science fiction releases, and people who lump it in with Cage’s worst work are being unfair. He plays it straight here, and the movie deserves the same courtesy.
The Setup
Cris Johnson (Nicolas Cage) lives in Las Vegas under the stage name Frank Cadillac. He performs a low-end magic act for tourists. He gambles at casinos and never loses more than a small amount because he can see two minutes ahead of any decision he makes. He’s lived this way for years, hiding from anyone who might discover what he can do.
FBI Agent Callie Ferris (Julianne Moore) has been tracking Cris for years. A terrorist organization is preparing to detonate a nuclear weapon in Los Angeles. The federal government needs Cris’s ability to locate the bomb before it goes off. Ferris arranges for Cris’s capture. He escapes.
Liz Cooper (Jessica Biel) is a young woman Cris has been seeing in his visions for weeks. He doesn’t understand why. His ability normally only shows him his own next two minutes. Liz is the exception. He sees her at a diner before she arrives there. He meets her. The encounter is the only thing happening in his life that he can’t fully predict. The film documents what he does when these three forces (his ability, the terrorist threat, and Liz) collide.
The Philip K. Dick Source
Dick’s 1954 short story “The Golden Man” appeared in If magazine.
The setup is different from the film. The Dick story describes a mutant who can see all of his possible futures and choose the branch that produces the outcome he wants. The story is post-apocalyptic. The mutant is gold-skinned and silent. The story is horror, with the mutant as a threat to ordinary humanity.
The film takes the precognition premise and discards everything else. Cris isn’t a mutant. Cris is a human with one limited ability. He can’t see all possible futures.
He can only see his own next two minutes. The constraint is the screenwriter Gary Goldman’s contribution. The Dick original is too cosmic for a thriller. The Goldman adaptation reduces the scope to a level that generates dramatic situations instead of abstract speculation.
The Dick source has been a problem for adaptations. Dick wrote during the 1950s and 1960s when speculative fiction was operating at higher concept levels than mainstream cinema would accept. Most adaptations strip out the cosmic content and keep the central conceit. Total Recall (1990) does this with “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.” Paycheck (2003) does this with the original “Paycheck.” Next does this with “The Golden Man.” The results vary. Next succeeds because the constrained version of the precognition is dramatically productive.
For Writers
Next shows what happens when you constrain a powerful science fiction ability to a small, specific application. Cris can see two minutes ahead. Not five years. Not the entire future. Two minutes. The constraint forces the writer to find dramatic situations where two minutes of foreknowledge matters and where two minutes is also insufficient. The lesson for writers is that powers that solve every problem solve no problem dramatically. If your protagonist has a power that handles the entire story, your story has been handled before it starts.
If your protagonist has a power that handles two minutes at a time, your story is built around the question of what happens at minute three. The constraint is the structure.
The Two-Minute Limit
The two-minute window is the film’s structural achievement. Cris can’t see the bomb. The bomb hasn’t been detonated yet. Until the bomb is within two minutes of his current position, he can’t use his ability to locate it. The premise forces him to be physically close to the threat before his ability helps. The constraint makes the FBI’s interest in him plausible and what makes his ability tactically useful at the climax.
The visual representation of the ability is the film’s craft signature. When Cris is about to face a decision, the film shows him performing every possible action in the two-minute window at once.
Multiple Crises appear on screen, each pursuing a different path. He selects the path with the best outcome. The frame collapses back to a single Cris performing the chosen action. The effect is achieved through compositing and choreography. The technique communicates the ability without requiring expository dialogue.
That multiple-Cris effect is the thing I’d show anybody who doubts this film. It’s clever and fast, and it tells you everything about how his mind works without a word of explanation.
The constraint also generates the central thriller engine. Cris can avoid any individual two-minute danger. He can’t avoid threats that develop over longer periods.
The FBI can corner him by setting up multiple simultaneous threats that exceed what two minutes of foreknowledge can resolve. The bomb threat exists outside the window entirely. He has to walk into the threat to use his ability against it.
The Nicolas Cage Performance
Cage plays Cris at controlled tone. He’s not in the “Cage Rage” mode that dominates the public perception of his work. He’s in the disciplined mode he can deploy when the material calls for it. Cris is intelligent, careful, and slightly sad. He’s been hiding for years. He’s had to learn not to react visibly when he sees the next two minutes of someone else’s death.
I like Cage best in this register. The sadness in Cris moves me more than any of the action, especially the idea of a man who’s trained himself to keep his face still while he watches the next two minutes of a stranger’s death.
The performance is one of Cage’s better 2000s roles.
He had been operating at variable quality across the decade. The National Treasure films (2004, 2007) were commercial. The Wicker Man (2006) was disastrous. Ghost Rider (2007) was middling. Next falls into the same year as Ghost Rider but works at a considerably higher level. The script gave him a character he could play seriously, and he played it that way.
Cage’s career trajectory makes the Next performance worth reconsideration.
His later work has gradually returned him to critical respect after the rocky middle period. Mandy (2018), Pig (2021), and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) have restored his standing. Next deserves to be seen as part of the body of disciplined Cage performances that the louder roles tended to obscure.
The Julianne Moore Performance
Moore plays Agent Ferris as a federal officer trying to do an impossible job under time pressure. She believes in Cris’s ability because the evidence is overwhelming. She also believes that securing his cooperation through institutional force is the suitable approach. The film paints her as a professional trying to prevent a nuclear detonation.
Moore handles the role at the same controlled tone Cage uses.
Ferris doesn’t raise her voice. She doesn’t deliver speeches about the stakes. She does her work. The understated performance is the right choice because the surrounding film could have become hyperbolic without this kind of anchor. Moore’s restraint keeps the institutional side of the story from overwhelming the personal side.
Moore is the reason the FBI half of the movie never turns silly. My one wish is that the script had given her another scene or two, because she’s doing more with Ferris than the pages ask of her.
Moore was at peak across the 2000s. Far from Heaven (2002), The Hours (2002), and Children of Men (2006) had established her as one of the strongest actresses of her generation. The Next role is smaller than the lead work, but it’s not less skilled. She plays Ferris as a complete person in the time the screenplay gives her.
The Jessica Biel Performance
Biel plays Liz at a different tone than Cage and Moore. Liz is open, warm, and unaware of what Cris is. She doesn’t know about his ability or that he’s been tracking her in his visions.
She thinks she’s met a kind man at a diner and is exploring whether to trust him. Biel plays the openness without making the character naive.
The Cris-Liz relationship is the film’s emotional core. Cris has been alone for years. He’s been unable to maintain relationships because he can’t pretend to discover information he’s already foreseen. Liz is the exception. He can’t see her future beyond the present moment. The constraint makes her the only person he can engage with as a real partner instead of as a future he’s already calculated.
The age gap between Cage (forty-three during filming) and Biel (twenty-four) became a critical point on release. The gap was real, but the film addresses it by making Cris’s emotional age considerably younger than his chronological age because of his social isolation.
Instead of pretending the gap doesn’t exist, the film uses it as part of the character work. Critics who wrote the film off over the age gap took the lazy route and skipped what the film does with it.
For Writers
The multiple-Cris visualization in Next is the cleanest cinematic representation of branching futures cinema has produced. The technique works because it doesn’t stop the action. Cris doesn’t pause to consider his options. The film shows his consideration while the scene continues. The audience watches multiple parallel actions and learns to read them as possibilities instead of as events. The lesson for writers is that complex mental processes can be staged as action if you find the right visual grammar.
If your character is calculating outcomes, you don’t have to write the character explaining the calculation. You can show the calculation happening. The technique is rare in cinema because it requires expensive compositing work. Next justified the investment by committing to the technique throughout the film instead of using it once as a gimmick.
The Lee Tamahori Direction
Lee Tamahori came to Next after a varied career.
Once Were Warriors (1994) was his breakout, a New Zealand film about domestic violence in a Maori family. He moved to Hollywood and directed Mulholland Falls (1996), The Edge (1997), Along Came a Spider (2001), Die Another Day (2002), and xXx: State of the Union (2005) before Next. His career has continued in lower-profile productions including Emperor (2020).
Tamahori’s direction in Next is workmanlike and effective. The action sequences are clean. The character scenes work. The pacing across the runtime is tight. Nobody will call it stylish, and I don’t care, because this story doesn’t need style. The script and performances drive the film. Tamahori gets out of the way and lets the material work.
The car chase sequence through the redwood forest near the end of the film is the production’s most ambitious set piece.
Cris uses his ability to predict and avoid pursuing vehicles while driving through difficult terrain at high speed. The sequence integrates the visual effects work with practical stunt driving. The result is one of the few action sequences in 2000s cinema that requires its protagonist’s ability to function.
The Ending
The ending is the film’s controversial moment. Cris uses his ability to discover the location of the nuclear bomb. The terrorists detonate it anyway. He sees the explosion and the loss of life, then wakes up in his motel bed.
The film reveals that everything from Cris’s first agreement to help the FBI has been a vision.
He’s been using his ability to see the consequences of cooperating. The consequences are catastrophic. He now knows what will happen if he goes the direction Ferris is asking him to go. He gets out of bed and prepares to face Ferris with the full information his foresight has provided.
Critics hated the ending. The “it was all a vision” reveal felt like the film cheating its audience out of the catharsis of the resolution. The reading is partly correct. The film does deprive the audience of conventional thriller closure. The reading also misses the point. The ending is showing that Cris’s ability is more powerful than the FBI has understood. He can see further than two minutes when the stakes are high enough. The Liz storyline and the bomb storyline have been a single extended vision.
He now has to live the events knowing what he’s seen.
The rug-pull ending sours a lot of people, and I understand the impulse, but I think it’s the bravest decision in the film. A thriller that refuses to hand you the payoff is taking a risk most studios would never sign off on, and I respect the nerve of it.
The ending also leaves the door open for a sequel that never materialized. The structure is set up. Cris has the full information about what is coming. He has Liz’s location. He’s the bomb’s location. He has Ferris’s tactics. The next two hours of his life will be the actual application of his foresight to the problem. The film just doesn’t show them, and I’d have bought a ticket for that sequel in a heartbeat. The structural choice is daring. It’s also the choice that buried the film commercially.
Craft: An Underrated Achievement
Craft Note
Next works at peak across multiple departments. The Cage performance is one of his disciplined 2000s roles. The Moore antagonist work brings institutional weight. The Biel romantic partner work establishes the emotional stakes. The Tamahori direction handles the action and character work without imposing a style on the material. The multiple-Cris compositing technique is a craft signature few other films have matched. The Goldman screenplay constrains the precognition premise into a dramatically productive shape.
Critical hostility to the ending and audience expectations about Nicolas Cage that the disciplined performance didn’t match buried the film on release. The film made approximately $76 million on a $70 million budget. The financial result was disappointing. The critical result was considerably below what the work earned. Later reevaluation has been slow because the film never had a champion arguing for it.
The 10 rating is what it earns across multiple viewings. The film holds up because the constrained precognition premise rewards careful attention. The multiple-Cris technique is innovative. The performances are stronger than the contemporary critical reception suggested. Next deserves to be seen as one of the strongest mainstream science fiction action films of its decade.
Is Next as good as people say?
A 10. Next is the most underrated time-perception film of the 2000s, and it’s still wrongly treated as a Cage punchline. Cage, Moore and Biel all play it straight, Lee Tamahori keeps it tight, and Gary Goldman turned a Philip K. Dick story into a premise with real rules.
The critics misread the ending, and that misreading cost a smart film its audience. I give it the full 10 because it takes its idea seriously all the way through, and every time the frame splits into a crowd of Crises, I’m grinning.
