Raising Cain : There's foreshadowing and then there's ridiculous…

I like this movie, but the whole sundial thing was absolutely ham-fisted. That's not how you do foreshadowing, people shouldn't even know it's coming. This gets beaten into the ground in about the first 5 seconds, and we probably end up with at least 3 minutes of scenes where it's somewhere in the scene. The best way to do foreshadowing is to feature whatever the key element is, but NOT to let the viewers know that it's foreshadowing. The moment they notice that, it's all over. If you do it right, they will go back and try and spot where it first happened.

The sundial was amateur bush league crap. There is a psychology to doing something like this, and having a truck driving back and forth for the entire final sequence completely ruins that. It's like this is a first semester film school project.

And why can't these jackasses park a truck, anyway?

You'd be right if someone actually ended up being impaled, but the whole point of this scene is to ridiculously overdo the foreshadowing and then completely subvert it with a gag right at the last moment. The joke being that these sorts of scenes so often end in a clich impalement, but in this case Dr. Nix's stray bullet knocks off the end of the sundial castrating it.

Compare this to the actual impalement earlier in the movie, with the statue's lance killing Jenny (in what turns out to be a dream). It isn't lingered on at all, it's just seen as she drives past.

The reason they can't park the truck is because the driver is drunk. If you listen, one of his colleagues mentions this.

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That's not how you do foreshadowing, people shouldn't even know it's coming.

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In classic, near-subliminal foreshadowing, sure. But that's not de Palma's way. He's not trying to slip something in on an audience, and use foreshadowing only so it doesn't seem abrupt when it comes into focus. de Palma treats such elements like chess pieces being visibly moved into an attacking position; his way of upping the tension is by making no secret of the fact that the characters have moved into the shadow of a very visible danger.



You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.