Minority Report
Reviews by : Kyle DuVall Eric Barker Gareth Von Kallenbach

Steven Spielberg's purpose as a filmmaker is to tell stories that communicate to our emotions. To paraphrase Mr. Spock in Wrath of Khan that is his "first, best destiny… Anything else is a waste of materials."

Spielberg's detractors perennially bemoan a perceived lack of depth and intellect in many of his films, they call him manipulative, sappy or (gasp!) too "Hollywood". Sentiment, to them, is anathema to real "cinema". Manipulation is malevolent. But cinema is always manipulation and one of the greatest inherent strengths of the medium of film is its ability to appeal to our emotions. Stephen Spielberg can articulate emotion, from fear to excitement to sorrow like no one else, and his latest film, Minority Report, embraces these strengths to tell a very satisfying very exciting story, one driven by emotion, but one bolstered by some very big ideas.

Minority Report is loosely based on the visionary story of the same name by Phillip K. Dick. It's a story of staggering ideas that have very intimate human consequences. In his interpretation of this story, Spielberg focuses on characters more than pure ideas. Minority Report's detective/action plot occupy the film's foreground. Thus, the film's big ideas serve as backdrop and framework for a humanistic story, one that toys with excitement and uneasiness in equal measures. It's the exact opposite of the dynamic that drove the deeply flawed and hotly debated A.I., where philosophy and speculation was always the end, and drama, plot and charcters were merely the means. Minority Report, even with its high-concept intellect, is not a film at odds with what makes Stephen Spielberg a great filmmaker, namely his ability to entertain us through our emotion, its one that uses those strengths in new way, while never failing to satisfy the audience.

Minority Report takes place in the year 2054. It's always a bad idea to be too specific with dates in a movie like this, (Its 2002, and New York is not a maximum security prison, there are no colonies on the moon and I still don't have my flying car) but that's inconsequential. In this future, the emergence of mutations with the power to foresee acts of murder has initiated the creation of an expirmenetal "Pre-Crime" unit. With the help of three precognitive mutants, these detectives can see murders before they actually happen and arrest and incarcerate "pre-criminals" often before they even know they are going to kill anyone. As the film begins, the Pre-Crime unit has all but eliminated murder in Washington DC and the nation is about to vote on a referendum that would make the pre-crime initiative national.

Pre-Crime's top cop is John Anderton (Tom Cruise). He's good at his job but, true to Minority Reports hard-boiled sensibilities, he's also, Predictably, haunted by his past. His son was kidnapped from a public pool years prior to the story, and we are later informed that if pre-crime had been in place just six months faster, his son might still be around. Since the tragedy, Anderton's wife has left him, and he has become a drug addict obsessed with hologarms of his son and his former life. In essence, he's not just a cop, he's a cop on the edge.

Trouble starts when the attorney general sends an investigator named Danny Wittwer (Colin Farrell) to investigate Pre-Crime objectively and search for flaws in the system. This puts him at odds with Anderton, who reacts with a combination of confidence and resentment to this new investigation. But as Anderton lets Wittwer in on the operation of the Pre-Crime division its increasingly clear that Wittwer's worldview means his interest is more than a little adversarial.

But at the behest of Pre-Crime's Director, Burgess (Max Von Sydow) Anderton co-operates with this investigator for the good of the project. But things are about to change for Anderton, who's faith in pre-cog is blind and unshakeable. Soon the pre-cogs reveal a new vision of murder, one with Anderton pulling the trigger on a man named Leo Crow. Anderton suddenly finds himself on the run from his own colleagues, wondering whether the vison represents a flaw in the system he has invested his life in, or whether he really will be a murderer, and if so, why is he going to kill a man he doesn't even know in 36 hours?

So Anderton must flee through the film's dystopian world in search of answers, answers that will lead him to some unsettling truths about pre-crime and its ramifications. His flight is the basis for some excellent set pieces, from a comical and exciting free-for-all with jetpacks, to a tense and creepy sequence where robotic spiders skitter through a tenemant crawling into every nook and cranny in search of their pre-emptive fugitive.

The film, as stated before, throws out some lofty concepts about determinism and justice, but this is not a movie that pontificates or overtly philosophizes, it's one that moves. As we move through Minority Report's tech-noir landscape, disturbing ideas are always on display in the background, but they never cause the film to lose its focus or forward momentum. Hence, we get a sort of guided tour through a world where both government and big business are consensually invasive entities, and the ever watchful eyes of authority have created an underground where virtual reality parlors thrive by artificially pacifying the human urges people are too scared to indulge in, and black-market surgeons are constantly working to find gruesome new ways to dodge the seemingly infallible mechanisms of government observation.

Anderton's journey through the bizarrity is one grafted to the conventions of Film Noir; he's the archetypal man on the run in a dark urban environment, but it's the shifting and elusive nature of his search for answers that adds to the familiar conventions and fortifies the film. Minority Report is at heart a very conventional, sometimes clichéd tale, but it maintains a symbiotic balance between its derivative elements, and the heavy concepts of humanism vs. predestination and freedom vs. security that are inherent to its plot. The tow elmenets play off each other in such a way that the ideas bolster the story at its weak points, and when Minorityy report stops short of delving full on into the issues it creates, the action and human drama, in turn, still keep the film on solid ground.

Anderton's whole motivation in the film is a good example of this ethos of convention twisted and expanded by big ideas. As he runs, Anderton is ostensibly looking for the imperfections in his own sytem that will prove he is innocent, but at the same time he's also trying to figure out why he would kill his future victim, a man he doesn't know, in the first place. It's a paradox, Anderton's quest to cear his name signifies a hope that the Pre-Crime process is flawed, but his investigation into his own future murder implies that Anderton thinks its going to happen, then there's the whole concept that it is Anderton's investigation to prove his innocence that might force him to commit the murder he is trying to prevent…

Are you dizzy yet? Too bad. That's just the beginning.

Of course, all this weirdness never goes to the point of being subversive. Spielberg is telling us a story here first and foremost. Its got a beginning a middle and an end with a real resolution for its characters, and when Spielberg wants you to squirm, you squirm, when he wants you to get cold chills, you'll feel the goosebumps. Still, this is probably the only film in existence where the hero carries his eyeballs around in a Ziploc bag.

That Cruise gives a solid performance, even when he's chasing his own eyeballs or wandering through gratuitous holographic product endorsements, almost goes without saying. Anderton is not a particularly complex character, but Cruise in conjunction with Spielberg's manipulations makes you feel everything Anderton does, from the wasting obsessions of drug-enhanced longing to the stark terror of going under a mad surgeon's knife. Farrell's philosophizing, button down investigator is just as good, a sympathetic foil, even when he becomes the film's primary antagonist.

Trumping them all is Samantha Morton, who plays Agatha, one of the unit's pre-cogs. Morton lends an eeriness and vulnerability to the film's most tragic character. Agatha is an object of both fear and pity whose abilities have terrifying implications, and despite her life of enforced isolation and "protection" from the outside world, no one feels it more than Agatha herself. Morton haunts cinematographer Janusz Kaminski's beautiful 2:35 compositions like a cross between a ghost and a delicate child, vulnerable and needy, yet never completely in the present.

Kaminski's photography is also one of the primary factors that makes Minority report one of Spielberg's most atmospheric films. Minority Report has a very bold and stylized "look". The colors are washed out into muddied blues and greys, while the highlights, the reflections and shimmers burn in bright, flaring overexposure. It's a combination of contrasts that evokes both the feeling of futurism, and the atmosphere of the old black and white detective movies Minority Report draws on, add this to Spielberg's mastery of manipulation through editing and the orchestration of performance, and the film always hits the right emotional notes, even when the screenplay is flawed.

Minority Report does have some formidable weaknesses, most coming from the screenplay. The film's last act eclipses mere convention and falls fully into cliché. While the performances and Spielberg's technique keep us caring enough to bear the derivative moments, the film would be strengthened by more elegant story telling.

One purported flaw that I would contest is the assertion that the film suffers because of an ending that gives full closure and resolution, and here is, indeed an opportunity to leave Minority Report with a chilling Terry Gilliam-esque, bleak "open" ending. In another type of film, this might have been the only way to go, but from the beginning, where the first word the audience hears is "murder", Minority report has , first and foremost, promised to deliver an intriguing detective story. A chilling, bleak ending might have some shock power, but it would be at odds with the rest of the film, much like AI's contested ending.

Spielberg's closed resolution also means the film never deals with the many conceptual questions that are left dangling in the film's subtext. More specifically, while Anderton acheives some closure, society, it would seem, still has to deal with some big issues at he film's end. But Minority Report, from the outset is a story about characters trapped in this world of paradoxes. The primary characters and the mystery story are the focus and thus, the film is required only to wrap up that story to be satisfactory. The macro-issues of the story and their resolution are for another movie, one Spielberg, from the very beginning, never sought to make.

In his choices with Minority Report, Spielberg has discovered (or re-discovered) that ideas and emotions don't have to be at odds, and that sentiment, drama and plain old visceral appeal can just as readily serve as a conduit for subtext as objectivity, ambiguity and cynicism. Minority Report is a smart film, a fun film, a creepy film, a chilling film and a triumphant film all at the same time, and one that holds together stronger with further examination instead of falling apart. Minority Report is a good film for the same reason The Maltese Falcon or Hitchcock's best works are good: because they achieve greatness not in spite of their willingness to entertain, but through it.

-Kyle DuVall

In a future where gifted psychics, called “precogs,” can predict murders before they happen, a dedicated cop is framed for a future crime...or is he?

For a decade now, Steven Spielberg has been assuring us he was growing up. Two directing Oscars, one Thalberg Award and a thriving new movie studio later, he may have actually done it with Minority Report, a smart, stylish science fiction thriller in which he finally learns how to fuse his split directing personalities -- the serious Spielberg, who has always aspired to greatness and treated the Big Themes, and the entertaining Spielberg, the showman who wants nothing more than to give us our money‘s worth, to make us laugh and scream on cue.

Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, the paranoid genius of literary science fiction, Minority Report is Spielberg’s most accomplished movie-movie since Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and the most mature science fiction movie of his career. Set in a wholly believable near future where privacy and anonymity have become all but extinct, Spielberg gives us an undisguised extrapolation of NOW, a world where super highways are clean and automated, news magazines pulsate with colorful updates as if they were alive, and it is impossible to simply walk through the mall without advertisements chasing you, shouting endless blandishments customized to your shopping history. Here, the invasive organization of cyberspace seems to have moved from the collective unconscious into the real world.

It is also a future where the government knows you’re going to commit a capital crime before you do, a society in which the precogs have made everyone’s destiny predetermined. Murder has been virtually eliminated, except for spontaneous crimes of passion, but even these can be predicted a few hours ahead of time. Every citizen is subjected to constant surveillance, everyone is a suspect, and no one seems to notice that free will has been nearly stamped out, least of all the protagonist John Anderton (Tom Cruise), an earnest supercop who puts people away just for thinking about murder. Of course, the tenets of plotting and story demand that Anderton will come under suspicion himself and, in the parlance of film noir, will have to take it on the lam, trying to prove his innocence of a crime that has not yet been committed.

The brilliance of this twist on traditional elements is pure Philip K. Dick, a writer who continually riffed on such pulp conventions as a means of drawing readers into uncomfortable alternate realities (see Notes). Spielberg, meanwhile, knows a good genre variation when he sees it, and he is in love with this one. The most sensual of American moviemakers, you can almost smell the worlds he creates onscreen, their texture is palpable, they have an exaggerated naturalism that speaks reams about plot and character that are not necessarily in the script.

In Minority Report he has created a rich, tactile world of ubiquitous eye scanners and streamlined, functional surfaces, touch screen computing and SWAT teams with jet packs, creepy surgeons who transplant eyes and lonely caretakers who become infatuated with female precogs, designer plants that paralyze trespassers and vast Orwellian vaults where suspected future murderers are condemned to the limbo of suspended animation. If a person does manage to hide, the “spiders” will come -- small, heat sensitive robots on spindly legs that enter a building en masse and look for suspects by spot checking the tenants’ eyes against an all-knowing database.

Unlike last year’s slapdash A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a film that felt like three disparate films clumsily pasted together, Minority Report is all one piece, structurally and conceptually, its various side trips into the dark corners of its own peculiar universe making perfect sense, a hallmark of superior science fiction. Free of responsibility to the memory of Stanley Kubrick, Spielberg cuts loose with the things he does best: composing wild, symphonic action sequences full of dread and humor in equal parts, populating a well-made world with genuinely strange secondary characters, exulting in a masterful command of film’s many languages and tempos, and occasionally pausing to unfold some startling visual moment no one has ever found before. The real ideas in a Spielberg movie -- indeed, in most movies -- are layered in the images, and Spielberg is an old-fashioned Hollywood mogul at heart; he feels he must entertain, first and foremost, in order to earn the right to speak to us for two hours in the dark. Minority Report reveals Spielberg in better form than ever, at all aspects of his job, making a truly risky ($80 million) movie for adults that integrates his past triumphs and failures into a polished, dark work of sophisticated, speculative fun.

For most of the film Spielberg and his screenwriters, Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, are true to the gloom of the original story, fashioning a dystopia that is all the more unsettling because its claustrophobic moments are balanced with generous areas of light and space, just like the real world. Where the director must ultimately part ways with his source material is in the arena of personal relationships: P.K. Dick was generally pessimistic about human interaction, and even in an early short story like Minority Report he presented an unending network of misunderstandings and personal isolation. While Spielberg is perfectly capable of plunging into a character‘s psychological pain, deftly mapping Anderton’s despair over the loss of a child and subsequent dissolution of his marriage (common Spielberg themes), such wounds cannot be left untended in Spielberg‘s universe, as if despair were a natural state. Even if he were not the most successful moviemaker in history, he would still have to impose evolution on the characters’ perceptions of the world. He is an optimist, and always will be, and amen to that.

Minority Report retains the moral complexity at the heart of Dick’s original story, posing a question that is all too pertinent to our time and place (which is another quality of superior sf): if we could predict future behavior with certainty, winning our freedom from the strictures of Time, from the unknowables of life and our fears of what might happen, would society pay a price? For both Spielberg and Dick the answer is decidedly yes, a terrible price, but each of them constructs a very different resolution to the problem.

As with all Spielberg films, the acting is above average from top to bottom, aided by a no-nonsense script. Tom Cruise, maturing along with the director, brings his usual, macho hyperactivity to the role of Anderton, but he has shed the youthful arrogance that originally made him a star. Most actors improve their skills with age, and what is enjoyable about Cruise now is his sincerity (or, as Indiana Jones might say, the mileage), a willingness to be vulnerable that has made itself apparent since he started working exclusively with the best directors in the business.

Cruise is supported in Minority Report by a glut of major talent: Samantha Morton, poignantly effective as the precog who holds the key to the mystery; Peter Stormare oozing his trademark malice as a corrupt doctor; Lois Smith, delightfully funny as an eccentric geneticist; and the great Max von Sydow, who can make any character he plays seem reasonable and wise, looms over all as Cruise’s avuncular boss.

Fantastic cinematography by Janusz Kaminski (Saving Private Ryan), once again sidestepping the horror modern audiences seem to have for black-and-white by creating bleached images that may actually be more evocative than the old film noir style; peerless montage by Michael Kahn, Spielberg’s film editor since Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

The “spiders” alone are worth the price of admission, a show-stopping, Spielbergian set-piece that rivals anything in his filmography for consummate storytelling skill.

Notes:

IT USED TO BE H.G. WELLS: Philip K. Dick (b.1928, d. 1982) is fast becoming the most cinema-friendly of modern science fiction writers. His novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was the inspiration for Blade Runner (1982), a film American critics despised at the time of its original release but which is now generally regarded as a modern classic, and his short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” which was turned into the Paul Verhoeven-Arnold Schwarzenegger opus Total Recall (1990).

A brilliant novelist who transcended a genre often dominated by hacks, PKD may interest filmmakers because his tales, subversive as they are to consensual reality, concern three-dimensional characters grappling with very human dilemmas (though by the time they reach the screen, they may be considerably thinner). All of his books are still in print, selling better than ever. Interested readers should try The Man in the High Castle (1962), a prize-winning alternate history in which the Axis powers are the victors of WWII.

ALL IN THE FAMILY: Look for writer-director Cameron Crowe, a major Cruise collaborator (Jerry Maguire, 1996; Vanilla Sky, 2001) in one of the chase scenes, reading USA Today on the subway.

WORLD BUILDING 101: Cf. other superbly made near-future worlds -- A Clockwork Orange (1971; Kubrick), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott; also full of eye symbolism), The Matrix (1999; the Wachowski Brothers, drawing heavily on sf writer William Gibson).

HE HAS ISSUES: Cf. Spielberg’s treatment of family dynamics in The Sugarland Express (1974), Jaws (1975), Close Encounters...(1977), E.T. -- The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Schindler’s List (1993), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997). He is obsessed with parents, children and siblings (of all species), and with the metaphor of extended families.

-Eric Barker

The threat of violent crime has sadly become a reality for far too many in our society. Compounding this issue is the fact that the nations capitol, Washington D.C., has a homicide rate that has grown steadily over the last few years despite all efforts to curb the problem. In the new film “Minority Report”, director Steven Speilberg has adapted the Philip K. Dick short story into a new star vehicle for Tom Cruise that is set in the homicide free Washington D.C. of 2054.

Cruise plays Detective John Anderton who is the head of the cities Pre-Crime division. Anderton is a solid cop who hides the loss of his son and the breakup of his marriage by using drugs and immersing himself in his work. He prides himself in the infallibility of the system and that there has not been a murder in the city in over 6 years. This has been accomplished by the use of three Pre-Cogs (psychics) who receive visions of the future and are able to alert the police to violent crimes before they happen allowing Anderton and his team to stop murders before they are about to happen.

With a major vote pending that will take Pre-Crime nation wide, the attorney Generals office has dispatched an agent to monitor the Pre-Crime unit as there is an ethical debate about convicting people before they have actually committed a crime, and if the system is foolproof. The system is thrown into question when Anderton is listed as killing a man in less than 36 hours and has to flee from his team in order to discover if the foolproof system he has devoted his life to can indeed be wrong. Tracked by his own team, Anderton has to race against the clock in order to discover the truth behind the system as well as discover evidence to free him from a crime he has yet to commit.

What should have been a gripping and intense action-thriller instead unspools as a rather run of the mill drama, as there is little suspense in the film and the action scenes are less than spectacular. The story unfolded in a very matter of fact way, and there was little tension or drama as the film leads to its predictable and I thought, obvious conclusion. Cruise shows very little emotion in this film other than high, deadpan, pained, and agitated, and is easily the worst performance he has given in years, which I thought would be difficult after the dismal “Vanilla Sky”. There is nothing about Anderton that makes the audience care about him, as he has no charisma or personality. He is a bitter man who is blindly loyal to a system that has turned on him, and only when he is in danger of being caught, does he begin to question the nature of the system. What could have been a gripping moment where Anderton has to battle his inner demons as well as the fact that he may very well have incarcerated innocent people in a futuristic stasis prison is glossed over, losing the potential dramatic impact. Worse yet are the action scenes which come across as very unspectacular and poorly staged, if you have seen the trailers for the film, then you have seen all of the best special effects in the film, as well as the majority of the action scenes. Cruise has shown in past films such as “Born on the 4th of July” and “Jerry Maguire” that he can give gripping and emotional performances and is a gifted and compelling actor with the right part. Sadly he is wasted in the film along with the talented Max Von Sydow who gives a strong performance in a supporting and albeit far to small role.

The film would have been better served with an increase in the action content as well as a deeper mystery as I was able to figure out the who’s and whys of the plot very early and the conclusion was very obvious to me. The color scheme of the film was also bad in many places as there was a very blue tint to many of the areas and only when indoors did the colors return to a more natural look, as this hampered the visual impact of the film which I found highly under whelming as did the costuming as aside from the cars and billboards, the clothing, shops, housing, and weapons of the future seemed better suited for today then for the high-tech future. Dick’s work is ambitious and can be very difficult to bring to the screen, lest we forget that “Blade Runner” was widely panned during its initial release before getting a second chance on video and being seen as the masterpiece that it is. Sadly, Spielberg seems to have burned out his futuristic visuals and ideas on “A.I”, leaving “Minority Report” as bland and lifeless as any film in recent memory.

-Gareth Von Kallenbach
Gareth's own site can be reached at www.sknr.net

Return to the Review Rack

shotgun reviews | the big question | review rack | feature forum | rasslin' ring | comics convention | shotgun press | contact | links home | masthead | sponsors | email: psikotyk@aol.com © 2001 Shotgun Reviews - All rights reserved.