Subject: Review: Minority Report (2002)

From: Jerry Saravia <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 18:04:34 -0000

MINORITY REPORT (2002)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
June 26th, 2002
RATING: Three stars

Something has happened to Steven Spielberg - he has been haunted by the ghost 
of Stanley Kubrick. The warm, sensitive, sentimental Spielberg is trying to 
tap into the darker recesses of fables and science-fiction stories.  After 
last year's fabulous "A.I.," itself based on ideas by Kubrick, Spielberg is 
aiming for something more ominous and foreboding, and he basically succeeds 
with his new science-fiction dazzler, "Minority Report." 

Cropped-haired Tom Cruise stars as John Anderton, the chief of Pre-Crime, an 
organization in Washington, D.C. that prevents actual crimes from happening. 
They manage this feat with the use of Pre-Cogs, precognitive humans who lie 
in a water tank and are tapped into some video computer that shows their 
premonitions of upcoming crimes, mostly homicides. When the main Pre-Cog, 
Agatha (Samantha Morton), the strongest of the three Pre-Cogs, sees a vision, 
a red ball is unleashed through some tubes with the name of the murderer. 
John's job is to use a high-tech system using motion control to find where 
the murderer will commit the crime. Along with his compatriots, they travel 
to the destination on a ship and prevent the murder within seconds. Pre-crime 
is a solid, workable system that has prevented crimes from taking place in 
almost six years (only, of course, in D.C.). The bureau director of this 
organization, Burgess (Max Von Sydow), is facing a crucial election year 
where Pre-Crime has been under total scrutiny. Enter the cynical bureacrat 
from the Justice Department, Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), who questions the 
validity of Pre-Crime, and is sure that flaws must exist in this system. 
Before you know it, John Anderton is in hot water when he discovers that he 
will commit murder himself. 

Based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, "Minority Report" has a lot of 
story to work with, and it helps that Cruise is cast as the hot-blooded, 
doped-up John, facing his own crisis over the loss of his son. Cruise makes 
John the hero to root for in a world that is grayish and washed-out, thanks 
to the dazzling cinematography by Spielberg regular Janusz Kaminski. This 
world is no picnic and technology has taken precendence over personal 
privacy. The year is 2054 and we see souped-up Lexus cars that can travel on 
ramps alongside the surfaces of buildings, plants that move and can poison 
intruders in private homes, eye scanners at every single street corner, 
advertisements that salute you particularly at Gap stores, newspapers that 
have rapidly changing images, spider-like robots that search for murder 
suspects, and so on. It is a world as eerily prescient as the world shown in 
"Blade Runner," and now that the FBI can scan library records of just about 
anyone, our universe is becoming just as Orwellian as ever. 

The aspects of Pre-Crime are fascinating, particularly the nature of it and 
if any flaws exist in a supposedly foolproof system. That is the function of 
the Danny Witwer character, questioning if any crime would have ever existed 
and if the Pre-Cogs could ever have been wrong in their assertions and 
visions. What if a homicide that took place was justifiable in some way? What 
about self-defense? What about a crime that leads to some positive 
consequences? The morality at stake of preventing crimes that may happen in 
the future is frightening if you consider the consequences. And it comes out 
of John's character who may commit a murder, but to whom and why? Spielberg, 
however, is not as willing to plunge deeply with such questions. Despite 
working with Kubrick's ideas in "A.I." and fusing a questionable future for a 
child robot, Spielberg brings us close to the immorality of Pre-Crime but 
refuses to stick with the ideas. It is like watching a magician who speaks of 
magic tricks yet never actually performs them. This is no surprise coming 
from the eternal optimist who believes that hope will always prevail. Kubrick 
or, for that matter, Ridley Scott might have stuck with the phase that is set 
in motion because they see that darkness sometimes prevails, and the 
consequences of real-life crimes sometimes prevents others from seeing the 
wrongdoing ahead of time. The future is never that bright in movies, so the 
last thing I expect is a happy ending.  

"Minority Report" is a stunning achievement in special-effects and production 
design, and Cruise fires his acting missiles with acute timing and perfect 
pitch. I like some of the dark humor in the film and the Kubrickian homages, 
and the film does have a spellbinding look to it - it is like a darkly 
humorous, sci-fi noir comedy. But it also goes on too long just when it 
appears it might have ended (a common Spielberg fallacy) and the last section 
in the film is overwrought and overdone. Still, it is quite a marvel of a 
film and the ironic look into the future of invasion of privacy is haunting. 

Post any questions, complaints or general comments at 
http://moviething.com/members/movies/faust/forum.shtml or email me at 
[email-masked] or at [email-masked]

For more reviews, check out JERRY AT THE MOVIES at 
http://moviething.com/members/movies/faust/JATMindex.shtml

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X-RT-RatingText: 3/4