Tom Cruise goes on the run as cop-turned-fugitive in a brave-but-bleak new world, while Spielberg proves that when he's on form, no-one uses the camera more perceptively than him. A pacy and enjoyable work, with a healthy undercurrent of ambiguity permeating all the way through to the finale.
Washington DC, AD 2054. The story of John Anderton, a detective working in the special 'Pre-crime' unit that arrests people before they can commit a crime. Aided by Pr... more >
Washington DC, AD 2054. The story of John Anderton, a detective working in the special 'Pre-crime' unit that arrests people before they can commit a crime. Aided by Precogs, genetically-modified humans who can tell the future, they identify John as a future killer and he becomes a fugitive from his former colleagues. < less
Tom Cruise goes on the run as cop-turned-fugitive in a brave-but-bleak new
world, while Spielberg proves that when he's on form, no-one uses the camera
more ... more >
Tom Cruise goes on the run as cop-turned-fugitive in a brave-but-bleak new
world, while Spielberg proves that when he's on form, no-one uses the camera
more perceptively than him. A pacy and enjoyable work, with a healthy
undercurrent of ambiguity permeating all the way through to the finale.
Detective John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is the top cop at Washington's Pre-Crime Division, rounding up killers before they've actually killed by going on the psychic visi... more >
Detective John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is the top cop at Washington's Pre-Crime Division, rounding up killers before they've actually killed by going on the psychic visions of three pre-cognitive children. Problems arise when the drug-addled Anderton turns up himself in one of the psychics' visions gunning down an unknown assailant, and the detective starts pre-empting (or post-empting) his own footsteps and investigating his own crime-to-be.
After the commercial success of the first two Jurassic Park films, it may be of greater significance that Steven Spielberg elected to take a pass on JPIII. Since the relative failure of Hook in 1992, the director has spent the last decade working on projects darker in content than one might expect - Schindler's List, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Amistad - and certainly far more adult than those of his most immediate contemporary, George Lucas. Lucas's latest Star Wars movie, acknowledged by aficionados as one of the more "grown-up" entries in the series, seems spectacularly juvenile in comparison with this new Spielberg project.
If he's getting drawn closer to the dark side, Spielberg's also become more prolific. Following A.I., this is his second new film in eight months, and there's another (Catch Me If You Can) due along before the end of the year. It's not hard to see him knocking them out hard and fast like a multi-billionaire version of a poverty-row studio's serials and film noirs, the films the boy Spielberg would have been raised on, and the films which often best dramatised the underlying tensions of their time. (Did the director feel he had to re-release E.T. recently to prove he was once capable of making a G-rated movie, or to show that, even back in 1982, his films were governed as much by shadow as they were by light?) Though it's set fifty years in the future, Minority Report - adapted from the short story by Philip K. Dick - gets its release at a time when the American government has stepped up security to unprecedented levels in a bid to counteract allegations they had advance knowledge of the attacks on New York and Washington, and only a matter of days after the British government passed a Mental Health Act which allows the authorities to round up and institutionalise those who might be psychologically predisposed to committing violent acts at a later date.
Last year's "big Spielberg summer blockbuster" A.I. was marketed - by its own director's admission - incorrectly, as much lighter than it really was. By way of an over-correction, Minority Report's trailers have made out the film is slightly darker than it actually is. This film has some good jokes, like a Grand Guignol "dun-dun-daah" as a pair of eyeballs bounce across on organ's keyboard, but its excessively mediated world is still a bleak place to inhabit, one where the powers-that-be can see more of their subjects than ever before. In the film, this results in a lot of product placement for companies that don't really need the publicity, and a multitude of references to the narratives of the twentieth century.
The pre-cogs are named Agatha, Dashiell and Arthur after a holy trinity of crime writers, and Spielberg quickly dashes off a number of casting and framing homages to the bleak moral worlds of Bergman and Hitchcock. In a double-strength nod to Kubrick, the director whose fingerprints were most visible over A.I., Minority Report straps Cruise to an A Clockwork Orange-style device which holds his eyes wide open. (It's from Kubrick, too, that Spielberg's new-found facility with classical music presumably derives.) To cast one notable supporting player from a Coen brothers film (Tim Blake Nelson) would be unremarkable; to cast two (Nelson and Fargo's Peter Stormare) appears deliberate. Minority Report is also unfortunate in coming late to the screen, several years after sci-fi movies like Strange Days and Gattaca have raided the Philip K. Dick-tionary for the suits and grammar of the dystopian futurescape, but Spielberg even pulls an L.A. Confidential on us by having a major character killed just as he thinks he's got it all figured out.
Still, though we may have seen a lot of this before, it's worth remembering part of the sci-fi world's remit is to remind us of what's going on in the present day, and it's also lucky this film has a decently involving labyrinthine plot: the last time a contemporary of Spielberg's set out to be this derivative, the result was Robert Zemeckis's laboriously unthrilling What Lies Beneath.
And whatever your thoughts on him as a director, Spielberg is a great technician. This can sometimes translate into "crashing hardware bore" - it's something Lucas and many of the movie brats are equally susceptible to - but when Spielberg especially uses his camera with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel, he makes a lot of modern American cinema seem so fuzzy and so indistinct you wonder why these other films bother to credit a director. One sequence, in which the camera lingers voyeuristically over the ceilings of an apartment block under surveillance, watching couples breaking up, making up and making out, does in under three minutes what Big Brother tries - and normally fails - to do over the course of three months.
The other outstanding sequence in Minority Report is demonstrative of just how Spielberg's predilection for sentiment, and perhaps even his fondness for technology, has been altered by the demands of this story. Early in the film, a lonely Anderton has a conversation with a holographic representation of his lost son and estranged wife. This, too, we've seen before - perhaps most famously in Lucas's Star Wars, with its ghostly projections of Princess Leia and Obi-Wan Kenobi - and the scene seems to be heading towards a similarly soft and heart-warming conclusion, allowing us to share in whatever pleasures Anderton takes from this kind of relationship. But then Spielberg twists the camera like a knife to show the hologram from the side, its image thin and tearing at the seams: and now, the picture appears to be saying, there is nothing more sad than the sight of a grown man interacting with a flimsy handful of pixels.
Most Spielberg films are interested in the plight of children separated from their parents for whatever reason, but this is the first to be more interested in the parents' perspective on such a separation, and the first to invoke the grim spectre of paedophilia (and revenge for paedophilic acts) as motivating forces. The script doesn't quite make enough of the irony that Anderton lost his child because he never saw the abduction coming and wasn't paying attention, but enough of the message - that while machines can very easily watch all the time, human beings cannot - remains for this particular plot point to be resonant and effective at this particular moment in history.
If Spielberg has moved on as a filmmaker - and Minority Report offers enough evidence that he has - then it may be the shift from the computer failures of Jurassic Park to the human frailty on show here that best proves the point. Whether his film celebrates or shakes its head mournfully at such frailty is another matter: Cruise is not the perfect choice for the lead role, his Anderton a mix of paralysing deformity and paralysed blankness. (His face is like an Enrique Iglesias record: just because it has "HERO" stamped across the front of it, doesn't necessarily make it heroic.)
But the director, at least, is in a position to give us two endings, each as valid as the other. The optimist's ending, the film's final shot, is a sun-dappled vision of once tormented psychics at rest amongst rolling country fields. Those of a more pessimistic persuasion might prefer the penultimate scene's rain-spattered view of the uncertain, unpredictable world into which new babies will be born. The happy-ender in Spielberg prioritises the first over the second, but it's a most welcome occurrence - not to mention a sign of where this director is now at in his career - that he's giving us the choice for once.
