Film Review: MINORITY REPORT **** (out of 5)
In a future where psychics can predict murders before they happen, a dedicated cop is framed for a crime that hasn’t been committed yet …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 mutant psychics called “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 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 his 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, 1998), once again sidestepping the unreasoning horror that modern audiences seem to have for black-and-white by creating bleached images which may actually be more evocative than the old film noir style; peerless montage by Michael Kahn, Spielberg’s film editor since Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
The “spiders” alone are worth the price of admission, a show-stopping Spielbergian set piece that rivals anything in his filmography for storytelling skill.
Minority Report
directed by Steven Spielberg; screenplay by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, from short story by Philip K. Dick; director of photography, Janusz Kaminski; edited by Michael Kahn; music by John Williams
with: Tom Cruise (Detective John Anderton), Max von Sydow (Director Burgess), Colin Farrell (Detective Ed Witwer), Samantha Morton (Agatha)
2 hr., 25 m.; 20th Century Fox - DreamWorks, rated PG-13
release date: June 21
Notes:
IT USED TO BE H.G. WELLS: Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) 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,” became the Paul Verhoeven-Arnold Schwarzenegger opus Total Recall (1990).
A challenging writer 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 are sometimes considerably thinner). All of his books are still in print and 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. Other, highly regarded works: Martian Time-Slip (1964), Dr. Bloodmoney (1965) and VALIS (1978).
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…, 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 metaphors of extended families.
Eric Barker is a writer and independent filmmaker living in Denver.
