Minority report

With a couple of exceptions the movies released so far in this year have been disappointing. The good news is that Minority Report is excellent, and is the best film released so far this year.

In many ways, Minority Report is a continuation of director Steven Spielberg’s fascination with the work of the late Stanley Kubrick, exploring one of Kubrick’s favorite themes—dehumanization. Although Spielberg’s last film, the disappointing AI: Artificial Intelligence, was more directly tied to Kubrick (the film was one of the projects Kubrick was developing at the time of his death), Minority Report is far closer to the spirit of Kubrick’s work (there’s at least one shot in the film that’s an obvious homage to Kubrick).

Although set in the future, the film’s center moral question—how much societal freedom are we willing to bargain away in exchange for a sense of personal freedom from violence?—seems as contemporary today as it must have when the story was originally published in 1956. Maybe more so. Based on a short story by sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick (who also wrote the stories that served as the basis for the films Blade Runner and Total Recall) Minority Report is set in Washington D.C. in the year 2054.

The film tells the story of John Anderton (Tom Cruise), the head of the “Pre-Crime” division, a futuristic police force that, with the help of a pool of psychics, predicts, arrests, tries, and imprisons would-be murderers before they commit their crimes. Pre-Crime seems like a good idea, and—under the leadership of Anderton and his boss Lamar Burgess (Max Von Syndow)—is on the verge of going national. But, like any good fascist enterprise, things start to go awry. Justice Department investigator Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) arrives and begins an uncomfortably thorough examination of the workings of the Pre-Crime unit. Witwer’s appearance nudges the first domino, and Anderton soon finds himself on the other end of the system when it predicts he will murder a main he’s never seen before in 36 hours, a revelation that forces him to become a fugitive who must try to prove his innocence in order to avoid a life sentence.

By running, Anderton throws himself in opposition to the system in which he once so strongly believed. Anderton’s dilemma: if the system he believes in is right, he is a murderer and, by the tenants of his own believe system, he should be punished; if he can prove himself somehow to be innocent, or even just get away without getting caught, then he’s off the hook, but he brings down the entire Pre-Crime system, the cause to which he’s devoted years of his life. Confronting this dilemma forces Anderton to face the greater moral question at stake in the Pre-Crime program—is the fulfillment of the social mandate to stop crime by punishing citizens for things the haven’t yet actually done worth the violation of the social mandate of personal freedom? In answering this question for himself, Anderton comes to see the world with new eyes.

Spielberg handles Dick’s weird, paranoid Eisenhower-era vision of the future deftly. Along with cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, he chooses to portray the super-technologized, media obsessed America-future in cold, blue-filtered, monochromatic cinematography. This gives the film an impressive, distinctive visual style that rivals those of Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List. Spielberg also reportedly employed a team of futurists and scientists to flesh out the technological look and feel of the movie from the details of Dick’s story. Spielberg’s future world errs on the side of realism. It’s not as revolutionary as futuristic landmarks like Metropolis, Blade Runner, and Dark City, but it does assemble a world that seems, for the most part, if not probable, at least possible within the next half-century.

It’s not without it flaws, of course. Although the film for the most part seamlessly joins conventions of action movies, pulp science fiction novels, and film noir, there are certain set pieces that just don’t work (the fight in the car factory and a later scene where the “spiders” search an apartment building are two that come to mind). The subplot involving the arc of Anderton’s family, which dominates the final third of the film, rings a little false. Also, there’s the distractingly weird gimmick of naming the Precogs after three titans of mystery novels—Agatha (as in Christie), Dashiell (as in Hammett), and Arthur (as in Conan Doyle). Finally, this film establishes a new record for gratuitous product placements, which, although I’m sure they helped pay the bills, and every attempt is made to integrate them in to the world of the future, still distract from the story at hand.

Tom Cruise’s performance is the same kind of cool, faceless, eyes-closed performance he perfected for past roles in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky (a remake of a Spanish film that’s title translates to English as “Open You Eyes” . . . it’s probably no coincidence that eyes—how we see—are an important motif in Minority Report). The utter equivocation of his approach to the character wears all the edges of the character, allowing him to be both good cop and bad cop, victim and killer on the loose.

Anderton is an ambitious, ultra-successful cop who also, it turns out is a grieving drug addict who sees himself as a failure as a father and husband, and furthermore, his success as a cop may be predicated on a system subject to the same human frailties that wrecked his personal life. Instead of using these contradictions inherent in Andertons’s character, Cruise plays Anderton (as he played William Harford and David Aames before him) as a dehumanized clockwork orange, wound by powerful figures, never choosing his own path (it would have been interesting, by the way, to see what another actor would have done with the role . . . perhaps even Colin Farrell, who is excellent as Witwer).

Despite raising some lofty (if somewhat muddled) philosophical questions, Minority Report succeeds more as entertainment than as cinema, which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with most of Spielberg’s films, so you can hardly hold this against the film. Still, this film attempts to reconcile the Spielberg who made Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan with the Spielberg who made Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jurassic Park—the artist against the entertainer. That in itself may ultimately make it worthwhile. And given its box office competition this summer (Spider-Man, Men in Black II, Mr. Deeds, Attack of the Clones, etc.), this fairly intelligent, exciting, extremely well-made film looks all the more impressive lined-up against all the other movies on the cineplex marquee.

Matt Parks (July 13, 2002)