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Minority Report (Widescreen Edition) Customer Reviews (64 - 66 of 102 Reviews)

The Second best thriller of the decade.
If not for Fox's 24 (yes, the television series), Minority Report would probably be my choice for (so far) the best thriller of the decade. Pretty hefty statement, I realize, but Minority Report's a pretty hefty movie, one that plays as an innovative mix of futuristic sci-fi and film-noir. And I'm a little surprised nobody prior to Steven Spielberg has tried for for a similar formula (cases have been made for Blade Runner and Dark City, though I can't entirely agree).

Minority Report is set in the year 2054, a future that, outside of the roads and constant eye-scans, still visually resembles the present (or the past, in this movie's case). Tom Cruise stars as John Anderton, one of the heads of Pre-Crime, a division in Washington, D.C. that has the ability to stop murders before they happen, thanks to the work of three Pre-Cogs, psychics (two male and one female) permanently placed in a watery bath, delivering info about the future to the Pre-Crime division (just how it's done is revealed in a very clever and tense opening sequence).

Anyway, there's a debate over whether or not Pre-Crime should go national, and it's something that the people are going to vote on. The creator of this division, Lamar Burgess (Max Von Sydow), is a bit wary of the FBI agent (Colin Farrell) sent to investigate the way the division operates and the possible infallibilities.

Anderton himself has a bit of a mess in his personal life. He lost his son six years ago, is divorced, and is addicted to illegal drugs. But matters grow even worse when the Pre-Cogs' latest vision displays a pre-meditated murder (unsurprisingly stated as a rarity in D.C.) and the killer happens to be Anderton himself! Going on the run, Anderton struggles to escape his old teammates and discover the truth behind this vision; is it a mistake or a genuine view of a nightmarish destiny?

First off, let me say hats off to Steven Spielberg. The man's always had unfounded criticism tossed at him with virtually every film he's ever made. It's nice to see he's never dissuaded (or influenced) by such complaints, he's a filmmaker who's always crafted his films with a touch of confidence and genuine emotion that few directors could even hope to achieve in decades worth of work (in case you can't tell, I'm a Spielberg fan, meaning I've just incurred the wrath of David Lynch lovers).

Spielberg's work here is, right off the bat, much unlike anything I've ever seen him do. Sure, there was A.I., but not a segment in that film resembled Minority Report's opening scenes, a montage of quick-cuts awash in blue colors that builds in both violence and intensity, in spite of the fact this sequence moves backward (meaning the violent act is committed first, then we see what led up to it). The segment ends with a close-up of an eye, with the camera pulling back to reveal a woman lying in a pool, ominously stating the word, "murder." It's a chilling, daring intro that holds a lot of promise, and instead of disappointing, the rest of the film actually manages to improve upon it.

The future that Spielberg presents here is entirely believable, from both a societal and technological viewpoint. Most interestingly, when I first saw the previews, I'd expected a "Big Brother" type society akin to 1984, one in which the government monitored all the actions of the people. But that's not the case here. The government presented here questions the ethics and logic behind Pre-Crime because if this were reality, it's a subject matter of serious concern, and not just hive-minded behavior and blather about how this is good for "everybody." Finally, we get a film that features a dark view of the future, but simultaneously gives us reasonable, intelligent characters that realize there are pros and cons to everything.

On a dramatic level, Minority Report delivers with as much resonance as A.I., and maybe even better when you factor in just how coherently and cleverly Spielberg and the writers tie all the subplots together. The emotional baggage is handled mostly by Tom Cruise, who does quite an admirable job; maybe that's an understatement, like the man or not, he delivers one of the best performances I've seen all year. No one else except for maybe Colin Farrell and Samantha Morton, comes close to Cruise's powerhouse performance, not even Max Von Sydow.

Plot-wise, the film is on solid ground with a few admittedly major stumbles. One of the movie's narrative burners is the move to make Pre-Crime national, which when you consider the logistics, is almost impossible (3 pre-cogs, an entire country, the cops have to decipher the location through the visual clues; let's face it, you'd need thousands of pre-cogs to pull it off). (Major spoiler here) The film's big plot twist, while fairly surprising and thought-provoking, doesn't completely hold water. It's a nice, well-done time loop, but if you consider what happens, then by that basis, I'd suspect a LOT of people could just as easily be accused of murder on such thing ground.

Whether or not Minority Report would appeal to the traditional summer crowd is a little iffy. There's not a whole lot of action (though the jetpack chase/car factory fight is the most hectic, exciting action scene I've seen all year), the story requires undivided attention (and maybe even a repeat viewing to gather in all the themes), and the downbeat tone, almost pessimistic tone will throw a lot of viewers off. But for those who do get caught up in this twisty tale (and that should apply to most people), Minority Report offers a lot of rewards, more than you could reasonably expect from a big-budget blockbuster.

A lot of people see Minority Report as a warning for how far technology could go and bite us back. While such a statement works to an extent for A.I., Report is mostly about morals, accepted ethics, and an intriguing look on just how far people are willing to go for their own survival in this "winner takes all" society. As far as science fiction goes, the genre hasn't been this damned smart and thought-provoking since Dark City.

Shadows of 1984
Minority Report, based on a 1956 short story by science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, has intriguing and entertaining elements. No expense has been spared. The filmmakers have thought up all manner of ingenious devices, combining the retrograde and the futuristic, to create the world of 2054. Indeed, that the writer had the same concerns in 1956 that we do now is more than a little disturbing. Issues of privacy, surveillance, human rights, addictions and obsessions, and legal definitions of criminality come into play. The film is set in Washington DC, during a time when murder has been removed. At the Justice Department's elite Pre-crime unit, detective John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is downloading information from the pre-cogs, a trio of humans who spend their time floating in a vat of conducting fluid, wired to one another and to a computer that reads images of murders about to happen, that come to them because they have ESP.

Since Pre-crime has been in existence for 6 years at this point, the murders tend never to be premeditated, but imminent crimes of passion still crop up. And so, Anderton's skills are important -- he's good at reading the signs quickly and accurately. He's also a classic haunted cop due to the still-unsolved disappearance of his son years earlier, turning him into the fiercest defender of the controversial precrime program - clearly he believes it might have saved his boy. But the theoretical arguments about the reliability and morality of precrime suddenly become all too personal when an alert from the precogs names Anderton himself as the perpetrator of an upcoming murder. In a matter of minutes the cop finds himself on the run from both a Federal investigator and his own highly trained unit as he desperately tries to figure out what's going on. Has he been set up by an enemy of the precrime program? And who is the mystery man he's supposedly going to kill?

Unfortunately, the compelling logical and legal issues brought up don't get much play beyond plot points, for they up the ante in everything else going on in Minority Report, from the ethics of taking predictions as "facts" to the political and ideological ramifications of a society premised on surveillance. Instead, the film remains more focused on Anderton's personal predicament: his own obsession with avoidance of his past, his self-pity and outrage, his determination to make his world "right" (yeah, sure). However, Steven Spielberg is not a fool, nor simply a propagandist for the existing state of things. The sight of helmeted, black-outfitted police crashing through windows and ceilings to apprehend individuals whose only crime is harboring violent thoughts is menacing and ominous - as are the images of mechanical spiders, who detect human presence, invading and searching an apartment building. Indeed, I'm sure many in our current Federal government are taking notes. Minority Report provides us with a policeman's eye view, filtered through suffocating layers of Hollywood liberalism, of the issue of the police-state. And in our so-called "war on terrorism", the film asks another important question: would you trade freedom for safety? I wouldn't.

Superbly executed
You'll enjoy this stylish blend of sci-fi and film noir if you're willing to suspend your disbelief at the door. Many have decried the illogical holes in Scott Frank and Jon Cohen's otherwise excellent screenplay, but in the end these deficiencies hardly matter. Movies dealing with predestination never answer the big questions effectively - they just use them as the springboard for a story. And "Minority Report" tells a pretty good one, even if it does reveal where it's going too soon and is occasionally marred by Spielberg's trademark mawkishness. Tom Cruise is hugely enjoyable as the frantic John Anderton, and Colin Farrell does a fine job of making you hate Detective Witwer. It looks great, sounds great, holds your attention for all 147 minutes, and will even have you giggling at the spectacular product placements and some unexpected comedy. It's a reasonably faithful adaptation of Philip K. Dick's story, too, so fans of the original should be pleased - although Act 3 does see the writers wandering into Hollywood-ending territory and has Spielberg wrapping things up on a typically optimistic false note. Still, it's refreshing to see a bunch of filmmakers tackling a sci-fi adaptation seriously and successfully while still keeping an eye on the box-office. If you're going to spend close to $100 million on a sci-fi project - and, let's face it, these days you have to - then you also have to consider the return. The result is a memorable film that strikes a savvy balance between deep thought and commercial appeal. "A.I" flopped because it glorified the former and "The Time Machine" failed by pandering to the latter. "Minority Report" wisely walks the middle-path. It won't have enough explosions to thrill die-hard action fans, nor quite enough depth to really please sci-fi devotees. But for the rest of us, it works.

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