director
Steven Spielberg
screenwriters
Scott Frank
Jon Cohen
based
on the story by
Philip K. Dick
producers
Jan de Bont
Bonnie Curtis
Gerald R. Molen
Walter F. Parkes
cinematographer
Janusz Kaminski
music
John Williams
editor
Michael Kahn
cast
Tom Cruise (John Anderton)
Max von Sydow (Director Burgess)
Samantha Morton (Agatha)
Colin Farrell (Danny Witwer)
Steve Harris (Jad)
Neal McDonough (Officer Fletcher)
Jessica Capshaw (Evanna)
Anna Maria Horsford (Casey)
Daniel London (Wally)
Lois Smith (Dr. Iris Hineman)
Tim Blake Nelson (Gideon)
Kathryn Morris (Lara Anderton)
Spencer Treat Clark (Sean at Nine)
Tyler Patrick Jones (Sean at Six)
Arye Gross (Howard Marks)
Mike Binder (Leo Crow)
Jessica Harper (Anne Lively)
Jason Antoon (Rufus Riley)
Peter Stormare (Dr. Solomon)
Cameron Crowe (Transit Passenger)
mpaa rating: PG-13
running
time: 145m
u.s.
release: 6/21/02
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other steven
spielberg films
reviewed on this website:
- a.i.:
artificial intelligence
- amistad
- catch
me if you can
- close
encounters of the third kind
- e.t.
(special edition, 2002)
- jurassic
park
- the
lost world: jurassic park
- munich
- saving
private ryan
- schindler's
list
- the
terminal
- war
of the worlds
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In the satirically detailed
world of Minority Report, which unfolds in 2054, you can't
walk into a Gap store without a hologram greeting you by name
and complimenting you on the last item you bought there -- perhaps
you'd care for a black tank-top? Privacy is dead, and people
visit a virtual-reality club to explore their wildest fantasies;
one man wants to kill his boss, but knows that if he plans to
do it for real, Washington's Pre-Crime unit will catch him before
he carries it out. Experience seems to be dead, too. The population
is safe from certain forms of physical aggression, but they've
all been pre-emptively neutered, like Alex in A Clockwork
Orange.
I refer to that Stanley Kubrick
classic for a reason: Minority Report, despite some eleventh-hour
lapses and rhetorical flab, is the movie A.I.
should have been. Steven Spielberg, adapting Kubrick's long-cherished
project last year, missed the mark so completely that the result
offered the best of neither director. But Minority Report
is the real thing, more Kubrick than anything Spielberg has done,
and more Spielberg than anything Spielberg has done in too many
years. I had given up hope, fearing Spielberg to be lost in his
warm bubble bath of homilies: His recent movies haven't been
entertaining or even educational -- they've been instructional.
Well, Spielberg seems to have snapped out of it. He is working
once again with his trademark effortless sense of purpose and
precision. If his previous recent films have been tepid baths,
this one is a cold shower -- shocking and revivifying.
Tom Cruise is John Anderton,
ace "detective" for the Pre-Crime unit. Spielberg's
and Cruise's first collaboration has not produced the expected
smiling, cocky, full-blooded hero, but rather an angry, hollow,
flawed man, who takes drugs to kill his torment over his kidnapped
little boy. Anderton is thus driven to stop crimes before they
happen, though his logic is faulty, since a boy can be kidnapped
and tortured for years without being "seen" by Pre-Crime's
three precognitives, who can only see future murders. Cruise
plays Anderton as a man who throws all his faith into the "perfect"
Pre-Crime structure because if it is shown to be faulty, his
work -- his reason for not eating his gun -- is rendered meaningless.
Faulty it is, though. The "Pre-Cogs"
-- cleverly named Agatha, Arthur and Dashiell -- "see"
Anderton killing someone within 36 hours, a man he's never met.
The full weight of the Pre-Crime force -- led by Max von Sydow
as its figurehead and Colin Farrell as a sort of internal-affairs
investigator looking for flaws in the system -- comes down on
Anderton, who flees into the city. It's there that Minority
Report most closely resembles a previous bitter dystopian
drama inspired, like this one, by a Philip K. Dick story: Blade
Runner, in which Harrison Ford bumped up against a variety
of colorful characters. Here, Anderton meets a crackpot who traffics
in black-market eyes (Peter Stormare), a virtual-reality pimp
(Jason Antoon), a wise old woman who accidentally started the
whole Pre-Crime project (Lois Smith), all of whom can help him,
but only so much.
Anderton goes on the run with
Agatha (Samantha Morton in an alternately touching and alarming
performance), the most powerful of the Pre-Cogs, and Spielberg
stages their adventures -- a bit of business with police spiders,
a beautifully timed chase sequence wherein Agatha's psychic abilities
come in handy -- with all his old genius for momentum and humor
arising from personality and situation; I cannot help loving
a film in which the high-tech Pre-Crime officers, with all the
gimmickry at their fingertips, are foiled by some children's
balloons.
The look of the film, by way
of cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, is ominously blue and bleached
and untouchable, but Spielberg packs the frame with reminders
of humanity trudging along despite the bleakness of its surroundings
(I particularly enjoyed the glimpse of a man lost in a virtual-reality
daydream of being lavishly praised by his peers). Toward the
end, Samantha Morton sells the hell out of a windy speech about
how Anderton's home is full of psychic residue of love for his
son, but it's still a windy speech; and Spielberg reneges on
the uncompromising film noir denouement the material well-nigh
demands. Still, this is the most exciting piece of work Spielberg
has delivered in ages -- clean, supple, and emotionally engaging
without being emotionally overbearing.
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