Future Perfect (Minority Report (DVD))

Name: Rumblefish

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Product:	Minority Report (DVD)
Date:	05/07/02 (213 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cinematography, performances, great premise, great suspense

Disadvantages: Plot not totally watertight

"The future's bright..." a certain telecommunications network keeps telling us. But not that bright, if MINORITY REPORT is to be believed.

This sci-fi thriller stars Tom Cruise (probably the biggest star of his generation), is directed by Steven Spielberg (probably the most bankable film-maker in Hollywood), and is based on a story by Philip K Dick (probably the most visionary writer of the twentieth century). With credentials like that you'd think it couldn't go far wrong. And you'd be right. In fact this film just about hits the bulls-eye, and reminds you just what fantastic medium for story-telling cinema can be.

The year is 2054. The police force in Washington DC now includes a "pre-crime" unit, which with the aid of three psychics, or "pre-cogs", is able to catch would-be murderers before they've actually committed the crime, with the result that the actual act of murder is now a thing of the past (well, a thing of the future, but you know what I mean) in the nation's capital. John Anderton (Cruise) heads this elite team, under the guidance of pre-crime's fatherly founder Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow), and has absolute faith in the infallibility of the system. That is until the pre-cogs predict that *he* will commit a murder (of someone he has never heard of) within 36 hours. With the pre-crime system poised to go national, and ambitious Justice Department operative Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) on his tail, can Anderton prove himself innocent of the crime he has yet to commit - and in doing so prove the system was never perfect after all?

One of the first things that strikes you about MINORITY REPORT is that the world portrayed is almost creepily believable. Rather than go for some distant sun-drenched utopian future, Spielberg has created a mid-twenty-first century city all to reminiscent of cities of today. Part of this is down to the cinematography of Janusz Kaminski (who h
as shot all of Spielberg's films since 1993's SCHINDLER'S LIST), which uses steely greys and cold blues to create a dark and gloomy urban sprawl. More intriguingly the Washington DC of 2054 is littered with drunks, beggars, and drug dealers, whilst couples row and babies scream in filthy, cluttered apartment blocks. The product placement (normally an annoyance in big budget movies) is also used in a clever, cynical way - company advertising uses retinal scans to personally identify customers so that it can address them by name, whilst it seems that GAP stores of 2054 will still be insisting on harassing customers the moment they enter the shop! We even discover that the pre-cogs and pre-crime were not the end product of some noble venture, but in fact the semi-accidental result of some morally questionable botched scientific experiment.

Despite its mind-bending premise, MINORITY REPORT is less science fiction than it is old-fashioned film noir. After all, the central idea - man goes on the run to prove his innocence - is one of the oldest in cinematic history. In fact setting the film in a future of psychics and pre-crime is merely a means for Spielberg to put a twist on the thriller genre, just as a unique conceit made memorable thrillers out of MEMENTO, say, or THE USUAL SUSPECTS (films with which MINORITY REPORT has far more in common than it does with most sci-fi movies). Spielberg - and writers John Frank and Scott Cohen - give us pieces of the puzzle and dare us to complete it before Anderton can, and even then they reveal that some of the pieces didn't fit in quite as perfectly as we thought they did in the first place. A good clue to what to expect from this film is that the three pre-cogs are named Agatha, Dashiell, and Arthur - after Christie, Hammett, and Conan Doyle, three of the greatest writers of detective fiction the world has known. This is the strangest kind of whodunit - because we know who did it, and anyway he hasn't
done it yet. This is more a whywillhedoit, and even a willhestilldoitifheknowshesgoingtodoit.

If the premise of MINORITY REPORT is multi-layered, so are its themes. The most intriguing of these is the one with which Anderton wrestles throughout the film - fate versus freewill. Is the future written in stone or can it be changed? We learn that the three pre-cogs are never wrong "but sometimes they disagree" (the "minority report" of the title), giving Anderton hope that his destiny can be changed ("you have a choice" he is repeatedly told as zero hour approaches). Yet we also know that most of the future can indeed be predicted down to the last detail, from the film's tense opening salvo when the pre-crime unit races to apprehend a man about to murder his adulterous wife, to perhaps the film's cleverest sequence when the most gifted pre-cog, Agatha (Samantha Morton) aids Anderton's escape with her foreknowledge - for example telling him to drop change for a homeless old man moments before Anderton's pursuers stumble over the man as he gropes for the money.

MINORITY REPORT also explores some basic issues of civil liberties, such as preventative police actions and invasions of privacy. The existence of minority reports in themselves question the very fundamentals of pre-crime. At first Anderton has absolute faith in the system, using the example of a ball being caught as gravity forces it downwards not altering the fact that it would have gone on to hit the ground had it not been caught. But is it morally justified to convict someone of a crime they have yet to commit, if there is the smallest chance that they may not have gone on to commit the crime without police intervention? Tied in with this is the more familiar theme of privacy invasion, in a world where everyone can be instantly identified by retinal scans as they go about their daily lives. Just as today our email boxes fill with spam addressing u
s by name, people of 2054 are told by name as they walk through shopping malls that what they could really use is a pint of Guinness. Just as today people's privacy can be routinely compromised by law enforcement agencies, the people of 2054 have to cope with the police sending spider like machines hopping through their apartment blocks, performing retinal scans on tenants as they sit on the toilet or have sex.

Of course almost inevitably with a film with such a complex narrative, MINORITY REPORT may in the end all fit together a little less seamlessly that it would like to think. If you don't notice one or two of the plot holes as you watch the film, you'll notice them when you think about it afterwards. But there is nothing so implausible or contrived that it really undermines the suspense of the film, nor detracts from its overall high quality.

The action-led tone of the trailer may have led you to think that MINORITY REPORT is just another dumb blockbuster, but that is certainly not the case. Yes, there is plenty of action, and Spielberg orchestrates it superbly, most notably a fight scene (with an amusing conclusion) in an entirely automated car factory, and a breathless sequence on a vertical freeway, which sees Cruise leaping between vehicles as they plummet downwards. But the action never comes at the expense of intelligent storytelling or characterisation. In fact the film has an almost action-less ending, but that is more in keeping with a film that is after all more detective story than thrills-and-spills actioner. Spielberg being Spielberg the ending does in truth come about twenty minutes or more after you thought it was going to end (just as it did in AI), but unlike AI (and too many of Spielberg's films generally) MINORITY REPORT is not coated in syrupy sentimentality. You may think otherwise when you first see Anderton alone at home watching old home movies of his missing young son, but thankfully this actually emerg
es to be a key plot element rather than just Spielberg piling on the sentiment.

Tom Cruise is excellent as John Anderton, who far from being a flawless American hero is in fact a damaged cop with a drug habit. Cruise can of course do the action sequences standing on his head, but more impressive is the manner in which he lends humanity and vulnerability to Anderton's character. Samantha Morton almost steals the film, with a harrowing performance as the deathly, exploited pre-cog Agatha ("I'm tired of the future" she gasps at one point). Soon-to-be-in-everything Dubliner Colin Farrell is also good, in a difficult role as Danny Witwer, Anderton's chief adversary, but a man who may have more integrity than he is letting on. There are a also host of marvellous smaller turns in the film: Peter Stormare (FARGO) as the rogue surgeon Dr Solomon, who is entrusted with giving Anderton a new pair of eyes to fool those retinal scans; Tim Blake Nelson (O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU?) as the organ-playing warden of a high-tech prison; Lois Smith (THE PLEDGE) as an eccentric scientist with some eccentric wildlife in her garden; and of course Max von Sydow as the benevolent founder of pre-crime, anxious not to see his creation swallowed up by bureaucracy.

The really good thing about MINORITY REPORT is that it demonstrates that Hollywood is able to engage the audience on an intellectual and emotional level without sacrificing the basic tenet of good movie-making that is telling a damn good yarn. The work of Philip K Dick has been filmed before, most successfully as Ridley Scott's BLADE RUNNER (1982) and Paul Verhoeven's TOTAL RECALL (1990), and this film has much in common with both the haunting story and complex characterisation of the former and the multi-layered realities of the latter. In it's original form 'Minority Report' was a 31-page short story Dick wrote for a magazine called 'Fantastic Universe', published in
1956. It is in fact only one of countless wonderful stories Dick wrote, and his work is a treasure chest of ideas that Hollywood delves into all too infrequently.

This will be seen as a real return to form for both Spielberg and Cruise, but more importantly it's a return to form for mega-budget film-making. Maybe the future *is* bright after all...

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