The year is 2054 and murder has been eliminated in the District of Columbia thanks to PreCrime, a special police taskforce, led by Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise), that uses a trio of precognitives to predict murders and prevent them. When the Precogs predict that Anderton himself will soon kill a man, someone he has never even met, he is forced to go on the run so he can clear his name by solving a murder that hasn't happened yet.
Warning! Includes Spoilers!
Based on the novelette by Philip K. Dick, Minority Report was originally developed as a sequel to Total Recall, with the aim of getting Arnold Schwarzenegger to once again star. After various delays and bankruptcies, it was reworked as a standalone film and ended up in the hands of Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise. They'd met on the set of Risky Business, became friends, and always talked of working together. At one point Spielberg was going to direct Rain Man, but dropped out to make Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade instead. A decade later they both signed to make this film, but production was delayed multiple times, first due to filming of Mission: Impossible 2 overrunning and then again because of Spielberg agreeing to make A.I. Artificial Intelligence following Stanley Kubrick's death.
Minority Report is three different films all rolled into one. It's a Hitchcockian chase thriller, a noir murder mystery, and a semi-dystopian glimpse of the future that wants to asks big moral and philosophical questions about fate and free will. Unfortunately, not all of these movies are operating at the same level of quality. The chase thriller element is rather good, thanks largely to the director being at the top of his craft, but the murder mystery is messy, convoluted and too reliant on contrivances to function, and it frequently stumbles over itself trying to answer all those big moral and philosophical questions.
As much as I enjoy his work, I'll be the first to admit that Spielberg doesn't always picks the best scripts, and Minority Report is certainly lacking in that department. Despite this, it still hold together rather well as an exciting slice of cinematic entertainment because of his efforts behind the camera. In anyone else's hands, this probably would've ended up as another of the many forgettable sci-fi thrillers of the 2000s, which sometimes had interesting ideas, but poor execution. That is never a problem with Spielberg. Even his weakest films are always exceptionally well crafted. There's really just no such thing as a badly made Spielberg film.
Between chase scenes, the film wants to point out and debate the moral dilemma of its central concept, but isn't really interested in going over and seriously interacting with it. There's a lot of thorny issues about this whole concept, so many little details to ponder, but the film isn't all that interested in digging into them and often sabotages its own arguments, notably during the opening scene. It's a mini race against the clock thriller as the PreCrime team struggle to sort through scattered clues to locate their target before he kills anyone. It's an effective sequence, and you can easily see why someone would think you could turn this entire concept into a weekly TV series, but it really undermines many of the points the film is trying to make about PreCrime arresting people who have committed no crime. Howard Marks cries of "I haven't done anything" would've carried more weight if we hadn't literally seen him trying to stab his wife just before the cops arrived. He might not have been guilty of murder, but he was certainly guilty of attempted murder.
There are too many inconsistencies in how the predictions actually work. The PreCrime cops argue that they are set in stone, yet they prevent them all the time. We're also told that you can change the future if you already know it, but Crow dies exactly as predicted even after Anderton chooses not to kill him. We're told that per-meditated crimes no longer happen, and the only murders they get are crimes of passion. However, Anderton's killing of Crow is classed as per-meditated, but he had zero intention of killing Crow until he was in the room with him and believes he'd killed his son, which made it a crime of passion. Also, Burgess orchestrated Crow's death, but that was done with Crow's co-operation, which would've made it a suicide, something we're told the Precogs can't predict. The prediction is also a bootstrap paradox since Anderton never would've been in that room without the prediction, which begs the question of how the whole scheme was supposed to work without the prediction.
Just as there are a lot of holes in the central concept, there are also a lot in the plot. The villain's scheme is so contrived and doesn't hold up to any scrutiny and is also completely unnecessary since all he needed to do to stop Anderton was let Witwer expose his drug problem so he could be fired. That would've stopped his entire investigation. Even if he still pursued it on his own, he'd just be dismissed as a crank junkie looking to get back at his old boss. So many of the plot problems stem from the need to force a neat and tidy happily ever after for everyone, which isn't really how noir (or Dick's stories) works, but is how Spielberg (unfortunately) tends to. Burgess kills himself, PreCrime is shut down, everyone is set free, John and his wife get back together and have another kid, and the Precogs are given a nice little cottage somewhere to live in peace, trading one life of enforced isolation for another, more comfortable and picturesque life of enforced isolation.
--Anderton isn't much of a stretch or challenge for Cruise. As a government agent on the run after being framed by his boss, he's basically Ethan Hunt with a drug problem. Colin Farrell brings just the right level of smarmy to Witwer so you're never quite sure if he is the mastermind behind everything or just an asshole twink after John's job. But Samantha Morton easily blows them both out of the water.
--Clearly the preservation rules against building high-rises in D.C. are relaxed in the future. I can sure as hell see that happening under the current administration.
--Like so many noirs, Anderton encounters various creeps and weirdos throughout the movie like Tim Blake Nelson's prison warden and Peter Stormare's very unhygienic doctor, but my favourite was Lois Smith as the mad scientist inventor of PreCrime.
--To image what the 2050s might actually look like, Spielberg went so far as to hire a whole team of experts to come up with ideas. We're almost halfway there now and it's amusing looking back at this film and seeing what it did get right, what it didn't, and what might still happen. Driverless cars might one day be a reality, but probably not jetpacks or newspapers that get live updates. The oppressive, omnipresent surveillance via biometrics feels almost certain at this point, along with the idea that it would be also used excessively to sell shit with ads targeted directly at you (the studio probably loved all that product placement). Oh and good news for anyone with shares in RadioShack because it seems set for a comeback.
--I really liked that Sean's disappearance remained unsolved and there is no closure there for John and Lara.
--Why wasn't Anderton's security clearance revoked after he went on the run? Even after he broke in and took Agatha, he was still in the system and Lara used it to break him out. More to the point, why was she even given his eye or his gun in the first place?
--With only three Precogs, who only have a range of 200 miles, how would PreCrime even work nationally?
--To create a noir look without making things black and white, Spielberg and Janusz Kamiński, his regular DP, overlit the picture and then bleach-bypassed the negatives in post-production to desaturate the film's colours. The only scene with full colours was the flashback to Sean's disappearance.
--The films projected on the wall when Anderton visits the eye doctor are House of Bamboo (1955) and The Mark of Zorro (1940).
--Mrs Marks and her lover are some of the dumbest cheaters I have ever seen. She has him waiting right outside her house in broad daylight where everyone can see him. This is also right next to a play park, where men loitering on their own tend to really stand out.
--Before filming was delayed, Spielberg planned to cast Matt Damon as Witwer, Meryl Streep as Iris Hineman, Ian McKellen as Burgess, Cate Blanchett as Agatha, and Jenna Elfman as Lara. Streep declined the role, Damon opted to do Ocean's Eleven instead, and the other roles were recast due to the delays.
--One roadblock the PreCrime team faced locating Marks is that the family has moved and not told anyone, which would be a little far-fetched today, let alone in this surveillance heavy society. You're telling me there's no record of their change of address anywhere, not with the government, their employers or even their kid's school?
Dr. Iris Hineman: “Sometimes, in order to see the light, you have to risk the dark.”
Gideon: “Careful, Chief. Dig up the past, all you get is dirty.”
Witwer: “Science has stolen most of our miracles. In a way, they give us hope, hope of the existence of the divine. I find it interesting that some people have begun to deify the Precogs.”
Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011 More Mark Greig
No comments:
Post a Comment
We love comments! Just note that we always moderate because of spam and trolls. It's never too late to comment on an old show, but please don’t spoil future episodes for newbies.