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Look ahead in horror
[Photos: Twentieth Century Fox and Dreamworks L.L.C. ]
Hanging above the streets of futuristic Washington, D.C., Anderton (Tom Cruise, right) uses the jet packs of pursuing pre-crime cops including Fletcher (Neal McDonough, left) to make a daring escape in Minority Report. |
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published June 20, 2002
In Minority Report, due process is as comatose as the sentinels who predict and prevent crime. But, wait: Why is law enforcement after a nice guy like Tom Cruise?
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Steven Spielberg has seen the future, and it's scary enough to make you want to stop time right now. Minority Report is a dazzling cautionary tale, a companion piece of sorts to the director's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, echoing today's headlines in the kind of chilling coincidence that only seems to happen with the movies.
Minority Report arrives at a time when homeland security is a Cabinet-level concern, when faces are scanned for mugshot comparisons and e-marketers know where we are and what we want to buy. Spielberg is working from a short story by the late Philip K. Dick (who also inspired Blade Runner) about a 2054 that is plausibly similar to 2002. It's the kind of tomorrow that seems cool until it becomes chilling.
Cars operate on magnetic roadways and advertisements call consumers by name, but the crucial cultural evolution in Minority Report is the Department of Pre-Crime. The agency uses the prescient dreams of comatose psychics called Pre-Cogs to determine when murder will occur and to arrest the future perpetrator before it happens. Civil libertarians will have a field day with that premise. It's perfect law enforcement, but what if it goes wrong even once?
Detective John Anderton (Tom Cruise) doesn't believe that's possible. He's the best pre-crime technician on the Washington, D.C., force, sorting through jagged images projected from the Pre-Cogs' minds for clues to the location of suspects. Spielberg's breathtaking opening sequence shows the system at work, identifying future victims and killers with high-tech lottery balls, then zeroing in on the scene of the crime with jet-SWAT teams and a countdown clock. Another would-be murderer gets an electronic "halo" that puts him safely away in suspended animation.
Pre-crime detection works so well that it may go nationwide. But it must be foolproof, and smug internal affairs investigator Ed Witwer (Colin Farrell) is poking around for glitches. Anderton steadfastly defends the system until his name shows up on one of those carved-wood lottery balls, declaring he will murder someone he never met. Who and why are questions Anderton will have to ponder on the run, with Witwer leading the jet-packed posse.
Minority Report is relentlessly entertaining, with grand special effects sequences. Highlights include a foot chase along the roofs of magnetized cars and close calls in a factory that makes them. One memorable overhead shot tracks an army of surveillance robo-spiders checking for a suspect in an apartment house sweep. The watery environs established for the Pre-Cogs' safekeeping and the morgue where haloed prisoners are stored are fascinating predictions of efficiency run amok.
Anderton (Tom Cruise) and Pre-Cog Agatha (Samantha Morton) face some troubling secrets.
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The screenplay adaptation by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen makes people count as much as machinery, unlike the distanced emotions of A.I. (or most sci-fi, for that matter). These aren't circumstances when great acting is expected, but Cruise delivers one of his best performances so far. Athletic and commanding on the job, he is shattered at home, drug-addicted and wallowing in hologram memories of family tragedy. He doesn't get many chances to flash "that smile," and never just for charm.
Casting Farrell as Anderton's foil was smart, since the rivals of good-looking movie stars typically wear danger on their faces. Making the cat as handsome as the mouse increases the mystery of why all this is happening to Anderton. Max von Sydow lends his imposing presence to the role of pre-crime agency director Burgess, and Samantha Morton (Sweet and Lowdown) offers an eerie Pre-Cog assist to Anderton's investigation. The solution may seem obvious in hindsight, but it works on first inspection.
The devil in Spielberg's future is in the details of his movie. Retina scans not only check for criminals; but personalize consumerism and access to a maddening degree for someone like Anderton who's trying to be incognito. Getting around the scans leads to macabre humor Spielberg hasn't attempted in years, with Peter Stormare making a grossly memorable entrance as a black market surgeon.
A creepy technician (Tim Blake Nelson) mans the halo morgue, playing a pipe organ like some futuristic phantom of the opera. Even plants have attitudes in a society where nothing is secret and civil rights are shortchanged for our own good.
Minority Report is the kind of science fiction movie that Hitchcock might have made, with a MacGuffin in the title and a wrong man being chased. Spielberg crosses the master's North by Northwest dynamics with the steamroller action of his own Raiders of the Lost Ark and that keen sense of futurism rekindled by Stanley Kubrick's ideas for A.I. Artificial Intelligence. This is a popcorn movie, and once in a while you bite into a kernel of fear that what's happening in Minority Report could happen to our great-grandchildren.
Minority Report
- Grade: A
- Director: Steven Spielberg
- Cast: Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Max von Sydow, Samantha Morton, Tim Blake Nelson, Lois Smith, Peter Stormare, Kathryn Morris
- Screenplay: Scott Frank, Jon Cohen, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick
- Rating: PG-13; violence, profanity, drug abuse, brief sensuality
- Running time: 134 min.
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