*** (out of ****)
Starring Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Max von Sydow, Kathryn Morris, Tim Blake Nelson, Peter Stormare, and Lois Smith.
Directed by Steven Spielberg, written for the screen by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, from the short story by Phillip K. Dick, music by John Williams, art direction by Alex McDowell, and photographed by Janusz Kaminski.
2002 PG13
The key to “Minority Report” are the two men and one woman perpetually floating in a vat of clear goo. They are known as the “pre-cogs,” psychics that live in a state of waking death, perpetually stoned and perpetually dreaming, so that their psychic abilities can be harnessed by the Pre-Crime Department to catch murderers before their murders are even committed. We discover, in steps, that the lot of the pre-cogs is indeed a sorry one. Their parents were addicted to horrifying, mind-altering drugs, and this is from whence the power of the pre-cogs’ comes. Their power is also their curse, as they can never live in the present, only in a rush of the past and the future. But Pre-Crime needs them, and has needed them for six years, to prevent hundreds of murders. “Minority Report,” Steven Spielberg’s engrossing new thriller, asks, among other things, aren’t the lives of hundreds worth three freaks?
Set fifty-two years in the future, “Minority Report” stars Tom Cruise as the chief “pre-cop,” a man dedicated to Pre-Crime but weighed down by the burden of his own dead son. He’s good at his job, but now that Pre-Crime is on the verge of expanding from Washington, D.C. to a nationwide law enforcement agency, the Justice Department has sent an agent (Colin Farrell) to look into things. Cruise and Farrell don’t get along because they don’t like having two roosters in the henhouse. They especially don’t get along when the pre-cogs accuse Cruise of killing a man three days in the future. Soon Cruise is on the run, with Farrell leading his former colleagues in hot pursuit.
Beyond that I will preserve the movie’s twists and turns by speaking only obliquely of the plot. The cat-and-mouse between Cruise and the pre-cops is inventive and exciting—we expect no less from the man who directed the Indiana Jones trilogy—and involves jet packs, flying cars, vomit-inducing night sticks, a car factory, rusted tenements, and robot spiders taking retinal scans. Cruise is eventually joined on the chase by a liberated pre-cog (Samantha Morton of “Sweet and Lowdown”), who is so weak and confused by the concept of “now” that she is a constant burden to him.
The web which Cruise must untangle involves the exact science behind the pre-cogs. For the supernatural or bizarre to work in film it must be made comprehensible; the unbelievable must remain wondrous but at the same time be rendered at least partially mundane. “Minority Report” effortlessly defines its psychics for us as well and as clearly as the brain damage in “Memento” or the floorplan in “Panic Room.” Cruise’s investigation leads him to both his current superior and friend (Max von Sydow) and the eccentric scientist (Lois Smith) who helped develop the system. In a interesting twist Farrell’s role in the movie is not simply to chase Cruise but to try solving the same mystery from a different angle, with a different personality, and with their two experiences we come to see what’s really happening to the framed police chief.
“Minority Report’s” greatest strength is in the future world it creates. D.C. is not the bleak, overcrowded, polluted mess that characterized Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” but a city where consumerism has gone wild. Everything seems to have an internet-style pop-up ad to go with it. Every store and subway has retinal scanners linked to a complete file of every purchase Cruise has ever made, and voices and images are constantly urging him to buy more. There’s also the usual movie optimism when it comes to flying cars and mile-high skyscrapers; we’ve seen it before, but production designer Alex McDowell and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski give us fresh and clear images of the cities and highways of the future. A clever touch is that suburban neighborhoods and national monuments in the nation’s capital, while in the shadow of skyscrapers and spiderwebs of overpasses, have remained mostly unchanged. Kaminski, who also photographed Spielberg’s “A.I.,” often gives “Minority Report’s” internal spaces the hazy, foggy look of film noir, with rooms of bright windows and heavy shadows.