MINORITY REPORT (Steven Spielberg, 2002) R

Reviewed: June 21, 2002 - June 24, 2002

I walked into Minority Report fully expecting a great film (as all my favorite and most respected critics had led me to believe) and walked out bitterly disappointed. Minority Report is not great, nor near-great. It is good. It is a coulda-been-a-contender and should-have-been-great, had Spielberg and his screenwriters decided to take any real risks with their Philip K. Dick source material. Instead they have produced an often conventional, big studio action pic, with a super strong premise that is never realized because of rote plotting and a disastrous, cliché-ridden final act. The visuals are revolutionary and awe-inspiring, yes. The movie is always enjoyable, yes. But it's a god damn shame Minority Report is not so much more.

Memo to all the critics who point to the irony that Minority Report is more Kubrickian than A.I.: you couldn't be any more inaccurate. When was the last time any of you even saw a Kubrick film? Whereas A.I. was consumed by a maelstrom of Kubrick ghosts, Minority Report never feels much like Kubrick at all. It is too inappropriately fast, far too annoyingly frenzied and manic and action film-ish, too frequently reliant on cheap thrills and endless exposition, and not nearly pensive enough. Yes, the Dick source material contains ideas I could easily see Kubrick responding to and making a nightmarish masterpiece out of. But whereas his film would be slow, probing, difficult, rewarding, hard-hitting, uncompromisingly bleak and R-rated, Spielberg has made his standard PG-13 gloss over.

The simple-minded will find Minority Report to be more sheerly pleasurable than A.I., but I don't think it's nearly as rich, interesting or important a film. Where A.I. challenges, Minority Report panders. Any critic commenting that Minority Report requires smart viewers to absorb its plot complexities are missing the point: in the case of Minority Report, that's a flaw, not an asset. Because it's not that the plot itself is complex (it fact, when all is said and done, it's terribly, dissatisfyingly simple), it's that the screenwriters try to cram in so much superfluous and tiring exposition, it can overwhelm even the strong of heart. Good dialogue makes exposition seem effortless, even nonexistent. But Minority Report's script is always so busy worrying about connecting point A to point B, it often feels mechanical, like a robot perpetually sprinting around a circular track. Why even bother trying to keep up? I constantly pictured screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen sitting down to write the initial outline. Roman numeral I, protagonist goes here to discover this. Roman numeral II, protagonist goes there to discover that. Repeat ad nauseum. Where is the flair, the vivacity?

Critics seem intent on pointing out how thoughtful Minority Report is. Do not be fooled-- they are lying to you. Minority Report tricked them into thinking it would be thoughtful, as its first act detailing a Washington DC precrime division that uses three pre-cogs (who can see into the future) to stop murders before they occur, has all the hallmarks of a fascinating (and obviously currently relevant) sci-fi exploration of morality. But the buck stops there. Past act I Spielberg and company are so concerned with the lame, lame, lame, trite, whodunit that they forget to exploit the brilliance of their initial setup. And there are rudimentary disconnects in their precrime postulations. Minority Report's conception of precrime never allows itself to achieve any depth, as the movie's vision of precrime is not sweeping enough to prevent the absence of gaping, detrimentally unanswered questions. I'll elaborate my precrime case later on in a spoiler-filled appendix.

All of the failings I've mentioned are heightened by what Spielberg does get fantastically right, mainly every technical aspect of the film. The futuristic world Minority Report presents is so convincingly detailed I wanted to jump into the screen. No praise is too intense for the monochromatic cinematography, the haunting sterile-grit combination of the production design and the striking, fucking genius work of the visual effects department. I really got the feeling I was watching a technical watershed film, because for once visual effects had to be used to convey absolute realism without leeway. Minority Report takes place in 2054, a not-too-distant future, so the luxury ILM has on the Star Wars pics to just go hog-wild is completely lacking. Specific compliments must be extended to the supremely kick-ass guns Cruise totes in a certain scene, the way Cruise gets high, the film's vision of travel (both ground and air), the film's vision of prison and the film's vision of specialized, super-targeted marketing. Not to mention Spielberg's eye behind the camera is as impeccable as ever--his camera moves are always deserved and his framings are gorgeous.

Spielberg also nails act I beautifully. So beautifully that it portends great things to come (which of course they never do) and thus added another facet to my overall extreme letdown. Anyone who's seen Minority Report's trailers knows the basics of act I and where it initially leads, but I won't reveal any specifics here. Suffice to say, we see the precrime division in action, we meet the major characters and we get some background on them and their plot positioning. Everything is handled efficiently, exposition is thankfully kept to a minimum (in direct contrast to acts II and III, which pile on the exposition like a thirty-five foot tall stack of mashed potatoes) and there's a steady pulse and real excitement to the proceedings.

Sadly, after act I, Minority Report begins it's steady decay. I've already mentioned a lot of the problems, but let me emphasize again how clumsy the plotting is, as well as focusing on a fundamental lack of sustained conflict in the film. Just as I felt betrayed by Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven last year because of an uncanny ability by all its main characters to avoid conflict at every single plot turn, I felt the same way about Cruise's character, John Anderton, in Minority Report. The basis 1-2-3 formula is as follows: Step 1) Anderton has a problem. Step 2) Anderton quickly figures out a way to overcome the problem. Step 3) Anderton succeeds.

Most of the time this leads to flat out silly happenings, such as when Anderton is trapped by the the armed team of jetpack men and yet easily, almost inexplicably manages to single-handedly conquer all of them. Or when Anderton is being sought by the retina-scanning spiders but can't take off his bandages to let the spiders scan his eyes cause he's just had his eyes replaced (to conceal his actual identity) and he'll go blind if they're exposed to light too soon after the surgery. First we have an incredibly, brilliantly tense sequence of the spiders seeking Anderton intercut with Anderton attempting to hide. Ultimately the spiders discover him. Oh, fuck we're thinking. What's he gonna do? Is he screwed? How the hell is he gonna get outta this? Cut to: he simply takes off his bandages and lets the spiders scan his new eyes (which thus don't identify him as Anderton)! Oh no, he's ruined?!

Nope. He's in a little pain and cries out and that's that and the spiders go away and Anderton gets off scott free and one minute later he's not blind, but perfectly fine. How fucking unfair and ridiculous! Dear screenwriters of Minority Report: don't set up a conflict and then break the rules of the conflict cause you can't figure a genuinely creative or remotely interesting way out of the corner you've painted yourself into! That does a huge disservice to your audience cause all you wind up with is empty manipulation, aka cinema at its worst.

Minority Report works best in its quietest moments, the times when Spielberg stops trying so hard to be relentlessly propulsive and takes a deep breath (and maybe even gives us a respite from John Williams's score). Instances include a scene in the GAP and a portion of the aforementioned spider sequence. These moments also frequently involve small, peripheral characters and as is increasingly (disturbingly) more common in Hollywood films these days, I felt these smaller characters were always more interesting and flavorful than the central ones. I am referring specifically to: Lois Smith as the sad, reclusive, bizarre "mother" of precrime, Tim Blake Nelson as Gideon, the organ-playing prison warden and Daniel London as Wally, the pre-cogs' caretaker. Their performances are all special and sublime and each managed to quickly make a strong impression on me. In fact, Wally's oddly sexual, possessive attraction to pre-cog Agatha was perhaps the most wonderfully perverse and inspired story touch in the whole film. It's never developed, only hinted at (during one of those quieter moments), and perhaps that's for the best.

Speaking of Agatha, allow me to make a bold statement: Samantha Morton is currently the most talented actress in cinema. This comment will not take longtime readers of the site by surprise, as I have sung her praises tirelessly in no less than two separate reviews. But with her performance in Minority Report, the truth is inescapable: Samantha has eclipsed even luminaries like Meryl Streep and Susan Sarandon and Julianne Moore as the best actress at work. Not the best overall, mind you, but best at this moment in time.

Agatha is an important character in Minority Report, but Samantha's role is mostly limited to shivering and crying. On the surface, that is. Despite the script limitations, Morton manages to inject so much emotion and raw power into Agatha using only body language and facial contortions that certain images of Agatha are perhaps Minority Report's most enduringly haunting imprints on my brain. There are a few instances of Morton screaming/crying to such shattering effect, I was truly shaken. Morton's never less than astounding.

As for the main (supposed) "characters," Max von Sydow and Colin Farrell in fact do not deserve such distinctions. Because they are not characters, they are prototypical, cardboard cutouts whom you've seen in countless other films. Anderton himself is more developed, but his driving motivation is somewhat pat and he's excessively, frustratingly clueless (more on this in the appendix).

Hey, listen:

I'll be the first to admit I often easily build myself up to gigantic expectations that are ultimately not met. My mindset is conducive to such buildup. I so desperately wanna believe the buzz when I hear a movie's fantastic. If for every five big letdowns there's one film that lives up to its hype and then some, my faith is instantly rejuvenated all over again. You see, I just don't have it in to me to be cynical and say "Oh, the critics and their glowing praise are probably all wrong about this film. It'll probably just be mediocre. I better go in expecting the worst so I'm not disappointed."

I don't protect myself like that. That's cowardly. That's bullshit. I can't do that. I won't. I refuse to become jaded. I believe anything is possible in cinema.

And I love movies too much.

***APPENDIX W/ CATASTROPHIC SPOILERS -- DO NOT READ UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE UNTIL AFTER YOU'VE SEEN MINORITY REPORT***

Here I will address three issues in a bit of detail:

1) Minority Report's weak characterization of its protagonist, John Anderton.
2) Minority Report's totally flawed conceptualization of precrime.
3) Minority Report's awful, bland, hackneyed and dissatisfying conclusion (read: final fifteen to twenty minutes).

John Anderton

Cruise does his standard excellent work, but the character of John Anderton is an underwritten cipher. We know his son got kidnapped. We know his wife divorced him. We know he's on drugs. But what we don't know is why he's so fucking ignorant. When he goes to visit the mother of precrime, she delivers gigantic passages of exposition, explaining the history of precrime and its most fundamental concepts. Throughout the whole scene all I could think was... WHY DOESN'T ANDERTON KNOW ANY OF THIS STUFF ALREADY?! He's been the head of precrime for six years! And I'm not just talking about the minority reports. Fine, maybe I'll buy he didn't know about those. But everything else? Come on. In reality his character would obviously know all that information, but the screenwriters had to find a convenient way to shovel all the exposition into the audience's brain. The casualty is Anderton himself, who simply comes off as a bumbling fool.

Another thing that really bothered me about Anderton is he keeps maintaining he's being framed because he doesn't know the person whom he's supposed to kill in the future. To this supposed logic I say... WHAT? That doesn't make a bit of fucking sense! I understand he seems to be in some state of uniform, inexplicable denial, but it doesn't take that much sense to figure out hey, I might not know the person I'm supposed to kill now, but I will know him in the future when it comes time for me to kill him! Plus there is the tiny fact to consider that the pre-cogs had never once been wrong. I could even stomach Anderton's blatant denial initially, but once it came down to minutes before the murder, once he had already discovered there was no minority report, once his life had taken all the necessary turns and he was still denying the future murder because he didn't yet know the guy, I gave up on him.

Anderton led a super high-risk life and operated within a super high-risk job. There's innumerable possibilities for why he might wind up in a death match with someone. But moreover, there's no context for the murder provided by the pre-cogs, so it's not like he's denying he's a cold-blooded killer. Did he ever consider the murder might end up being an accident (as it of course does)? Why so easily dismiss any explanation other than FUCK I'M BEING FRAMED! I thought this guy's supposed to be a detective. Did it ever occur to him (like it obviously does to most of the audience), hey this murder I'm supposed to eventually commit might have something to do with my kidnapped/dead son (which of course it, even though it's only ostensibly, does)?!

Some might argue I'm nitpicking, big deal, who cares about this stuff. But the reason it truly matters is because I'm convinced the more interesting film to be made was not a sci-fi whodunit, but a sci-fi exploration of John Anderton's psychology as he slowly comes to terms with the fact that he will be murdering someone. An absurd uniform denial is not interesting. Or even if this psychological exploration was just one of many story facets, I feel it would have certainly enhanced the film.

Precrime

Minority Report and its whodunit revolves around Max von Sydow's campaign for precrime to branch out of Washington DC and be implemented nationally. Minority Report also occasionally explores the morality of precrime. Unfortunately both of these story elements were rendered moot in my book by the simple realization that precrime has absolutely no hope of becoming a national installation and can never work on a remotely practical level. It is way too flawed, and I don't mean morally. I mean in implementation. First off, how does Sydow expect the program to go national? We are told by the mother of the pre-cogs, that the pre-cogs only became pre-cogs due to unpredictable side effects from experiments gone wrong. Three children became pre-cogs, but many others simply got severe brain damage. Plus we are told the two male pre-cogs are useless without Agatha, so out of all the experiments that went wrong, only one truly useful pre-cog was produced.

In other words: no one has the power to successfully create pre-cogs. There is no pre-cog technology, recipes, formulas. What the fuck is supposed to happen, the three pre-cogs who are already overworked seeing everyone in Washington DC's future are now supposed to note visions for everyone in the entire country? Highly unlikely. But more importantly, what happens to the precrime program even in Washington DC, when those three pre-cogs die? Or even when only Agatha dies? Unless new ones are created (and again I don't see how that's possible), the program would instantly be ruined. Thus the movie's final verdict that a precrime program is doomed, was obvious, bland, predictable and wholly dissatisfying.

Now I'm sure some people are thinking, lighten up man, it's sci-fi, once they get national funding they'll do some testing and what not, and figure out creating pre-cogs down to a science. To that I respond: if the movie had left pre-cog science very vague, fine I'll buy that somehow it can go national. But no, Minority Report goes to great pains to explain all the problems of precrime and pre-cogs in depth! A movie has to be willing to play by its own rules, by the rules of the world it has created.

Another thing: I don't see how Sydow's national precrime platform has any hope of actually succeeding once people find out that their children will be tested on incessantly, with one of two possible results-- they will either get brain damage and possibly die or else they will lead a glamorous life as a pre-cog, aka a life of shivering in a tank and haunted by incessant murderous nightmares. Oh yeah, I'm sure parents will be happy to oblige. I mean, seriously, Sydow must have been prepared to kill a fuckload more parents besides Agatha's. If he thought killing Agatha's mother was enough, he doesn't know what would obviously be in store for him if the program went national. Oh what's that, they'll just use orphans you say? Hmmm, yeah I'm sure no civil rights groups or anyone else would object to turning scores of orphan children into lifelong vegetables. I'm sure the voters will be happy to pull the lever for that one.

And yes, I'm well aware that's one of the ways Minority Report decided to deal with the morality of precrime, by setting up this paradox. But it's just not a very interesting one because it's not a gray area. What's a lot more interesting is the morality of physically arresting people before they've committed murders, and the morality behind dealing with said people's fates. There's the gray area. But who the fuck isn't gonna empathize with the pre-cogs? You're not eliminating murder if you have pre-cogs, because the very usage of them is undeniably another incarnation of homicide. Having only three is interesting, because you have to look at ratio of pre-cogs to people saved. But once you have a huge national team of pre-cogs, pre-cogs who have to rotate in and out once they stop being effective or die, the scales become a lot less evenly tipped. Anyway, I'm taking the movie's ball and running with it. Minority Report is always too wrapped up in its fucking whodunit to pause and think about any of this stuff. When all is said and done I found Minority Report's addressing of precrime facile.

The conclusion

The final twenty minutes or so of Minority Report are staggeringly bad and pedestrian, given the pedigree of the talent involved. I couldn't believe what I was watching -- I was astounded Spielberg hadn't requested a rewrite. First off, let me reiterate for the tenth time how pathetic the whodunit aspect of Minority Report is. Throughout the pic Spielberg and his writers try their best to hint at us that the intricacies of the whodunit and the whodunit's resolution will be complex, tangled, fascinating. But why? There's really only two suspects throughout the film, one who is set up as a malicious square, and the other who is set up as the kind father figure. The surprise that the father figure is actually the killer will only in fact be surprising to anyone who's never seen a film. Plus von Sydow's motivation is snore-o-rific. He has to cover up his murder of Agatha's mom so the precrime program can go national! Well woop de do dah! I repeat: That's cliché. And bor-ing. We've seen it before. I could just see the gears of the screenwriters' plot machinations turning like clockwork. Click, click. Click, click.

Adding insult to injury, how should the savior figure out who the killer is (btw the fact that this savior is Cruise's ex-wife, a total non-character for the entire duration of the film who makes a brief appearance at the end only to indeed save the day, is perfectly indicative of the desperate depths the screenwriters will sink to to allow Cruise to immediately prevail at all turns) but with the very original, Hey, let's have the killer reveal himself by saying something only the killer would know! Then people will wonder how he knows that! Yeah, that's great! Do you think it matters that that device has been featured in every other episode of Matlock and Perry Mason and every B-grade murder mystery since the dawn of cinema? Nahhhhhh!

But wait, perhaps the grandest insult is saved for last. In one scene (as you know cause if you're reading this you've already seen the film), Colin Farrell explains in detail to von Sydow how exactly the killer got away with murder, unbeknownst to him von Sydow is the killer. Subsequently, of course, Sydow shoots Farrell dead (the underling innocently telling his evil superior the answer to the murder and thus being murdered for his knowledge is another standard murder mystery and noir plot device -- it was even used a few years ago in LA Confidential, when you know who, actor last name beginning with letter C, kills you know who #2, actor last name beginning with the letter S). Then a few minutes later we are treated to the utterly dispensable scene of Cruise telling Sydow and the audience verbatim everything that Farrell already fucking told us! We have to listen to all the damn exposition all over again! Have the screenwriters ever heard of a little something called ECONOMY OF LANGUAGE?!

Now, a question: Sydow hired the drifter to kill Agatha's mom, then after the drifter was caught, Sydow killed her mom himself (and he wasn't caught cause he staged it just like the drifter's death, thus everyone thought the pre-cogs were just seeing an echo of the old murder, blah blah blah), right? But why the fuck didn't Sydow hire another drifter to do the actual murder, instead of doing it himself? We know the actual reason is so the filmmakers can have that Big Moment at the party, where everyone sees Sydow's face on the screen as the killer in a flurry of revelation and can gasp and faint and so on, but what's the practical reason? There is none! If Sydow had any criminal savvy he wouldn't have done it himself so that there would be absolutely no way to trace the killing back to him. But no, in Minority Report everyone's intelligence must cater to the lowest common dominator plot turns the screenwriters hack up.

And last: the final sequences with the pre-cogs reading books in the idyllic countryside and Cruise's shitty and unnecessary voice-over is standard Spielberg ending hogwash. Thanks for spoon-feeding us, Stevie! Wouldn't want any of the baby food to drip on our bib!

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