With the names Steven Spielberg or Tom Cruise attached to a film project you have a box office success on your hands. Put those two together and you have a critical and commercial sure fire smash of epic proportions. Such is Minority Report. Based off a short story by Philip K. Dick, whose work is almost synonymous with effective (Total Recall) or brilliant (Blade Runner) near-future science-fiction, Spielberg has crafted a 2 hour plus movie of stunning scope. Utilising the very best in special effects technology we have the Earth of 2054 brought to us in minute detail. Apparently employing a team of scientists and theorists to come up with plausible technological advances of the next fifty years, we have voice-activated home furnishings, self-driving cars which can slide up or down massive tower blocks and, most importantly as far as the film is concerned, three gifted, or cursed depending on your view, pre-cogs (or telepaths) who literally see the future and can warn the police force of impending murders.
They have been so successful in this that the murder rate has fallen dramatically, and crimes of motive (easiest to spot due to their thought and planning) have become a thing of the past. Leading the elite force of Pre-Crime police officers is Tom Cruise�s character, John Anderton. Brilliant and fearless, his home life however is a wreck. With the death of his son six years ago, he fell apart, his wife left him and he became a user of highly addictive narcotics, something he somehow keeps secret from his friends and colleagues. He is proud of his work though, and believes fully in it and it�s creator Lamar Burgess (von Sydow).
However, after a snooping FBI agent by the name of Danny Witwer (Irishman and next-big-thing Colin Farrell) temporarily assumes control of the unit and starts interfering with the pre-cogs and the day-to-day running of the Pre-Crime division, things start rapidly to go wrong. Cruise is �attacked� by the supposedly comatose pre-cog Agatha (Morton), who flashes up a long-past murder, and mere moments afterwards an alarm goes off and he finds that he is now wanted for the murder of a man he has never met two days from now. Barely escaping from the Pre-Crime building, he attempts to evade capture from his old colleagues, something almost impossible to do in the era of regular eye-scanning, whilst getting to the bottom of both Agatha�s vision and his own apparent murder attempt.
The film is fantastically realised in every sense of the word. The special effects are fabulous and look astonishing on the big screen, but they are used only in the most necessary circumstances, and the vast amount of futuristic ware we find is in the form of more simplistic-to-film vehicles and other technology. For instance, the eye-scanning gear is widely used and is so effective that it can tell when you last entered a store and what you bought. Newspapers and advertisements are everywhere, and alter in relation to the users particular preferences (the site of the USA Today front cover changing from a regular heading to one pointing out Cruise�s escape is a particular gem). In order to get around the fact that his eyes can give him away just about anywhere, our �hero� goes to extraordinary lengths to get around this fact.
The effects and the look of the film though should not in anyway detract your attention to the real brilliance of the film, the plot. Similar in many ways to L.A. Confidential, but not as labyrinthine naturally, is has you constantly guessing at the motives and appearance of all the major characters. Is Cruise really innocent of the crime he will allegedly commit? Is Farrell setting him and Pre-Crime up to discredit the whole organization on the eve of it�s worldwide acceptance? Is von Sydow hiding something? Is his former partner, Dr Iris Hineman? In this nothing is quite what it seems and just when you think the whole thing has been neatly wrapped up and all the characters motivations are satisfied, it twists you again and you find yourself enjoying another thirty or so minutes as the whole plot finally reveals itself.
Cruise is superb, as he regularly has been of late, mixing his action-man persona of Mission: Impossible II with more thoughtful and introspective traits. The scene featuring him and a wall hologram of his dead son is very touching, and sets the scene for several of the twists later on. Farrell is also brilliant, his suspicious and determined FBI agent is neither wholly good nor wholly bad in his dealings with the other characters, and while at first we can see the possibility of his having set Cruise up, his attempt to find him and uncover a wider conspiracy involving Pre-Crime starts to put doubts in the audiences mind. He asks questions no one else has thought of, and his character is possibly the most important in the film, serving as the lynchpin between the scripts pre-determined murderous Cruise, and the clear fact that there is something else going on under the surface, something equally if not more important.
No review of Minority Report would be complete without Steven Spielberg�s contribution. The biggest act in Hollywood has recovered brilliantly from his stumble with A.I., servicing this film with the desired layers of intrigue, action and suspense without any of the unrealistic schmaltz that dogged his last work. For a film as long as this he does an amazing job, keeping Cruise constantly on the run and dodging from one gripping near-capture to another, whilst all the time referring us back to the other main characters and their attempts to uncover (or hide) the real truth behind it all. As I said before, he does a great job of giving us a plausible view of the future. Super-technology mixes effortlessly with the poverty and degradation which will always be part of any society, no matter how advanced, and it�s all so well put together there is rarely a moment where you think to yourself �nah, that�d never happen�, not even with telepathic humans, intelligent metal hunting spiders and jet-packed police officers. A truly great film, and one which goes above and beyond the expected summer blockbuster. |
