FILM FRENZY

Tom Cruise in Minority Report (Photos: Paramount)

By Matt Brunson

MINORITY REPORT (2002)
★★★★ (out of four)
DIRECTED BY Steven Spielberg
STARS Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell

The runt in the litter of Steven Spielberg’s great movies, Minority Report is an unqualified success, a motion picture that like most films worth their weight deepens and expands upon repeat viewings. If there was initially any reluctance on my part to award this a four-star rating, it was because, for all its merits, it doesn’t quite belong on the same level as all those other Spielberg four-stars, movies like Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark and Saving Private Ryan. Yet on a more generous sliding scale, this was markedly superior to practically everything else that had played theaters in 2002 — among the year’s offerings, only Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away also earned perfect scores.

Expanding a 1956 short story by Philip K. Dick (whose works also inspired Blade Runner and Total Recall), screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen plunge viewers into the Washington, DC of the year 2054. For the past six years, there have been no murders in the DC area, thanks to a branch of the Justice Department known as the Pre-Crime Unit. Brought to fruition by kindly creator Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow) and largely run by Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise), the unit relies on three “Pre-Cogs” who have the ability to see murders before they even occur, which in turn allows Anderton and his men the opportunity to arrest the killers before they’ve actually killed anybody. It’s a perfect system, everybody keeps insisting, but with the Pre-Crime Unit on the verge of possibly going national, pesky government agent Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) suddenly shows up and starts asking the difficult questions. Whether Witwer hopes to shut the operation down or replace Anderton as its main man remains shrouded, but things certainly appear to be swinging in his favor either way when Anderton gets pegged by the Pre-Cogs as a murderer, destined to assassinate a man he hasn’t even met in approximately 36 hours.

It has long become a cliché to gush over the ability of a motion picture to create its own self-contained world, yet there’s simply no other way to describe the sights and sounds of Minority Report. From the very first frame, Spielberg and production designer Alex McDowell present a fully realized universe, a place that basically looks like today but with some logical technological advances added for good measure (in that respect, the movie draws comparison to gritty futuristic flicks like A Clockwork Orange, RoboCop, and, of course, Blade Runner). In this brave new world, cars drive up the sides of buildings, animated characters on cereal boxes sing and dance for the pleasure (or annoyance) of the consumer, and headlines on newspapers automatically change with each breaking story. Most ingeniously — and surely the most natural progression from where we stand today — ads on billboards directly address each person walking by, making modern society’s Internet impersonality seem quaint by comparison. As an added credit, this is that rare movie in which product placements are woven into the fabric of the story rather than merely left hanging as extra cash incentives for the filmmakers.

Minority Report also succeeds in its look at the lengths Americans are prepared to go to give up their personal freedoms. During a period (the Bush Jr. years) when polls showed that many citizens were willing to let the government usurp their individual rights in the name of feeling a little bit safer — and (then as now) facing the machinations of a rabid administration happy to accommodate — here’s a work that shows exactly the price that must be paid for such a comfort. The movie is more subtle than, say, A Clockwork Orange or the two screen versions of 1984 in its indictment of the erosion of personal responsibility and individual freedom, yet its message is unmistakable. In one of the most chilling sequences, the Pre-Crime Unit sends out mechanized spiders to enter an apartment building and scan the eyes of each individual to make sure that the fugitive they’re pursuing isn’t on the premises. Using a shot he borrowed from his old friend Brian De Palma, Spielberg, working with his usual cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, takes a bird’s eye view of the apartment complex, showing the spiders barging into the rooms, crawling up the inhabitants (most are terrified but also apparently used to this), and scanning their orbs as if they were bar codes on supermarket produce. Eyes, in fact, play a large part in this future society: The eyes of citizens are scanned as they disembark from subway cars, they’re scanned as people enter department stores, and they’re often scanned when employees arrive at work. Eyes are also critical to one of the film’s most morbidly humorous scenes, as Anderton is forced to chase his own eyeballs down a twisting corridor — I’ll leave it at that.

Cruise delivers a forceful, stabilizing performance as a flawed hero who’s rendered even more vulnerable by the slow dismantling of his belief system, yet it’s the supporting rank-and-file who add immeasurably to the film’s far-reaching appeal. As Agatha, the most vital of the three Pre-Cogs, Samantha Morton (in 2002’s finest supporting turn) is both spooky and sympathetic, while Peter Stormare, playing a cracked quack, appears to have stepped in from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Farrell is effective as Anderton’s antagonist, and veteran Lois Smith registers in one formidable sequence as a Pre-Crime architect who quickly lost faith in the entire situation.

A genuine puzzle for most of its running time, Minority Report nevertheless spills the beans before it should, making the finale feel somewhat protracted. Still, this is a minor quibble for a picture that successfully works as a sci-fi yarn, a film noir drama, an adventure romp, and a message movie. And, oh yeah, as pure popcorn entertainment.

(Minority Report has recently been released in a 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code edition. Extras include an interview with Spielberg; a piece on Dick; and an obscene number of making-of featurettes.)