Paramount Pictures
Minority Report was made almost twenty-five years ago and it still looks like the future.
Philip K. Dick is, by far, the greatest science fiction author that America ever produced and the three great cinematic adaptations of his work: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall, and Minority Report all contain indelible, brilliant production design that set the standard for the industry at the time of their creation.
Minority Report feels like a future brought to you by Meta and Apple: a world of touch screens and self-driving cars and a police surveillance state that has become so expansive that its bounds currently override ontological reality. Dick’s peculiar locus of concerns: memory, metaphysics, human identity, and eerily prescient technological speculation are all on full display in Minority Report and Spielberg pairs the audacious ideas with a visual precision that only comes from a genius working on all cylinders.
Minority Report has one of the great high-concept premises of all time: in the near future clairvoyant humans known as “Pre-Cogs” are being used by the Washington DC Police Department to identify and arrest murderers before the crime is committed. Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is totally committed to the legality of Pre-Crime despite the inherent paradox pointed out by auditor Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell): criminals are arrested for crimes they never commit based on predictions that do not come true. As one character puts it: “The actual crime is pure metaphysics.”
Soon after Witwer is assigned to the Pre-Crime Department the Pre-Cogs predict that Anderton himself will kill a man he’s never met, and the ardent defender of the system must run from the skeptical auditor put in charge of interrogating it.
Convinced that he’s being framed, Anderton visits Dr. Iris Hineman (Lois Smith) in order to understand the Pre-Cogs’ process and makes a crucial discovery: the three Pre-Cogs working for Pre-Crime are never unanimous in their prediction of murder, because a unanimous vision would be impossible to prevent. For every prediction there’s a “minority report” from one of the three Pre-Cogs where the murder doesn’t take place. Convinced that his “minority report” holds the key to the mystery, Anderton kidnaps Agatha (Samantha Morton), the most talented of the Pre-Cogs and the one most likely to have produced a minority report.
All of this thoughtful and provocative science fiction is married to some of the most fundamentally sound action work of any film of the 2000’s. Minority Report is right there with Total Recall or The Fugitive in terms using suspense and spectacle in conjunction to create great action set pieces.
Tom Cruise is fine as the lead: he chooses to attack the performance with a real maniacal intensity that either works for you or it doesn’t. I personally think he’s just serviceable here in a role where he’s more a physical and emotional presence than a full character. Samantha Morton on the other hand is excellent as Agatha, Colin Farrell is an excellent antagonist in the mold of Tommy Lee Jones’ character from The Fugitive, and Max Von Sydow is dependably solid as Cruise’s mentor and the Chief of Pre-Crime.
Minority Report does have a glaring weakness though, and it’s one that would continue to loom over director Steven Spielberg’s career to the present day: Spielberg doesn’t seem willing to follow the implications of his premise to any kind of tough choices or dilemmas for the audience. The movie is built on the dramatic irony of Anderton being caught up in the system he championed and it seems to be building to a point where he gets put in the coma-collar (before being presumably rescued) but we never get there.
Likewise the premise is so powerful because it so directly connects to real debates of freedom vs security. Just what would you, the viewer, be willing to give up to live in a world without murder? The film is firmly on the side that the sacrifice of the reality of the actual crime is too great for the benefit of a world without killing and the film ends with a voice over from Anderton about Pre-Crime being disbanded but wouldn’t a perfect coda have been something like “There were sixty murders the following year”? Something that reminds us even if we’ve made the right choice, we’re still making a sacrifice we should be cognizant of?
That said, the positives far outweigh the negatives. Minority Report is a perfectly constructed, audaciously staged thriller with amazing production design and one of the best premises ever for an American science fiction film.
Extras include featurettes, production concepts, storyboard sequences, and trailers.
Easy Recommendation.
