Cruise Month - Mini Review: Minority Report

So, we’ve looked at one Cruise/Spielberg collaboration, so let’s took a look at another with Minority Report

Based (and I know this will shock you) loosely on a book of the same name written by Phillip K Dick, this was originally conceived to be a sequel of the sort to another adaptation of his works, total recall, and I mean the original one with Shwarznegger, not the reboot. They looked at the story again in 1997 with Novelist John Cohen chosen to help screenwrite it. However for whatever reasons the original director, Jan de Bont dropped out of directing, instead serving as a producer to the series (neither Cruise nor Spielberg are credited as producers on this one) Cruise passed the script onto Spielberg who agreed to direct after several rewrites. He’d been hoping to work with Cuise for some time.

The movie had a $102m budget, and grossed $358.4m, a moderate success for 2002, but it gained massive critical acclaim for its ideas and themes. So, we’re 13 years on now, does the movie still hold up under modern grounds? Let’s take a look.  

The year is 2055, and Washington DC has a unique division called ‘Pre-crime’ where 3 psychic beings known as precogs are able to see murders that are about to happen allowing a special team to take steps to prevent it. However when the head of pre-crime team, John Anderton (Tom Cruise), is himself accused of murder, he’ll have to outrun his own team (Tom Cruise on the run from the law; I’m bowled over by this movie’s originality…) whilst trying to find a way to prove his innocence, or discover if he is truly innocence. His journey leads to him uncovering some terrible truths about the pre-cog programme that could change his stance on it forever.

Spielberg was just after A.I. doing this, and while A.I. was a disappointing movie (although to be fair, I’ll be damned if ever see a director trying to do something like another director and it ever turning out well) this movie bowled me over. It’s exploration of the notions of pre-determined destiny over individual thoughts were well thought out and executed brilliantly. The action scenes were intense, the dialogue was mostly believable and the character development complemented the story.

Of course, given that Phillip K Dick’s story was actually quite short, they clearly added plenty to keep us going. The first major thing was the back-story for John Anderton. In the original book, he was happily married (information from Wikipedia) in the film he is a drug addict father who lost his son at a swimming pool (circumstances kind of odd if you ask me) and his wife left him, unable to face him without seeing her lost son (so you abandoned him at a time when really you needed each other the most – she’s a dick)

This provides a lot of interesting side-plots in the main narrative, but also becomes the main motivating factor in him killing his target.

There are a number of (mostly small) issues with the film. The first off is it’s attempts at humour (mostly during the house-raid scene) come off as forced, the second is that the titular Minority Report comes off as a mcguffin item that’s ultimately dropped later on (I didn’t even bother mentioning it in my scene description) finally we come to the one plot-hole that really stretches my suspension of disbelief: why didn’t they remove John’s retinal scans from their security files the moment he was wanted for murder? How was he able to access secure areas? This wouldn’t be as great an issue if not for the fact that two pivotal moments in the plot were not dependant on it.

Some people take issue with the ending, claiming it to be one of those Spielburg style ‘happy endings’ personally, I would say War of the Worlds was much more Spielburg happy ending. Here there is some closure, particularly for the pre-cogs, but there is precious little for John. After having to abandon an initiative he previously believed in, there’s no reconciliation with his wife, and no answers regarding what had happened to his son.

A movie that’s “50% plot, 50% character” I can get behind and for all its flaws I do enjoy this movie.

Rating 79/100

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Images used in this review are from Minority Report and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use.