Opinion

Minority Report

In 2056, murder is a thing of the past in Washington DC. The PreCrime initiative uses a trio of precognitives to stop killings before they happen, using the recorded visions of the three as evidence in condemning the potential murderers for a crime they haven't (but would have) committed. John Anderton (Cruise) heads the operational team of officers who make these arrests, and has absolute confidence in the infallibility of the system, which is about to go nationwide. But his infallible system has just identified him as its next target.

Pretty much everyone knows that Minority Report is based on a Philip K Dick story, and cinematically, it bookends the previously best-known of those, Blade Runner, very effectively. Where Blade Runner was dark, Minority Report is light, where Rick Deckard was a man plagued by his own uncertainties, John Anderton is about as rock-solidly certain as humanly possible (though only professionally - his personal life is a mess), and where Blade Runner was happy to trade in ambiguities, Minority Report has no room for them.

It's not, by any stretch, a bad film, and in many ways it's a very good one. Technically brilliant, and adding some great new concepts to what must be an increasingly-narrow creative scope for depicting hi-tech future cities, it's a worthy addition to the resumes of all concerned. Some of the elements which I thought irritating during the course of the film, I began to see as strengths as the time went by. For instance, huge questions about the nature of predestination, free will and basic freedoms arise as soon as you start depicting this kind of operation, and the film avoids really addressing them completely. This apparent weakness is actually a strength here, because they're superfluous to the story. It's clearly shown that some of the very people who created PreCrime are deeply ambivalent about the outcome of their work, but this is not their story - it's about Anderton, and his quest to avoid a fate which he believes to be unavoidable.

It's a manipulative film on many levels, some good and some bad. On the good side, it's adept at misdirection, making you believe that Anderton has been set up, then showing how he might actually be pushed to do the deed, then pulling you away from that again, and so on. Likewise, audience sympathy is shared around all over the place, causing a sense of uncertainty and actually unease which gives the film much of its impact.

Conversely, some of its manipulations are so weak they can make you cringe. The film's bad guy is so screamingly obvious from the minute we see them that you begin to wonder if the twist will be that they didn't do it after all.

And some of the plot holes are huge. On the run, Anderton appears to be able to get to the most secure space in the police building by going through one door, for instance. And the sequence involving the surgeon and his assistant is packed full of hints and innuendoes to make the surgeon seem like a threat, all of which come to nothing. So why include it when all it does is pad out an already overlong running time.

My biggest criticism, however, would be of the ending, in which Spielbergian schmaltz oversomes what could have been a daringly downbeat conclusion, in which political expediency wins the day, and everything doesn't work out right in the end. Interestingly, it's a similar shift to that which made the conclusion of A.I. undo all the good of what had been done before it.

Spielberg would never have made that version, but I can't help wishing he had.