Minority Report (2002) * * * 1/2

 

Directed by:  Steven Spielberg

Starring:  Tom Cruise, Samantha Morton, Kathryn Morris, Max von Sydow, Neal McDonough, Colin Farrell, Peter Stormare, Mike Binder

Minority Report is dark and troubling sci-fi which is one of Steven Spielberg's most inventive and unheralded films.   One would look at Minority Report and just assume "Tom Cruise action movie" but it's deeper than that, with a vulnerable and pained Tom Cruise in the lead fighting against the tide.  The movie takes place in 2054, with Cruise as John Anderton, a detective who is the leader of the "Precrime" unit in which future murders are predicted by a trio of psychics and the perpetrators arrested before the murder ever takes place.   The program is a success, until government bureaucrat Danny Witwer (Farrell) appears on the scene to try and poke holes in the program.   If the program is found to have flaws, then this will result in the release of hundreds of prisoners convicted of committing murders they haven't actually committed yet. 

Anderton is haunted and troubled by the loss of a son via kidnapping and murder six years ago which ruined his marriage and hooked him on illegal street drugs which can be taken with eye droppers.  He is protected by his boss Lamar Burgess (von Sydow), the inventor of Precrime who loves Anderton like a son.   If Witwer were to find out about Anderton's drug use, would that cause Precrime to be shut down?  Then, the psychics, who are kept hooked up to computers and afloat in a small pool, predict Anderton himself will murder a lowlife named Leo Crow (Binder) in a few days.  Now Anderton is on the run from his own unit looking to arrest him.   Anderton flees and tries to prove his innocence, but the more he tries to run away, the closer he moves towards his fate. 

Spielberg adapts Philip K. Dick's story with unique perspectives.  The action is shot in a discolored haze.  Like A Clockwork Orange, Minority Report will always seem futuristic, but the action never overtakes the characters.   Cruise gives us a flawed, sympathetic hero, while Farrell's Witwer isn't simply a cold-hearted bureaucrat.  Samantha Morton provides another sympathetic character as Agatha, one of the psychics who Anderton kidnaps in an attempt to exonerate himself, but when we see Agatha quivering with fear and cold and unable to walk due to atrophied muscles, we see how she is treated inhumanely and practically held against her will. 

Among the most memorable moments are the robotic spiders which crawl around aiding the detectives in their search for Anderton and Anderton having emergency eye replacement surgery in a grubby hotel room performed by a questionable doctor (Stormare).  (In this future, people are ID'd by cameras everywhere via a retinal scan).  Minority Report has a grungy feel to this version of the future, even though murder has been almost eradicated due to Precrime, the buildings and streets are dingy and dirty.  You would think it would be utopia, but like anything else, there are ways to even screw up preventing murders before they happen.  One of the underlying themes Spielberg and Cruise explore is whether such a program could be a bad thing for individual rights, and it all projects a sense of dread and doom.