Does not live up to its potential to be a great movie, but still very good.

Rating: 7/10 (2 September 2002)

'Minority Report' should have been one of the year's best movies. It is directed by Steven Spielberg who, despite his gooey moments, is a great director. It stars Tom Cruise, who, regardless of what you think of him as a person, is a charismatic and talented actor (if you doubt me, go and see 'Magnolia'). It is based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, the warped and brilliant mind responsible for the ideas behind 'Total Recall' and 'Blade Runner'. And the photography and special effects are superb.

It is the year 2054 and murder has been wiped out in Washington D.C., due to the Department of Pre-Crime, which uses the psychic powers of three pre-cognitives (Agatha, Dashiell and Arthur, presumably named after the famous mystery writers Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett and Arthur Conan Doyle, which is a nice touch) to prevent slayings before they happen. Cruise plays the leader of the Pre-Crime unit, a skilled cop who lost his son 6 years earlier and now uses drugs to try and dull the grief. One day he is monitoring the visions the pre-cogs have when he sees himself commit murder and is forced to go on the run from his own unit. As he tries to discover who set him up, he realises that what he needs is in the mind of Agatha, who may have had a conflicting vision of the murder.
The first half of the movie is excellent, with several tense and exhilarating action scenes and a some creepy moments, particularly involving a genetically-engineered garden and eyeballs. What is most impressive though is the technology of Spielberg's future world. Like most good science fiction movies, the technology seems both amazing and believable. I particularly liked the transparent viewing screens which Cruise could manipulate with cybernetic gloves, the chamber of cryogenically frozen criminals and the spiderlike, retina-scanning robots. The cast is solid, with a quietly haunting performance by Samantha Morton as Agatha.

However in the second half the movie goes a bit flat, becoming too like a routine murder-mystery. I was not moved by the way the relationship between Cruise and his son was shown and the villain did not impress me. Besides the obvious mind-bending paradoxes about changing the future, there are also number of questions that the movie asked but did not answer. Why are there no ethical storms about the way the pre-cogs are used? If the surgeon hated Cruise, why wasn't he less helpful? Shouldn't clothing fashions be different after 50 years? What exactly happened to Cruise's son? They are not large things, but together they add up. 'Minority Report' is very good, but it does not become the great movie it promises to be.

7/10