Spielberg regains his vision

Rating: Null/10 (23 February 2004)

Twenty minutes into Minority Report and I am thinking - is this Spielberg's mid-career masterpiece? On the ebbing strength of the last half hour, perhaps not, but it is still a masterful piece of film-making.
I'd like to think of this as Spielberg's equivalent of 'Measure for Measure', an accomplished piece of storytelling from an excellent writer source, but emotionally detached while philosophically engaged.

The basis of the plot is a law enforcement experiment called 'Pre Crime' that uses three humans with drug-induced 'second sight' which causes them to have visions of crime in advance of them happening. These visions are manipulated via the information technology of 50 years in the future to piece together the time and location of the intended crime, enabling teams to get there first and arrest the pre-cognised perpetrator.
The premise is worked through in a dazzling 10 minute set-piece at the start of the movie which sets the tone for its stylistic verve. The ideation of the virtual moving 'scrapbooks' which are used to rearrange evidence is quite simply brilliant, but just one facet of the film's visual inventiveness. Spielberg uses FX frequently to play around with rough cut digital video imagery, which is far from his trademark sumptious and immaculate composition (still precedent in the foreground).
There is a deeper philosophical layer behind the Spielbergian eye candy. Behind the success of pre-crime as a tool for civic harmony and the implications of interning individuals for actions they did not actually commit. In essence - the argument between predestination and Free Willl - which has been exercising humankind since Socrates and perhaps before.

It is only the idea of the infallibility of the pre-crime process, and the unanimity of the three precogs, effectively a reworking of the three classical 'fates' that lend the programme its moral authority.
This is where the parallels with Measure for Measure emerge. In Shakespeare's play, the events take place in a degraded civic society and the argument is that sometimes illiberal measures are needed to protect society at large from the forces that would destroy it through vice and crime. This is clearly the philosophical settlement made by the society of the time of Minority Report, which is able to countenance the oppression of the 'not yet guilty' to protect the 'not yet victimed'.
The film has been criticised for not portraying a suitably dystopian view of the future, which is laid at the door of Spielberg for his inability to be truly bleak (those having missed Schindler's List). The inevitable comparison is with Bladerunner - truly the sine qua non of unfortunate futures. But I find Spielberg's ambivalent vision a lot more interesting and probably accurate.
It is unlikely that the state will be all Fascistic, that all the trees will be uprooted, that it will rain all the time and everyone will be unhappy and unloved in the near or even far future. Despite our fears, that is not really how life turns out. It is much more likely there will be mix of rich, poor, luck and unfortunate that has typified human society since it has been recordable.
Nevertheless, the ambience of a more illiberal society, by a degree, is created in the progress of the film. One of the most memorable set-pieces is the 'spider sequence', where a SWAT team is searching for the film's fugitive anti-hero, played by Tom Cruise. They unleash a swarm of mechanoid 'spiders' into an apartment block who intelligently seek out humans from their heat signatures with the aim of reading their iris for a positive identification.
The sequence is brilliantly realised uses a roving plan-view of the apartment complex to show how the machines infiltrate each apartment to apprehend their 'prey', each of which are indulging in the mundane activities of life, from taking a dump to arguing in the kitchen.
What is interesting is those vignette characters' reaction to the intrusion of these sinister devices. They appear neither surprised nor shocked by their arrival, but instead either wait patiently to be scanned or ignore them. This occurrence is normalised, yet it appears to the viewer to be an unsettling violation of our rights to privacy and anonymity. What levels of control and intrusion will become normalised in the preceding generation.
The theme of vision and sight is repeatedly explored throughout the film. The iris is the instrument of identification - the eye functions to define our individuality and our citizenship, but it also functions as a shackle, an inescapable 'mark of Cain'. Interestingly, again from classical parallels, is the means Anderton uses to escape from that particular problem when on the run - it is an established them in classical literature for those outside society - the hermit or outcast - to be blinded.
I will avoid discussion of the film's last segment, the emergence of the precog character, the final plot twist and the denouement. It appears that when Spielberg intends them to account for themselves directly to the audience something is lost. From the loss of Colin Farrell, the anti-hero's nemesis - onward, the film loses something and cruises towards it resolution. This just makes the latter stylistics seems slightly forced and ephemeral.
But there is intellectual engagement enough across the entire two and half hours to merit the regard of being a truly great film.