Spielberg surprises with another outstanding out-there outing

Rating: Null/10 (17 June 2002)

Spoilers By the late 90s, Steven Spielberg had reached his lowest ebb. Not content with merely making successful, populist features, he had begun to try and bully his way into awards shows; his triumvirate of Schindler's List, Amistad, and the execrable Saving Private Ryan the absolute nadir of his grossly manipulative ways. The director broke brilliantly from this tailspin with last year's magnificent AI: Artificial Intelligence, a paean to his dead friend Stanley Kubrick's vision of an android future; the resulting sprawl a dystopian vision of planetary decay and man's hubris topped off with the most perversely Oedipan mother/son relationship in recent film history.
With that tale having been based on Brian Aldiss' short-story Supertoys Last All Summer Long, so Spielberg makes this new-found fascination with bleak parables of future fiction an unexpectedly invigorating 'career' movement', as Minority Report latches onto a Philip K. Dick short story and never lets go. Unfolding over another sprawling spell --right on two-and-a-half hours-- the film poses a simple question: can you avoid your prophesised future? Can you change the course of events that will happen?
Minority Report, depicting these, literally seethes with Dick's familiar themes of overwhelming big brother. Not merely content with setting up a state in which all constituents are inescapable to an omnipresent big-brother --and inescapable, in public locations, from the scourge of 'direct' (ie.personally-addressed) advertising-- Dick authors a scenario in which the police know of murders before they happen; the infallibility of this pre-crime system presuming that intent to murder is tantamount to committing murder.
Based on the seeing capabilities of three genetically-grown 'pre-cogs', children blessed/afflicted with the ability to see future murders, a pre-crime police-force with unlimited powers is in place, piecing together the visuals of the pre-cogs' visions to solve the when/where of murders; stopping them before they are perpetrated.
Tom Cruise plays John Anderton, the crack leader of the pre-crime squad; the archetypal flawed hero whose motivations for a career in pre-crime are completely personal, haunted --as usual-- by the memories of his dead son. Everything changes, however, when Anderton sees himself committing murder, killing a victim he's never met at a point 36 hours later. He initially flees, but believing his innocence, he returns to try and solve the conspiracy he believes is being perpetrated against him.
Invariably, the film climaxes with the countdown to his moment-of-murder. Aided by the most gifted of the pre-cogs, Agatha (Samantha Morton), Anderton plays out future time exactly as it has been prophesised, with the wind-up to the pinnacle of the incident recalling the tragic denouement of Chris Marker's short-film La Jetée, and the feature Terry Gilliam made from it, 12 Monkeys; the concepts of time and time-paradox milked for all they're worth. An artfully-staged sequence, these scenes of Agatha leading Anderton through a maze of minutiae and happenstance have a strange, eerie, fatalist beauty about them; like you're in the hands of some unseen ideal of fate that goes beyond the machinations of film, and the motivations of the director.
Spielberg uses many of the same visual motifs he employed in AI here, too; paying the same attention-to-detail as he zips through sprawling a metropolis, and rendering the home of the family-unit a golden-lit enclave of love. And like AI, Minority Report unfolds out into an extra movement well after it initially appears it will climax; Spielberg unafraid of letting the tale continue on long after the film's main character has reached the plateau of his initial destination. It would be no surprise if, in that, Minority Report is, like AI before it, classed as 'difficult', 'weird', 'boring', 'overlong' or even 'incongruous'; but for anyone of any remote taste this surprising Spielberg renaissance should be savoured.