Great SciFi, bad Mistery, no A.I.

Rating: 8/10 (20 August 2002)

First, I must say I disagree with the previous posting. Minority Report should have been one of the year's best films. As I was watching it I thought it was one of the best Scifi movies I had seen in a while and then Spielberg lost his touch. I agree that the movie rises some deep moral questions, as most of Phillip Dick's stories, that is one of the wonderful things in this gender and a point dutiful achieved by Spielberg in A.I. But Minority Report is not only a SciFi film but also a thriller, and it is as that that the film runs into faults that go beyond celuloid redemption (if I am allowed the such metaphor). SPOILER ALERT ---the following points will give away important points of the story, beware readers that haven't seen it. As I was saying, the film is a thriller and it suddenly runs into big holes: 1. Why does the PRECRIME police arrest Tom Cruise's character after he allegedly murdered the FBI guy? Wouldn't that be a job for the regular police? 2. Spielberg uses the worst cliche resource to solve the mistery. The killer gives himself away with the old loudmouth trick: he says too much to the wrong person. Its been seen in a thousand movies before (many of them TV of the week flicks) and it's a cheap scene in the context of the movie. 3. Afther it the old recorder in the pocket trick is much worst. 4. The ending also is not consistent. If the precogs predicted the crime it should have happened: they never missed until then. 5. This future society must have been advanced in advertising, prepolice, marketing and traffic design. But they lacked the most simple police techniques. In the murder of the FBI agent the killer uses a gun (Tom Cruise's) that was in the Police's custody since the first guy is shot by Cruise. It would be impossible for the Cruise character to use that same gun to kill somebody else. Summing up, there are many other little missed points in the film. I don't know what was a genius like Spielberg thinking in this ending. It felt as some of those alternate endings you find in DVD-extras gladly because you know they were left on the editing-room floor.