Spielberg Pays His Respects to Philip K. Dick

Rating: 8/10 (23 June 2002)

I should start this by saying Philip K. Dick is my favorite writer, bar none. From "Eye in the Sky" through "The Man in the High Castle" to "Valis", his visionary prose is unmatched. I will continue by saying that Steven Spielberg is not someone I would normally associate with Dick.

Until I saw "A.I.".
It fascinates me to see Spielberg move in a Dickian direction as an artist. To put this film up against "Jaws" or "Raiders of the Lost Ark" is tantamount to whiplash. Only the ending of "Minority Report", which I will not go into here, reminds us of the boyish ideals which normally drive Spielberg's work.
So is the film a classic? Questionable. The MTV bug bit Steven a little too hard here, and as a result the film is overloaded and muddy in several places. However, as a tribute to the works of Philip K. Dick, the movie does quite a respectable job. The two central premises of Dick's body of work, "What is reality?" and "What is human?" are both touched on as well as can be expected in mainstream cinematic terms (certainly more so than in "Total Recall"), and the downbeat vision of the future in the midst of a somewhat overoptimistic projection of technological advancements is actually very close to the type of stories Dick wrote (He had transcontinental aircars in the 1990's in some of his works). And the agonized dilemma John Anderton (Tom Cruise) experiences is very Dickian. By the way, this may be one of Cruise's best performances in his career.
So yes. "Minority Report" is well worth experiencing. And although some elitist critics will look down their noses at it, it is a film as worthy of respect as any made in the last hundred years.