Not just a movie, but a yardstick!

Rating: 10/10 (27 December 2002)

God bless Spielburg and crew for this movie. Having seen it during its summer premiere, I now am the proud owner of this soon to be classic piece of scifi cinema.
There was so much in this movie that impressed me, the cinematography, the effects, the acting and the overall sense of the story. Not to be outdone, the spirit of PKD's classic story of sacrifice for the betterment of society gone wrong resonates with a vibrant life as prescient now as it was when he first wrote the short story.
The entire technological structure of 2054 is well thought out, and though visually striking, is not as garish and showy as what we see in a typical Star Wars or Star Trek film. You can sense that technology as being a outgrowth of the future and not some obscene or frivolus paen to it with the only exception being the personalized and ubiquitous advertising, greeting each and every person that has been retina scanned. Though most of the technological progress of the movie push us easily through the story, this is more of a shove, but not one that would be lost on this viewer, no sir. Spielburg is proving he is as sage as his precog characters by predicting a future in which the last gasp of advertising is this "blitz" of information we all will be exposed to....by name no less. A concept that probably left huge drafts wafting over many a viewers heads, their indignant rebukes against the gross commercialism proof of the failure to understand. That is alright, I hear Men In Black 2 is out on DVD now as well.
The characters were very perfunctory to merely glance at them, but as the story carries us along we see the dimensionality of Anderton, Burgess, Witwer and the Precogs become richer, more colorful and less static. Anderton, not only determined to "save" society by maintaining the Precrime system that will effectivley make murder extinct in all of North America should Witwer, find no proof of the system as being fallible. This sudden rivalry by PreCrime versus Dept. Of Justice sets the stage for the exposure of Precrime's top cop Anderton as being an effective and idealistic leader. A true believer in the system he works for but when at home alone, he is drug addicted, slovenly and in a constant state of mourning for his abducted and presumed dead child Sean, a loss so deep it not only drives his quest to end murder's grip on D.C. but splits him off from a wife he also still cares for. These are not hollow characters, floating in and out of the story like ghosts out of the ether, they interact in an intelligent discourse of, discovery, agony, hope and danger weaving an intricate story that is part crime-drama, part science fiction, another part detective story and a small part a fantasy. The melange becomes not just a clever scifi film but a hybrid yardstick that other scifi films will and should be forced to stand against if they truly believe they are "serious scifi". Gone are the pulp trappings of action/scifi and effects driven sentimentality. Spielburg has given us a movie that not only tells the story but sells the story in a fashion that you can almost feel its need to be told.
Though there have been many adaptations of PKD stories throughout the years Minority Report is the only one in my opinion that gives us the story like Dick would have if he could have written a screenplay for it. At no time did I feel that they pimped or profaned the original concept or verse of the original story even right down to the ending which in relation to the short story would have been outlandish to force upon the audience but still a departure from the "perceived" PKD norm. The Minority Report, proof that scifi isn't all rayguns, spaceships, mythical creatures and vapid dialog.