Impressive in its design, muddled in its ideas

Rating: 6/10 (19 January 2006)

Steven Spielberg has a habit of trying to put a conventional spin on stories with offbeat or challenging ideas. The problem with "Minority Report" is that he's so intent on downplaying the movie's subject--preventive detention--that he's afraid to address the underlying issue that the original Philip Dick story pondered. It's a film that for most of its two-and-a-half hours seems more interested in the sci-fi thriller elements of the story than in the difficult questions it poses. While the movie transcends its genre because it deals with such an interesting topic, it shortchanges that topic by skirting around these tough questions.
Tom Cruise plays a cop in the mid-21st century who's part of a unit called "pre-crime." A trio of psychics can tell when someone somewhere is going to commit murder. One example: A man inadvertently walks in on his wife with another man. In the heat of the moment, he picks up a pair of scissors and is about to stab her, when the cops burst in and prevent him from doing what the psychics had predicted he would do. They slip a weird machine over the man's eyes and keep him locked up, immobile, and comatose.
Right there you have a problem. Even in our justice system, a man who raises a weapon to someone has committed a crime, even if he's caught before he has had a chance to carry out the act. That has nothing to do with "pre-crime." Of course, the punishment this man receives seems quite harsh for attempted murder or assault. But it would seem quite harsh even if the man had carried out the act. The notion that preventing this man from killing his wife would require that he be detained indefinitely, particularly in such a grotesque fashion, is absurd. But there are examples of preventive detention that are not so easy to dismiss. By failing to address such examples, the movie weakens its own argument.
As in other anti-utopian tales, the very person who carries out the corrupt form of justice becomes its next victim. The psychics envision that Cruise will soon commit a murder. Since Cruise believes in his job, shouldn't he accept their reading and allow himself to be arrested? But he finds himself in the same position as the people he has detained. They all swear to their innocence. Up to now he has trusted the psychics, knowing that the detainees would have committed the crimes if not for his intervention. But he knows he is no killer. The psychics must be wrong this time! Caring for his own self-preservation, he goes on the run.
The rest of the film is an intense hunt-and-chase thriller as Cruise evades the police while trying to solve the whodunit. His adventures will take him in icky directions as he encounters spider-like robots and men without eyes. He also must meet with a strange old lady in a sequence that seems ripped off from "The Matrix," which is ironic, since "The Matrix" was itself inspired by Philip Dick's fiction. "Minority Report" is longer and more complicated than necessary, but it is handled with the intricate craftsmanship that we have come to expect from Spielberg.
The problem is that the movie is so focused on the complex plot that most of the time it forgets about its provocative themes. Certain plot points are muddier than they should be. Until I read the original story, I did not understand what the minority report was. (It was actually quite simple: one of the three psychics may have a different reading than the other two. But the movie explains this concept poorly.) And the final explanation for why the cop was thought to be a potential killer, which involves something of a time-travel paradox, was much simpler and to-the-point in the original story, leaving readers with something to grapple with. The movie tries so hard to argue against preventive detention that its case feels forced.
Dick was never much interested in the design of his futuristic stories, and that's certainly true of the story on which this movie is based. In that story, the detainees were kept in ordinary fenced areas. There was nothing about them being suspended in a bizarre, computer-induced coma. In an effort to create a visual representation of the story, the film envisions a lot of new technology, including the ability to transfer the psychics' thought to a screen, a level of technological advancement that I doubt will exist by 2054. The movie does capture some of the paranoia that was typical in Philip Dick's fiction. To escape the police, Cruise has to take some gruesome measures because of the government's sophisticated means of identifying everyone, a possibility that doesn't seem far off in our own world.
But all this technology distracts from the movie's political and philosophical message. Spielberg is a master of design, and his vision of the not-too-distant future is impressive but not exceptional. Most big-budget science fiction movies today do a good job at the level of world creation. I just can't help feeling a little frustrated every time a Philip Dick story gets turned into an action movie. Ironically, a film like "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," which is not based on any of Dick's stories, does a better job of bringing out his ideas than any of the actual adaptations of his works have done. Because it focuses on the consequences of technology rather than the conception, it comes closer to the spirit of this great philosopher of science fiction.