The Terminally Boring

Rating: 1/10 (18 August 2003)

I recently sat down to watch this movie again more closely, and decided to re-write my review. In specific, to clarify on why I don't like it at all. It's because Steven Spielberg has the skill to make a movie that will really knock you on your ass. These days, an intelligent movie is almost certain to get an R rating, because the character of Tom Cruise is a Philip K. Dick character. This guy wrote stories where almost every time, the main character was tripping out in his own head as a different person, experiencing things and discovering things along the way, and so do we along with him. This trick is briefly explored, but in the end it doesn't matter anyway, because it was decided this film had to be a PG-13 hero saves the day family entertainment type of film, the demographic that Spielberg has catered to all for almost all of his career.
The visual style they are trying to use here, which involves extensive use of a blue filter on the lens, really doesn't look pleasing to the eye. In fact, the film is rather ugly to look at, the design is unimaginative. A noir film is filmed at night! When you film at day, and put a blue lens on your camera to make it dark anyway, it doesn't make sense. Has anyone reading this article seen a movie called "And God Spoke"? It's a fake documentary where two idiot z-level direct to video filmmakers decide to make a film about the bible because "it's the biggest best seller of all time, the biggest target audience." During the production, they decide to hire a polish cinematographer who is obsessed with Sven Nykvist. He thinks if he films exactly like Sven Nykvist, who is famous for his creative uses of dark lenses in brilliantly lit scenes, he will be like Sven Nykvist. He idolizes the man. When they film the garden of eden sequence, it's a cheap production, they barely have any lights, but the cameraman has put very dark lenses on the camera to be like Sven Nykvist. The end result is, they can't see anything, it's too murky and dark. He wasted several hundred thousand dollars in re-shoots in overruns. The point is, Minority Report is so boring that's how I was able to think of this connection. Doesn't Spielberg know that history grinds away at hacks?
When the plot can be summed up as "you used the memory of my dead son to set me up"... that is awful writing. I would expect that kind of writing in an Edward Bulwer-Lytton junk writing contest.