Just another action movie

Rating: 6/10 (28 September 2002)

Entertaining and full of fascinating special effects, but what does it leave you with in the end? Not much. It goes down like a glass of water.
I've read a couple of Dick's novels, and I couldn't say they were thrillers. Science-fiction novels with thought-provoking implications, which made them interesting. In this film, this side is completely neglected, drowned in an orgy of special effects.
Ridley Scott took one of Dick's novels and created a masterpiece: tense, visionary, fascinating, full of interesting, multi-faceted characters. Spielberg's is just a classic Hollywood movie: lots of effects, lots of adrenaline, lots of action, but characters are extremely dull, and almost every turn of the plot can be easily anticipated.
Spielberg isn't very good at exploring characters and implications of a story, and Cruise is the right actor for a movie like this: a good professional, but also good for shallow characters only. Like other Spielberg's film, this one is also, sometimes, intolerably moralistic.
Definitely no masterpiece; 6/10.