Spielberg and Dick... a marriage made in Hell!

Rating: Null/10 (10 February 2004)

If there was ever a director less appropriate by temperament than Stephen Spielberg to adapt the work of PHILIP K. DICK, I couldn't guess who it might be.
On the one hand, you've got the borderline personality of SF writer Dick, plagued by demons (schizophrenia, drug addiction, paranoid delusions, and an affection for classical music), whose writings describe dystopian futures where reality is no more than a collective hunch, and corporate fascism controls our lives, and nobody wins.
On the other hand, you've got the oeuvre of Mr. Spielberg, the Disney of the modern era, an idiot savant whose portraits of adolescents yearning for nuclear family security, played out against fantastical backgrounds, nearly always end in triumph and affirmation.
Man, is this a marriage made in HELL, or what?
Like the equally psycho-schizoid merger of Kubrick/Spielberg in "AI", the MINORITY REPORT is a partly brilliant, partly moronic, fully beautiful rendering of Dick's ideas, utterly betrayed by Spielberg's compulsive need to be loved.
Also as in `AI', if this film had ended 15-20 minutes sooner, we would've been offered a truly terrifying and bleak depiction of a future that could've made our blood run cold. But Spielberg and Cruise were not about to put themselves in such a position. So, at the denouement, we end up with the reunion of Cruise and his ex-wife (unseen as a romantic couple for the entire film!) starting over with a new pregnancy and a happy ending, utterly unearned by anything that preceded it. [End spoiler]
There is also a TRAGIC misstep in casting. No, not Cruise, who is fine. There is a secondary role played by a world-renowned character actor famous for playing villains. If you cast him, it better by either as a villain, or as someone you want the audience to THINK is a villain just to fool them because he's really NOT the baddie, but merely a red herring. If you cast him as a seemingly nice guy who TURNS OUT to be the bad guy, and if THAT is supposed to be a surprise twist, then you've just shot yourself in the foot... narratively speaking. [End spoiler]
There are some ingenious images and ideas in the film, and it's well paced, for the most part. But it's not an action-packed summer thriller, by any means, nor a particularly cerebral think piece, either.

Part BLADE RUNNER, part LOGAN'S RUN, it's all Spielberg, without even a hint of Dick (Philip K, that is). More's the pity, as MINORITY REPORT is somehow LESS than the sum of its considerable parts, and ultimately quite sterile.