Okay, but not fantastic - and looks too much like A.I.

Rating: 8/10 (18 July 2002)

#Tons of SPOILERS - but come back after you've seen it#
The Good:
Worked as a pretty solid, clever-ish sci-fi flick. Nice special effects, and some interesting but still credible future set-design and innovations. Really good lead actors. Good pacing.
I especially liked the TV/cereal packet, the escape from the car factory, and the realistic (and rubbish quality) holo-projection TV - as opposed to the far-fetched "perfect 3-D" nonsense you usually see.

The gun they used in the car factory was very cool (especially the Winchester-style (Terminator 2) spinning & re-cocking before the next shot) - Tom should definitely have used it throughout the film, it would have been more iconic and given the hero a stylistic focus.

The Bad: too much humour. Would Blade Runner work with comedy? NO.
The entirely wooden (and B-list) police team. Tom's equally dull wife (her hologram had much more charisma). The 'kerazy loner' beach-bum scientist working in the Temple. The redneck prison guard (still doing his "O'Brother" hillbilly act). The first-murderer-guy from Ellen (miscast, poor acting). The (for no particular reason) deranged woman who designed the system and now (equally for no good reason) tends/creates ridiculous attack plants which belong in a Jim Henson movie. The backstreet doctor (and his unnecessary, OTT assistant), who has every reason to butcher Tom, but decides it's enough to be annoying. Tom's precrime-room assistant - obviously couldn't get Forest Whitaker, and so didn't bother with the character either.
And -
The Pre-Cogs - sorry, really bored with the sci-fi idea that psychics/visionaries are crazy/drugged/mental-patient-types. I know they explained away the history as having drug-addict parents, growing up in medical institutions, experimented on blah blah blah - but I'm bored of that concept itself, and of watching someone with a shaven head and wide eyed stare pretending to walk funny while managing to avoid a supposedly crack-team of police/agents. Also - not one passerby stared at the bizarre couple as they stumbled around! Not so much a criticism about the Pre-Cog role in the movie, as about the lack of originality. Ditto the 'stylish but nightmarish' visions.
The Spiders - what the f..? Did Spielberg have some leftover CGI that didn't get used in A.I.? If they'd been more mindless and relentless drones it could have been quite freaky (like in that old Tom Selleck film), but the apartment search was stupidly comical. I expected the spiderbots to stop and do a subtitled gag to camera. Very nearly ruined the film for me.
The drugs - not a crucial part of the story, but come on! Looked like a cross between a whistle and a kazoo, and - judging by Tom's acting -about as effective (and sinister) as a boiled sweet. Oooh, let's make him take drugs to deal with the loss of his son, to prove he's a flawed hero! And while we're on this - that face paralyser did make him look ugly, but that lab technician must have been blind and deaf not to see instantly that it was still him.
The society - with technology so obsessed with scanning your eyes all over the place, and supposedly so hard to hide in, I didn't get that feeling. The Fugitive, Enemy Of The State (and probably several other films) gave a much better impression of hunted, agoraphobic paranoia and 'Big Brother' surveillance.
The elite pre-crime response unit - let's see: jetpacks that make the users so clumsy they couldn't 'take out' an agile five-year-old.. squad tactics that barely avoid shooting each other.. Thunderbirds-style wall-lifts into the flying-vehicles (which George Lucas could surely sue them over), and the comically clumsy wire/chair deployment as if they're all middle-management accountants on an abseiling course. The jet-pack fight, although amusing, showed up all these criticisms.
The epilogue - Precrime is shut down. Big deal. Where's the narration that "the crime and murder rate gradually increased back up to pre-Precrime levels", or some reference to his son's unsolved abduction, which would at least give the ending some bite.
=> Before going to see it, I was curious (and optimistic) about the high IMDB score. Now I see it as overrated. I just can't understand Spielberg - we know he can 'do serious' amazingly well (Saving Private Ryan & Schindler's List), but just lately Evolution, A.I., Jurassic Park 3 and MIIB2 (all on his Producer credits) have sucked in one way or another because they're just too dumb. If that seems an odd thing to say about A.I. - well, I didn't enjoy the film, and although not actually dumb, I did think it pandered too much to a very simplistic viewpoint. You could read more into it if you were so inclined (one person I know saw it as a huge allegory to the Catholic church!) but it's a film goddammit - it could have been much more multi-layered and thought-provoking up there on screen!
Anyway, that would be (some) of my personal DVD commentary. Having said that, in a nutshell - Minority Report is not bad. Just flawed.