A nice visualization for a movie with no Vision

Rating: 6/10 (24 July 2002)

In the summer 2002 "everybody run", so I ran to see Minority Report the 42nd movie of Mr. Spielberg (as a director) after the disappointing A.I. in 2001. Mr. Spielberg is part of those directors to whom you will always give a chance no matter what. Unfortunately this "no matter what" just happen once again with Minority Report. The main concept of the movie is the obsession of vision / visualization. In fact the dynamic between vision and visualization is the dialectic, the key that we need to take the movie a little step further. The movie describes how a vision is generated then visualized and finally how this visualization is rationalized and used: triplets mutants lying in a bathtub filed of amniotic fluid generate visions of future crimes that are visualize on a screen and organized by John Anderton (chief police Tom Cruise) in order to find clues that will help the pre-crime department to arrest the suspect/convict before the crimes are committed. Obviously Mr. Spielberg tried here to raise some fundamentals questions: 1)Isn't the concept of Justice linked (in theory) with the concept of certitude? In other words is what we see always certain or subject to interpretation? 2)Isn't Justice supposedly "blind" but however subjective in essence? 3)What degree of freedom are we willing to give up in exchange of safety? Meaning, who is suppose to watch the people who are watching us...isn't it a dynamic base on a "vicious circle" principle? The positive thing about Minority Report is that the movie lays out pretty well those questions and do so through an almost perfect visualization on screen. The picture is perfect: very nice bleached blue grain reinforce the "cold techno" ton of the movie. The acting is nothing special but still can be ranked as good. Some scenes are just a jewel and are very powerful: to note the floor by floor identity check by the robot spiders. However Minority report has 2 major problems. The first one is the lack of originality. The picture grain is the same as in "A.I", the cars reminded me of "Tron", the police squad erupting from the roof are straight from "Brazil", even the "film noir" atmosphere that Spielberg wanted to impose is a re-creation from "Blade Runner". The second problem lies in the scenario itself. The concept of the triplets who can visualize the future is a little bit hard to believe: their visions are limited to a certain area (why?) and they can only see crimes (why?). Above all the personal story of John Anderton (Tom Cruise) completely lacks of depth and ends in a fire works of cheesiness with a sparkle of "zero-creativity" stained with "uselessness". I mentioned that this movie is about vision and visualization. Mr. Spielberg is a master of visualization, unfortunately he did not have any vision for this movie. The same way he invited the audience to run he ran for an easy success but forgot that in sci-fi, Vision is about re-inventing the genre. As a result we have a nice movie but not a masterpiece.