Very good ... nearly

Rating: 8/10 (30 July 2002)

An unusual film, it started so-so, had a horrible downhill period, and then, when all of the modern chase nonsense was out of the way, it became very good. But boy, did they bottle out of the ending! There was a perfectly set up distopian ending beautifully engineered ... and they blew it!
Once it gets going, this is a spelendidly manipulative film, most perspectives are wrong, most character evaluations are wrong, I think all of my assumptions were wrong (there might have been something minor I got right, I just can't remember it) ... if they'd had the nerve to stick to the genuinely unsettling tenor of the middle to later part of the film this could have been great.
A few lacunae (these aren't spoilers, since they don't make sense outside the context of the film and don't have any bearing on the outcome or plot) - how did Cruise not get hit with the car seat? why wasn't he taken off the access database? why was there a plug in the bathtub and why didn't anyone know where it went (they could have asked Neo ...)? How come the pre-cogs ability was limited to DC? Why didn't any of the police hit Cruise with their non-lethal weapons? Why did the police always have to come through the window when the front door was open (but then they do that in real life, don't they)?
I haven't read Dick's original, but I understand that the protagonist is an overweight slob druggy type; I think if Spielberg had kept that in mind we wouldn't have had the unconvincing chase near the beginning which didn't lend anything to the story, and made Cruise seem like some kind of proto-Batman... unnecessary and distracting and irrelevant, maybe it was there for some putative teen audience who don't think its a movie without someone hanging by his fingernails from some high place.

And some great incidentals: the ultimate Siebel CRM system - and just as ineffective as its 2002 version - personalisation taken to useless perfection; the spiders, which certainly had more character than the cops; the roads.