Builds on "insights" (attn: contains possible spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (5 October 2002)

Minority Report builds on some apparent "insights", that, once you know those, will unravel the movie even before 10 minutes are over. Two important dice have already been rolled beforehand, and you will recognise them so quickly it makes your seat hurt. Dice one. " good hunter of murderers, deep down, must be a murderer himself". This "wisdom" walks the earth with many faces: social workers, that have vast experience as prisoners themselves; pediatricians that once were repeatedly children patients and know the ins and outs of hospitals themselves; and of course the "hunted turned into hunter". This leads - with the flick of one eye - to the person behind the whole thing, the murderer who covers everything up. It also underlies Tom Cruise's character's motivation, that makes the movie goer believe that subliminal revenge is a good means as motivation to become a police officer. Dice two. "Release the underdogs". In Spielberg movies, one particularly important and prevailing element of portraying "goodness" comes about by "releasing the underdogs". That element prevails in many of his movies in various forms (including Jurassic Park, but also many others), and adds to everybody "feeling good about" the movie when walking out. Which is why, of course and surely, you will guess the fate of the pre-cogs to begin with. In combining the two elements above, one will immediately realise that a third principle emerges: the victim of a child murder can never be "bad" in such a movie. That's why it is so blantantly obvious that Tom Cruise's character as well as that character's wife end up on the "good" side in the end of the movie. This, again, leaves only one interesting suspect. In other words: the basic assumptions, the world view, this movie builds upon, are gridlocked against each other in a way that the script itself can compile only to one possible solution: the one we get to see. While the basic counter argument to this pre-crime-scheme apparently is the killer sentence "You still have a choice", the movie itself does not follow that form. The script of this movie is gridlocked by basic assumptions that leave the viewer with nothing to hope or worry about after learning the basic setup of the story. The one thing that varies with Spielberg movies, that use a very limited and small set of "assumptions" that - logically - will lead every viewer to the right conclusion very early in any of his movies - is maybe the core target audience. In Minority Report, the target audience is probably everybody who works in hierarchies whose members may have hidden agendas. Have you been set up by your boss? What is your motivation for your job? etc. This is another one of a whole sequence of "movies according to the world of Spielberg", and there is nothing wrong with it. As such, it is not possible to compare this movie to anything else - because Spielberg movies simply don't compete. One may add that the effects of this movie are nice.