Mixed Message

Rating: Null/10 (27 June 2002)

Spielberg wants us to think he has a dark side, so he grabs onto more of the spurious writing of the eternally plagued Philip K Dick. He enlists the help of Tom Cruise, because the latter looks so good doing chase scenes in his Mission Impossible extravaganzas. He rounds up a team of future experts, at a cost only he could absorb, to delineate what the world will look like fifty years hence. He pounds us with nightmare visions of retinal scan-based demographic tracking and advertisement. And he tries unsuccessfully to emulate the cinematography of one Ridley Scott, who made Dick famous twenty years earlier.
But Minority Report is ultimately a run-of-the-mill detective story, not film noir. And although some may see a parallel with Sam Spade, most will instead see a very contrived, very predictable plot denouement.
Whatever Spielberg wanted to say about the evils of demographic tracking is not known. He does paint this future, but it's doubtful he wants to warn us about it, it's doubtful he's against it and wants to be taken seriously in this movie.
One need only look to Cruise's continually displayed Bulgari watch, Cruise's entrance into The GAP, and the fabulously touted Lexus future car (which looks more like a VW Golf driven backwards) to realise that anyone - and especially Spielberg as we've all along suspected - has a price.
Add the clumsy music by John Williams and you have a cinema visit which can be thought-provoking and interesting only if you want it to be. The raw material here is innocuous (and insidious) Muzak all the way.