SCRIPTWRITING 101 *****MAJOR SPOILERS*****

Rating: 1/10 (30 November 2003)

Minority Reports, MAJOR FLAWS in scriptwriting:
1- The set up is this, in the future a police force uses 3 "mediums" to foresee murders before they happen. Then the cops drop by and arrest you just as you are about to kill someone, caught in the act before the murder is committed. It is understood through other characters that if you make the choice NOT to kill etc, you'll be ok. Tom Cruise (a cop) is set up so that the mediums see him killing a guy in 36 hours. Tom Cruise runs away and succeeds in getting outside the medium's reach. 24 hours to go. What would YOU do?!!! NO-He goes back to the city (`I've been set-up, I need to find out who's that stranger I'm supposed to kill!'). No more explanation than that ONE sentence... He could have waited 24hrs, be innocent THEN use ALL the police's resources in finding that stranger (whose name he was told on top of it!) 2- Everywhere you go (billboards, stores, even newspapers) continuously scan your eyes to discover who you are and talk to you (EX: Tom Cruise enters a GAP store, a holographic sales clerk appears `Hi Mr. whatever, nice to see you!'). When he escape, he has a surgeon removing his eyes and replacing them with new ones (a MAJOR plot idea that, as it turns out, serves no real purpose in the unfolding of the plot other than to have that useless "spider" sequence). He brings his OLD eyes with him in a zip-lock bag. The REASON is that as soon as ANYTHING (even a newspaper) scans his eyes, the police would be alerted. Well he gets to the POLICE HEADQUARTERS, walks up to the door, pulls his old eyes out of the Zip Lock and scans them. The Security door opens up ` Hello, agent Anderton!'... YOU'D THINK THAT IF THE NEWSPAPERS AND BILLBOARDS WERE
ALERTED, SO WOULD POLICE HEADQUARTERS BE!!! 3- BAD CLICHÉ. You know when in movies you have a guy that we know did something bad, he's with someone who doesn't know and we're waiting for THEM to discover it? You know when the guilty person says one thing he's NOT supposed to know (that only the murderer would know)? `I'd check to see if a girl was drowned, what was that name you said?' `Mrs. Marsh, but I never told you she'd been drowned!' 4-Scriptwriting 101- When you study scriptwriting, they teach you the 3 basic mistakes made by bad writers A-DEUS EX MACHINA (When the character is in such a bad
predicament to invoke a God to save him, such as the T-Rex appearing out of nowhere inside a building at the end of Jurassic Park that no one felt coming) B- Not tying up loose ends and C-When a story is so convoluted that at the end you need a long speech to explain it (like Harrison Ford does at the end of The Fugitive). At the end Tom Cruise calls the bad guy, and TELLS HIM for like 10 minutes ALL HE did, and WHY he did it etc so that WE, the audience, may finally understand this mess!
If Spielberg wasn't the money-hungry hack he's now become he would have asked for a re-write.