A merely good Dick adaptation

Rating: 6/10 (11 February 2014)

I think the critics went a little overboard loving this one. It is good - with Spielberg at the helm that's almost a certainty, but it is not outstanding. Chief of its crimes is happy ending syndrome. Max von Sydow is really the best character in the film by far, so why not let him get away with his well-meaning but tragic master plan for humanity? Dystopia does not need a happy ending. But far worse, do we really need to find out that the abused human crime sensors, who have spent a life immersed in an isolation tank, get to live happily ever after in a cozy cottage? In AI, a whole half hour finale separated the film from Kubrickian quality. Here it's only 10 minutes, but entropy being what it is, 10 minutes of garbage can destroy 2 hours of vision quite easily.
And what a vision it is. Cruise as a detective bereft of his son, himself a son-figure to the fatherly von Sydow who developed a crime prediction program that arrests murderers before they get a chance to carry out their crime. When Cruise is on the verge of discovering how his mentor pulled off a premeditated murder to save the program, Von Sydow uses Cruise's dead son against him, and the detective becomes a hunted man. Crime mystery, action and science fiction are deftly blended in the plot, in the set design, and even in minor characters like the woman geneticist who surrounds herself with flesh-eating plants, or the eye transplant doctor who had a previous encounter with Cruise: Cruise comes begging to him to avoid detection by the ubiquitous eye scanners of the future. Silly action like Cruise escaping 10x by a hair trapped inside a car assembled by industrial robots does not help the film, pulling you out of the sense of futuristic reality created by the cinematography.
So, good, but not great. When Spielberg makes Ubiq, I hope he just sticks with Dick's story, without the alternate ending. Philip K. Dick is already 'alternate' enough as it is.