Faith-Based Police Work

Rating: 8/10 (21 December 2005)

Steven Spielberg has made his first religious movie. Sure, he's dabbled in religious symbolism before with his messianic "E.T." and it's not your typical sand-and-sandals Biblical epic, but "Minority Report" definitely qualifies as a religious movie. The stated subject of the film is the validity of predicting criminal acts before they occur. This is referred to as "pre-crime" and has been compared to racial profiling, but it used to go by another name: prophecy. A trio of prophets (ESPers, really) exist in a sterile environment in the service of a bureau charged with heading off such crimes. Tom Cruise, as an agency operative, plays with computer screens like God playing with the cosmos (or, perhaps more fitting, like Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice in "Fantasia"). The stress of his job and the hell of his personal life are assuaged by recreational drug use. The plot gains traction when he himself is accused of a future murder; he must both prevent and solve the uncommitted crime. Add in a former seminarian, a ghoulish jailer with the not-at-all subtle name "Gideon" who dresses like a rodeo-circuit preacher and addresses his cryogenic-frozen charges as his "flock," and the brooding presence of Max Von Sydow (who had played Jesus in "The Greatest Story Ever Told"), and you don't even have to wait for the scene where one of the ESPers turns angelus and provides Cruise with some much-needed solace. While the key crime in this story is solved thanks to that old plot stand-by The Detail That Only The Killer Would Know, and while the special effects are as stunning as the legendary Spielberg pacing, this film also works as a meditation on the pervasiveness of toxic faith in the service of the State at the beginning of the 21st century.