A Missed Opportunity

Rating: 1/10 (17 December 2002)

This film is a tragic miscalculation when you know the source material, and what could have been. A story that should have been about facing your destiny, changing your future, fate and loss gets tossed out of the window so that we can watch good guy Tom Cruise catch the evil Max Von Sydow. Imagine the variety of good endings we could have had: the precog yelling at Cruise "You can change your future!" as Cruise instead chooses to kill the man who murdered his son. Or perhaps we go with the hopeful ending: Cruise lowers his weapon, and arrests the man instead. The end. Or perhaps we really explore the issues raised by pre-crime, and end the film with our human ideals of fairness and justice being more important to us than a "foolproof" system. These and many others could have given us a film that really meant something. Instead we have a convoluted plot with too many characters, too many gagdets, a tone all over the map--from brooding to goofy "funny" action--a hodge-podge that plays like a sci-fi film of the eighties. All of it building up to the end of the evil Max Von Sydow. The short story had a point: There never was a "Majority Report" for Anderton, because he saw his future--and the fact that he saw his future made every majority report he witnessed a "Minority Report." This was clearly not grasped by the makers of this film, who thought it much better to replace this conceptual twist with the idea that you could "beat" pre-crime by performing a copy-cat murder. Sorry guys, that's clever in and of itself...but don't you see that a story like this should never be "about" the pre-crime system? Rather, the concept should be used as metaphor to discuss and elaborate on questions of fate. By making a film that finally ends with the bad guy being found out and the pre-crime system being shut down, you shoot yourselves in the foot. It's a loaded deck. Who cares?! What we need to see in a film like this is the human dimension, the tragedy, the sacrifice, the intangibility of true justice. When you give us a Spielberg happy ending, you blow it. This is a missed opportunity on one of the best potential sci-fi film concepts around. What a shame.