Minority Report has been hailed as Steven Spielberg’s best movie yet. If Schindler’s List signalled his intention to grow up and put all that sentimental kiddie stuff behind him, and last year’s AI: Artificial Intelligence was his attempt to step into Stanley Kubrick’s shoes, Minority Report apparently represents his final accession to cinematic maturity.
Like Blade Runner, perhaps the most influential template for dystopian thrillers, Minority Report is based on a Philip K Dick story. Set in 2054 or thereabouts, it tells of a futuristic form of policing. In Washington DC’s Precrime Division, a trio of clairvoyants wearing white leotards and floating in an indoor pool have the visions in their heads projected on to screens — visions of crimes yet to be committed. The names of the victim and perpetrator pop out of a strange machine, etched on to wooden balls. The Precrime cops then whiz off to forestall these crimes seconds before they happen, and of course to apprehend the almost-murderers.
The top cop in this unit is John Anderton, played with teeth-clenching concentration by Tom Cruise. Early in the movie we see him heading off athletically and efficiently to preempt a dual scissors murder; this is exciting. Then, soon after that success, and much to his amazement, Anderton pops up as a figure in the latest projection by the ‘precogs” in the jacuzzi: he is a proleptic murderer, and before you can say ‘Pass me those interesting little gloves that allow you to manipulate your computer with mere gestures”, he’s on the run.
Herewith please find a whole lot of science-fiction, policier and noir tropes thrown together and reworked into a new, and mostly coherent, whole. Find also a brilliantly realised vision of a possible future, one that convinces for at least the duration of the movie because it has such visual authority and we are pulled by the kinetic energy of the storyline. The greyish blues and blacks of the Precrime Division contrast with the pus-like yellow of the undercity called ‘the Sprawl”. The advertisements that read your retina and address themselves individually to you are creepily plausible, as are the breaking-news updates that quiver across your newspaper as you read it. The transparent computer screens, a bit like those teleprompters used at concerts and presidential addresses, look like something already on the drawing boards over at Apple Macintosh.
There’s a moral debate in Minority Report about intention and action, but in the final analysis it’s not a theme, just a plot device. Issues of state intervention into private lives may be a bit of an issue in the United States post-September 11, but the premise is wrong: worrying about a future in which the state has too much power is rather last-century. It is perhaps a hangover of the post-war Orwellian view, a fear of Soviet-style governance. Today, in this new era of globalised corporate-capital domination, we are more concerned that the state will have too little control.
One also has questions about whether the plot, in the end, works. Can this whole Precrime scheme really be based on three psychics, the only ones in the world, two of whom don’t function if one is removed? Not much room for nationwide expansion there. And how come a vision of crime foretold lacks relevant incriminating information at one moment but acquires it later? Do these visions nail the perpetrator or don’t they? The whole plot and ending turn on this, but it doesn’t make sense. Also, with all that vision-translating computer technology on hand, what’s with the wooden balls?
These questions arise once the movie is over, because it is so superbly done that it puts them into abeyance while it’s on screen. And maybe this is the movie in which Spielberg grows up. But what kind of adult filmmaker is he? There is, in the swift movement of Minority Report, something of the child-like fun of the Indiana Jones movies, but the role of the child and the child’s-eye-view, so central to other Spielberg films, has been all but erased, though intriguing echoes remain. The sentimentality that shaped movies such as ET is absent, replaced by the chilly, disillusioned gaze that typifies the Kubrickian mode and presumably indicates European-style sophistication and worldly wisdom to a filmmaker like Spielberg. The sententious self-importance (another form of sentimentality, really) of a Schindler’s List has also, thankfully, been largely sidestepped, though there’s still a feeling that in Minority Report Spielberg feels like he’s tackling big issues and not just making a science-fiction thriller.
Yet he has become more Kubrickian in another way, too. The visual pyrotechnics are more important than the people. The Cruise character is shorthand for a person: he’s given a tragic event in his past and a drug problem, and that’s about it as far as characterisation is concerned. Cruise is not a good enough actor to give Anderton more life than this; he’s just a lean, mean machine. The other characters are really plot points, though that works well enough, and Anderton’s confrontation with the scientist who discovered the ‘precogs” is a pleasingly surrealistic note. But it seems that without his sentimental artillery Spielberg can’t do emotion. In this movie he’s almost as icily pessimistic as Kubrick, the director whose most sympathetic character is a supercomputer. Minority Report is great to look at, is engrossing and often thrilling, but it’s so cool it leaves one cold.