minority report
directed by stephen spielberg
Feel free to boycott
Minority Report
for its product placements and shitty "
product
placement" advertising.
Minority Report is set about fifty
years in the future when they have finally invented
flying cars. A sinister law enforcement organisation
uses people ("pre-cogs") who were
genetically modified to give them precognitive
powers to anticipate murders. Then the cops
interfere and arrest the would-be killer for
"pre-crime". As a result the homicide
rate falls to zero. The top cop is Tom Cruise.
But he turns up to work one day to find himself
on the wrong end of the stick (literally). Cue
the hunter-becomes-the-hunted routine. There
are chases, suspense scenes and bloodless fights,
standard thriller stuff in a fun, Sci-fi setting.
Minority Report has a colder feel
to it than the usual Spielberg stuff. The Stanley
Kubrick influence may have been a huge factor
here, although ghastly sentimentality does break
to the surface too. The emotional scenes do
not really work.
But
Minority Report made me doubly
appreciate Spielberg's previous movie -
AI
- which was a kind of collaboration with the
late Kubrick. This may be controversial, but
I believe that AI is by far the superior movie.
AI has a certain atmosphere, a look-and-feel
about it that is just incredible. Maybe it will
date. Apart from a few nice moments, Minority
Report isn't quite the same never-been-there-before
experience. If Kubrick had been in control of
Minority Report, it would have had more intelligence
to it. You see, Minority Report is a bit like
another Cruise movie,
Vanilla
Sky. It pretends to think but it doesn't
really. The plot holes are awful (see
Spoiler
Zone) and worse, the plot conforms to formulaic
cliché far too often to make this movie
great. Me thinks
Minority Report
"borrows" too much from previous efforts.
One of the more true-ringing aspects of this
movie is the portrayal of Philip K Dick's (who's
short story this is based on) insight into the
hideous intrusions of an increasingly Big Brother
government onto the freedoms of its subjects.
This is exactly mirroring what is going on now.
Cameras are everywhere and we are being spied
on in cyberspace. It is getting worse and crime
reduction in general and the Sept 11th terrorist
attacks in particular are the pretexts.
Minority Report is a pretty good
movie, I definitely enjoyed watching it (except
for the ads and the ending, endings are not
Spielberg's forte, it seems). I love futuristic
gadgets and city scapes that are not cheap and
dystopian. This movie has subtle and well-executed
effects. During scenes where cruise is examining
images using a futuristic computer interface
the hauntingly beautiful music is Schubert's
Last Symphony, if I am not mistaken. At its
best
Minority Report has moments
of real atmosphere. Most of these involve the
creepy, petrified pre-cog girl (Samantha Morton)
whose scenes are fascinating - with one horrendous
exception, see
Spoiler Zone.
The blatant product and brand placements in
Minority Report pissed me off
no end. I spend my life trying to avoid ads.
I feel deeply affronted when I fork out the
high cost of movie tickets only to be forced
to watch what are effectively ads in movies.
It makes me feel cheated - after all I have
already paid my hard-earned, yet I must watch
ads in a movie for the sake of tacky commercial
gain. The gratuitously blatant product placement
scenes as parodied in the prescient
The
Truman Show are becoming a horrible reality
- if anything the reality is actually becoming
worse. There was no reason (other than superfluous
greed) why real brands had to be used in
Minority
Report, which is a movie set over
fifty years in the future. When I see commercial
products placed in movies my suspension of disbelief
is shattered: I think of shyster movie execs
in meetings with admen. Shovelling product placements
into a movie is a great way to taint it. I call
it ad pollution. Therefore, for me,
Minority
Report, which would have been a 4/5
movie, decayed into a more mediocre 3/5.
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spoilers corner
Spoilers!!!!
Warning: this box contains a movie post-mortem analysis that freely gives away important plot twists and details. If you have not yet seen this movie and intend seeing it, avoid this spoilers box until afterwards. Bookmark the page, see the movie, see if you agree with my review then write an arsy comment saying I am talking total b*ll*cks :-)
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The Artificial Intelligence of the mechanical
spiders was so astonishing that they should
have been able to track down Cruise very
easily indeed through face-recognition
systems. That is assuming that privacy
laws meant they were not able to transmit
video images of the people and transmit
them to the cops. That stuff about only
being able to identify suspects from their
retina scans didn't ring true. But it
is forgivable as it is a plot device.
It was a great scene when Cruise dropped
his eyeballs and caught one by the tip
of the optic nerve.
Maybe I missed a slice of the plot exposition,
but why were the murders by the bad guy
(it was fairly easy to guess he was the
bad guy from the start) not seen by the
pre-cogs, when she obviously had amazing
foresight even when not floating in the
pool? Why was the pre-cog girl able to
predict the future with such accuracy
that she could tell when and how to hide,
when at other times she couldn't even
foretell a huge attack on the house at
the end, etc. Why did Max von Sydow tower
over Cruise at the start of the film,
yet at the end when they stood face to
face, they were virtually the same height?
That scene where Cruise drives the newly
made car out of the factory unimpeded
was just utterly unbelievable: I stopped
caring at this point. At least have the
guy escape in a more plausible fashion.
Ditto with the escape from the "Temple".
That pool has a ten foot plug hole with
no grid? Silly. Then the FBI guys say,
ah, we'll let them go, so that they can
commit the murder. Then later on, they
do their damnedest to intercept them.
Were they deliberately steering Cruise
towards the man he is supposed to "kill"?
If so, then why didn't they stop him in
the act and arrest him there and then,
before he can do any more harm?
You didn't need psychic powers to suss
out straight away who the real
baddie was. There was too much cliché
in Minority Report. The bad guy
was given a gun as a gift, which he then
was able to use as a weapon. Original?
The expose scene where the bad guy is
shown up with video footage at a seminar
has never, ever been done before
eh? The prongs holding cruise's eyes open
was a rip-off of Kubrick's Clockwork Orange.
Everything here, particularly in the second
half of the movie, was formulaic or a
blatant rip-off.
The scene with the psychic girl babbling
about "so much love" in this
house and then embarking on a speech about
what their son would have done had he
grown up was false and nauseating. They
didn't need to do that scene. But most
of the time, the girl was amazing to watch.
The terror she felt was surprisingly disturbing
to watch and added a sense of real foreboding.
That scene near the beginning of the movie,
where she lunges at Cruise was predictable,
but still a good scare. For me a cool
ending would be to have the pre-cogs themselves
commit the crime. That last scene of the
psychics (complete with luxuriant hair)
in the cosy cottage was too twee. Why
show them as normal-looking? They're freaks.
The feel-good factor at the end, and the
clumsy clichéd dispatching of the
villain tainted this movie. But, the movie
is fun, has some nice moments, and is
well worth a watch.
Update: I have since stumbled across
a theory, and this theory is not mine,
I take no credit for it! (I only mention
it because this theory is too good not
to mention). The theory concerns the last
(and crappiest) part of the movie: after
Cruise is "halo"ed there is
an over-neat ending, where his wife suddenly
solves the mystery; they are reconciled;
she is pregnant again; the bad guy gets
humiliated and dispatched in the most
convenient way imaginable; the precogs
live happily ever after and it also explains
why the wife had TWO of Cruise's eyeballs,
when we know he had dropped one of them
down the sewer. (I remember thinking that
to be odd, but I forgot about it). Could
it be that the post Cruise-gets-the-halo
part of the movie is Cruise's dream whilst
he is actually still in the Halo state?
WARNING, Vanilla Sky SPOILER!
Now back to my own original thoughts again.
That dream ending would solve some of
my criticisms above. But such an ending
be too much like the recently released
Vanilla Sky
wouldn't it?! Maybe they had to cut a
more explicit dream "twist"
out of Minority Report after
Vanilla Sky (itself a remake of "Close
My Eyes") had already stolen the
show. That would explain the ending, which
maybe is slightly more intelligent that
the nonsense that it seems. Even if this
is true, it doesn't change very much:
"it was a dream" is a
dire way to end a movie anyway. MR is
interesting but flawed.
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There are no more spoilers below this
point, except maybe in any user talkback
comments.
End of spoilers corner
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See
Andy
Zagozda's review
See spoilers corner.
Add your comment to this page
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| From: |
James Crosby | Subject: | 2002-07-18 09:52:18 |
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| From: |
Angie Liu | Subject: | 2003-02-12 20:57:17 |
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