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Minority Report (Steven Spielberg) 2002
* Here are some of those plot holes and contrivances promised above --- Major spoilers, obviously:
* 1/2 06-21-02 Jeremy Heilman
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Most of the hope that I had for Minority Report,
Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of a classic Phillip K. Dick short story drained
away early on, as soon as I saw one overly cute element of the film’s set
design. In Spielberg’s vision of the near future (2054, to be exact), the
Precogs, a trio of clairvoyant crack babies, are used to predict murders so they
can be stopped before they are committed. To illustrate the process by which
their predictions are delivered to the policemen that investigate them, he uses,
for no good reason a spiraling glass ramp that delivers colorful balls with the
perpetrator and victims’ names on them. It’s a distinctive touch, to be
sure, and its one that could only exist in a child’s vision of the future, and
it feels entirely out of place among the sterile metal look that dominates the
rest of the set. This fragment of his future is indicative of Minority Report’s
biggest problems, however. Spielberg uses images that could fascinate a child in
his designs in hopes that they will appeal to everyone, and the resultant effect
is the creation of a science fiction future that feels emotionally familiar and
comfortable. While that might be some sort of achievement in itself, it works
entirely against the plot of Report, which attempts to show us the
dehumanizing effects of the invasion of privacy in its futuristic police state.
Unlike Dick, Spielberg’s doesn’t use science fiction to
provide a cautionary and predictive look at the future. It instead fuels
childish hope that all wishes will come true and fantasies will be fulfilled if
we just have patience (consider ending of A.I. in this light). That’s
precisely why he’s so wrong for this material. He has faith in happy endings
even under totalitarianism, even when they make no emotional sense. In Minority
Report, Spielberg’s characters revert to using old technology (as opposed
to the impotent, non-lethal weapons of the future) whenever someone actually
dies, and by doing this he’s suggesting that the human foibles and flaws that
allow murder to happen are outmoded artifacts that will hopefully be phased out
soon. This notion completely contradicts the film’s ending, which vehemently
denounces technology, and embraces those flaws. The way that the film is shot,
though, it appears as if all of the color has been desaturated from the future
world, leaving a pseudo-black and white wannabe-noir look, and that lack of
shading is appropriate considering the sheer simplicity of the film’s morality
and symbolism. The attempts to push the morality of the characters into gray
areas are so obviously going to be overcome by the film’s end that they are
completely ineffective in making the movie any more complex. The symbolism is
even more laughably heavy handed. Early on, one character explicitly points out
how goofy the clunky religious symbolism (there’s a Holy Trinity, a Temple
where humans play God, halos placed on convicts, etc…) that the movie employs
is, but Spielberg continues to pile it on afterward, as John Anderton, Tom
Cruise’s harbinger of truth undergoes his spiritual and literal cleansing.
Perhaps even more groan-worthy is the repeated use of the characters’ eyes to
reflect the true nature of their souls. A man with murder in his heart wears a
pair of glasses that surely should be anachronistic post-Lasix. A drug dealer
has empty sockets where his eyes should be. We know Anderton’s ex-wife must be
a decent person since she’s a photographer. Cruise’s cop on the lam has to
lose his in order to be resurrected as humanity’s savoir. It was enough to
leave me rolling my eyes every time it resurfaced.
Spielberg’s films have never been about great ideas,
however, so the above gripes were hardly what ruined Minority Report for
me. Despite some flat-out stunning visual effects, the film’s vision of the
future felt unconvincing. Every chase sequence that the film throws at us feels
as if it is a big commercial. Product placement abounds in this vision of the
future where the Gap store knows your name and every car seems to be the same
make of Lexus (one apparently without a standard lowjack system, despite the
obliteration of every other privacy right). Small change is still used and bums
still beg for it and newspapers update so quickly that no writers could possibly
have been involved in the journalism. The police use small spider-shaped robots
to search private residences in what might have been the most harrowing scene of
the film, but Spielberg makes sure that even they are humanized with double
takes and endearing motions worthy of a Pixar cartoon. Though there’s no apparent femme
fatale among the noir homage in Minority Report, it soon becomes apparent
that this technology itself is mankind’s great seducer. Spielberg can’t
resist its siren’s call, and he ironically ends up making a cautionary tale
about his own directorial hubris. As he has done throughout his entire career,
he puts too much faith in technique and technology here, and the resultant
effort flounders.
Most of the directorial flourishes that do work here are
unfortunately cribbed from more successful movies. Certainly, Spielberg owes a
great debt to many classic film noir, since the trappings of the plot, the
smart-aleck prison guard, and the look of the movie are derivative, but he might
own even more to Kathryn Bigelow’s underrated action masterpiece Strange
Days. Alongside most of its attitudes toward technology, he also borrows
from that superior film the sole witness to his murder mystery (recorded brain
waves) and copies a sleazy computer geek character that deals in virtual
recreations of experiences. Echoes of every type of film can be felt elsewhere,
however. There’s a chase scene through a dingy apartment that feels as if it
came out of De Palma’s The Fury, a run in with a gardener that
resembles Poison Ivy from Batman & Robin, a scene in which a
character’s eyes are forced open á la A Clockwork Orange, cute kid
banter (“How long can a whale hold its breath under water?”) that recalls Jerry
Maguire, and a scene in which Cruise sheds his pretty face that’s borrowed
from Vanilla Sky. Less successfully integrated are several scenes of
gross-out comedy where characters play with eyeballs and eat rotten food. Worst
of all might be the obvious copy of the final shot of Andrei Tarkovsky’s great
sci-fi film Solaris, which is recreated here with none of the emotional
weight that it had in the original. It’s downright hilarious at one point when Samantha Morton, as the
most fetching and eloquent of the crack babies, says, “I’m tired of the
future,” since the film seems so stuck in the past. Her bald character has
been photographed like Dreyer shot Falconetti in his The Passion of Joan of
Arc, but she’s the opposite of the martyr that the visual homage leads us
to expect. She shirks her social
responsibility to gain personal freedom by the film’s end, and unsurprisingly
Spielberg expects us to cheer for the move.
Since all of the best stylistic elements of Minority
Report are stolen, the packaging of the pastiche becomes of utmost importance, and
that’s when the disappointments of the plot become crushing. Myriad plot holes
and contrivances* are to be found here, but many are so bad that they’re
inexcusable. A crucial flashback is continually interrupted at its climactic
moment. The film never offers up a compelling reason why Anderton insists on
facing his destiny. Knowing that he is facing an inevitable fate, he charges
headlong toward it instead of simply burying himself for the thirty-six hours he
has until it is supposed to come to fruition. This plot device effectively
defuses any excitement for much of the movie. Since we know that he will never
be captured and we know that no one will die as he attempts to escape his
pursuers, little suspense builds during the action scenes. Since Minority
Report is not a character study, some early scenes in which Anderton watches
old home videos are so obviously expository that they render the film’s
biggest surprises completely predictable. It doesn’t take a Precog to figure
out where the film’s plot is heading, and there’s little excitement in
getting there. To work, this sort of movie requires a level of coherency that Minority
Report simply doesn’t have. It’s not a total waste, however. As noted
above the effects are great, the cinematography is stellar, and the acting is
solid, if not as good as it was in A.I.. I didn’t love Spielberg’s
last attempt to spin a sci-fi tale, but at least it was ambitious and messy
instead of sloppy and simple. Minority Report aspires to more than mere
mindlessness, but fails miserably, and as a result crystallizes nearly
everything that I dislike about Spielberg’s films.