Minority Report

Minority Report; science-fiction triller, USA, 2002; D: Steven Spielberg, S: Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Steve Harris, Max Von Sydow

Washington, 2054. Pre-cogs are three clairvoyant people equipped with precognition who predict upcoming murders in town. The police force "Precrime" placed them in a pool while Director Lamar organized police officers who arrest people even before they commit a crime. One of the officers is John Anderton, who lost his son, supervised by Danny. When one day Pre-cogs predict that John will kill someone, he runs away. In order to prove his innocence, John kidnaps Pre-cog Agatha and takes her to a building. There he kills a man claiming to have killed his son and gets arrested. But the man lied since he was hired by Lamar, who himself is a killer. But John's wife discovers the fraud, saves John and Lamar gets killed.

The sole story of "Minority Report" was taken over from a short story by the genius Philip K. Dick, but is rather shaky since precognition and predicting future are topics that step way too much into paranormal. Still, the finished film is an excellent achievement, a 'tour-the-force' sci-fi thriller. Who ever presumed that Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise are only going to glorify themselves will be shocked by the dose of nihilism and realism in the film for whom they might have not been mature enough some 5 years before. Cruise plays the hero Anderton who is a real opposite of a "clean image" beau: he is a drug addict, a cynic and a depressive person ever since his child disappeared. The story is basically the classic "the system worked fine until they came after him" concept, when Anderton has to run from the police - in one radical moment, since the identity of everyone can be discovered through eye scan in the future, he decides to pay a doctor to replace his eyes with the eyes of someone else in a surgery. In one elaborated sequence, the police sends small robot-spiders to search for a building and scan the eyes of every tenant there (they even scan one man while on toilet!) so Anderton, still with a bandage on his eyes, submerges into cold water so that the heat sensors won't detect him. The film is filled with such creative moments. Despite the ugliness, this is a beautiful film, like in the scene where the hero tiresomely walks with Agatha in the store while the song "Moon River" plays in the background, and it would have been better if it ended like a real "black pearl", and not so neatly as it did.

Grade:+++