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Minority Report
Movie Stats & Links |
| Starring: |
Tom Cruise, Max Van Sydow, Colin
Farrell |
| MPAA Rated: |
PG-13 |
| Released By: |
20th Century Fox /
Dreamworks SKG |
| Web Site: |
www.minorityreport.com |
| Kiddie Movie: |
It's pretty deep -
better for the older ones. |
| Date Movie: |
It's got Tom
Cruise, she'll just wish you were him. |
| Gratuitous Sex: |
There's a little. |
| Gratuitous
Violence: |
People get killed. |
| Action: |
People get chased. |
| Laughs: |
A chuckle or two. |
| Memorable
Scene: |
The spiders
scanning eyeballs. |
| Memorable
Quote: |
Nothing stands
out. |
| Directed By: |
Steven Spielberg |
| Produced By: |
Jan de Bont,
Bonnie Curtis, Gerald R. Molen, Walter F. Parkes |
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Minority Report
A Movie Review |
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I know most other reviewers don’t share this thought,
but my personal feeling is that Steven Spielberg needs to get out of
the future. First "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" and now "Minority
Report." It’s not that both movies are horrible, and yes, they are
both visually stunning and can be shown in any movie-making class
about how films should be made, but there are reasons movies like
"Close Encounters of the Lost Kind", the Indiana Jones series, "E.T.:
The Extra-Terrestrial," and "1941" stand the test of time for the
average moviegoer – it’s that they are great stories, whether fun or
serious, and make you not change the channel when they come on TV.
You watch them over and over again; you’ll even rent it again because
you enjoyed it the first or second time, but I can honestly say I
won’t be too excited when "Minority Report" makes its way to video or
cable.Anyway, "Minority Report" gives us life in the not too
distant future, where the crime of murder has become all but
non-existent in Washington D.C. because of the Pre-Crime unit. Tom
Cruise plays Detective Anderton, one of the Pre-Crime dudes, whose job
it is to figure out who is going to murder someone before it happens
so that the person can be arrested prior to the killing. He does this
with the help of an etched ball carved out by the thoughts of three
"Pre-Cogs", psychic humans stuck in a pool (alright, they’re a little
more complicated than that, but oh well…) who see murders before they
happen. The ball thingy projects images onto a screen manipulated by
hand movements.
The Pre-Crime unit has done so well in D.C. that there is a move
afoot to take it national, so it’s now under the scrutiny of the
government, namely Detective Witwer (Colin Farrell).
As it turns out, one day Anderton is trying to dissect one of the
balls when it shows him committing the murder of a man he has never
met. Knowing he’ll be arrested before he even commits the crime, he
takes off running. He’s chased, gets his eyeballs changed, even steals
one of the "Pre-Cogs" to help him figure out if he is being framed,
and instead of just staying away from the room where he is supposed to
kill this man, well, Anderton ends up in the dudes room, and yea,
kills him. Eventually Anderton figures out where the flaw is in the
Pre-Crime system, and I’m sure the murder rate jacked right back up to
where it was before the Pre-Crime people came into existence.
"Minority Report" does have it’s share of cool chase scenes, the
mechanical spider scene is really great, and even watching Anderton
manipulate the murder screens is fun, but I lost respect for the story
when, fine, Anderton needed to run up to a point, and that was up to
the point of the murder. You see, along with showing who is doing the
killing, the "Pre-Cogs" also tell exactly when the murder is going to
occur. All Anderton really needed to do, especially when he began to
doubt the infallibility of the Pre-Crime system, was to wait until
after the designated time of the murder. Sure, there was a cover-up in
place, but it would have been a hell of a lot easier to expose the
cover-up showing there is a problem in the Pre-Crime system.
Too many "give me a break" moments and not enough logic in this
movie had me just saying "Other than the chase scenes, what else was
there." Fine, give me that morality dilemma to make me think, tell me
the film is a visual masterpiece, and try to convince me that
sometimes movies are supposed to make you go deep in your thoughts to
pull out the relevance of a story to society, but in the end the story
really needs to be good. I didn’t think it was. It’s 2 ½ stars out of
5 for "Minority Report." Here’s hoping Spielberg gets back to just
telling a good story when he does Indiana Jones 4.
That’s it for this one! I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!! |
