Preston Hunter wrote:

> One of the best movies of
> the year. A serious Oscar contender. I saw it last night and
> it is a tour de force incredible, thought-provoking,
> entertaining, edge-of-your-seat movie. Seriously, this may
> be Tom Cruise's best movie EVER, and it is Spielberg's best
> movie in a LONG, LONG time. Definitely PKD's best movie
> since "Blade Runner" (which I've only seen on television).

(A small warning -- this post will probably contain some small spoilers for the film, though my intent is to keep the discussion at a broad conceptual level. Still, any discussion of reactions to a story must of necessity give up some details. FWIW.)

I saw Minority Report the day it opened and have been trying to figure out what I think of it. In general I liked it a lot, but I also left the theater feeling vaguely dissatisfied and I've been trying to figure out why. A couple of impressions . . .

I had enormous expectations going into this film. The buzz has been very positive, and the subject matter really fascinates me -- especially in a post 9-11 United States where we are now actively debating what personal liberties we're willing to give up in order to ensure our safety. It's one of the fundamental moral questions, and ties back to a number of discussions we've had on this list, including interning Japanese Americans for fear of what they might do, and driving Mormons from state to state for the same reason.

I was really primed for this film. Maybe too primed.

This is a very well made film. The visuals are quite spectacular and the interactions well thought out (the interaction by the precrime cops with the 3D recording interface is especially fun). There were a lot of fun cinematographic gewgaws that used color, blurred motion, slow frame rates, and other visual techniques to create a sense of otherness when dealing with the images provided by the precogs.

Spielberg is learning how to treat science fiction as a legitimate medium for telling a story. The tendency in film (as in literature) is to dwell on the technically cool stuff at the expense of the surrounding story. Especially in film, the desire to richly create this alternate world can lead to boring viewer moments (anyone remember Star Dreck: The Motion Sickness with its excruciating long shots showing that space is really, really big?). Yes, this film featured some pretty spectacular world creation shots, but it mostly used effects to a purpose, rather than as the purpose. And the story was treated as a real and serious part of the total film. Good stuff. A clear improvement from his promising but overdone effort with A.I.

A hallmark of Phillip K. Dick's fiction is a world that is substantially different than our own in many of the details, but that is still familiar in most of the broad strokes. The result is a sense that the world of the story is not so much a speculation on what our world might look like in the future as it is a fable set in a future world reminiscent of our own, but not necessarily evolved from it. Where PKD tends to draw these differences (and similarities) with a soft touch, Spielberg is much more heavy handed. Spielberg may have shown me too much of this alternate world and tied it too concretely back to my own, creating a desire to know more about how we got there from here than is really necessary for the story.

I think this is the basis for my vague dissatisfaction with Minority Report. Civil liberties have taken a very drastic turn in this fable, and I either needed that change to be more clearly explained or else needed a greater distinction between the world of the story and my world. I admit freely that this is something I have a hard time with in a lot of science fiction, and is a criticism that I regularly make. If this is supposed to be *my* future, I want to know how we got there -- especially when some fundamental social/political institutions have changed so radically. That is a purely personal reaction, and is not one that most of my friends have.

I really wish the film had been shorter. At very close to two and a half hours, I would like to have seen this trimmed to be much closer to two hours.

Part of the length could be reduced by ending this film about ten minutes before it actually did. In my mind, Spielberg went for a happy ending (or at least fully resolved one) that didn't quite feel right to me. A friend offered an alternate ending to the film that I think would have been quite satsifying and that is essentially opposite to the current ending, that would have left most of the primary issues resolved for the viewer, but unresolved in this future world. I wanted the Tom Cruise character to be a little darker and more desperate, and I wanted the issue to resolve a little less cleanly. Your mileage may vary. For my dime this film tried too hard to end nice, and I just didn't buy it.

So . . .

Having nitpicked a bunch of little things that are largely one person's individual biases, I have to say that this is a very good film and very much worth seeing. It raises an interesting and timely issue and tells a successful story based off that issue. I'm not sure the story was as deep as some are suggesting (not unlike The Matrix which had far less depth than many people gave it credit for), but it's a darned good film and may well take over the top spot in my list of quality sf films. It is to Spielberg's credit that most of my criticisms are those of personal approach, not of basic story. I would have told the story differently, but Spielberg told it well.

In the end, that's all anyone can ask.

Scott Parkin