2002 was a pretty dynamite year, if you were Steven Spielberg. It was the year that saw him direct Catch Me if You Can, a ludicrously fun, intrigue-packed crime film based on the autobiography of severely talented con man Frank Abagnale, which pitted Leo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks in a two-hour cat-and-mouse game that was, if we’re being honest, simply too fun for its own good. But it wasn’t the only movie that Spielberg directed that year that centered around a man on the run from the law, though the other one was, perhaps, as different as you could possibly imagine.
Released just six months earlier, Minority Report – based on the Philip K. Dick short story of the same name – wasn’t about a criminal on the run from the law, but rather followed a man on the run for something he had not yet done. We find ourselves in Washington, DC, in the year 2054, where 90% of premeditated murders have been effectively eradicated. How, you may ask? Well, that’s quite simple: clairvoyance. The experimental “Precrime” division of DC’s police force (which we find on the verge of being made nationwide) use three people, dubbed “Precogs,” who get vivid visions that show how that murder will be carried out, allowing the detectives within the division to solve the murder before it even occurs. The wrinkle is with crimes of passion, which by their very nature allow detectives very, very little time to stop those murders from occurring; the film begins with Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise) racing against the clock to stop a man from stabbing his adulterous wife, searching for clues about the crime’s location in the vision seen by the Precogs.
Okay, so it isn’t that simple. In fact, it brings up many, many questions, the chief of them being, “How does one deem a person a ‘murderer’ when the crime they committed didn’t actually occur?” Minority Report is quick to respond to that by asking us to consider a ball rolling across a table: just because you catch it before it falls does not change the fact that it was going to fall. The analogy sounds clean enough, but considering the fate of those who are caught and imprisoned without trial – their imprisonment being a state of suspended animation, their consciousnesses stored in a perpetual state of virtual reality – you’d hope that they had a better explanation than that. Indeed, the film that follows is a long examination of that question, as Cruise works to uncover why, precisely, the next vision they see is one where he murders a man he has never met.
Though Minority Report exists in a world of pure science-fiction, what keeps it relevant year after year is that, at its heart, it’s an ol’ fashioned detective story. Cruise plays a detective at the height of his own professional power, though he’s forever haunted by the specter of a horribly tragic event that he blames himself for, and that pushes him to substance abuse. Outside of Anderton is the Greatest Hits: a jerky rival detective (played by Colin Farrell, who is perpetually chewing gum); a benevolent figure in a position of great power (Max von Sydow) who may not be what he seems; a descent from glossy, opulent locations into the seedy underbelly of DC, and even the intertwining of multiple unspeakable crimes that swirl around a potentially-corrupt agency, one that is more concerned about their pragmatic vision of a crime-free world than they are about whether they’ve actually caught any actual criminals. We even get a (deeply satisfying warning), meant to dissuade him from sticking his nose where he shouldn’t, that sounds like it’s straight out of a Dick Tracy story: “Careful, chief – when you dig up the past, all you get is dirty.”
There’s also plenty of action that straddles the lines between thriller and sci-fi – and, to many, these aspects are some of the film’s best moments. There’s a highway scene where Anderton leaps across vertically moving cars to try to find safety. There’s a fight against cops in an alleyway, but those cops are equipped with jetpacks and batons that will make you projectile vomit if they touch you. There’s a wonderfully fluid fight between Anderton and Witwer in an active factory where self-driving cars are being built. In one of the film’s most tense scenes, we watch from above as tiny spider robots (called – ugh – “spyders”) search for Anderton in a shitty apartment building where he’s recovering from a goddamn eyeball transplant. Every action scene feels like it has purpose and depth, making it hard to really pare them all down to keep this revisit from being longer than it already is.
What elevates Minority Report, though, is the dazzling and complicated world that Spielberg created for us to exist in. He blends the pre-existing architecture of Washington DC and the near-future tech of this world – the film’s opening sequence, which ushers us into the world of Precrime, shows heavily-armored police descending from a hovering police vehicle into the bedroom windows of a cozy brownstone home across the street from a quaint playground. There are self-driving cars, but there’s also an ever-present surveillance state that scans your eyeballs everywhere you go, which is just as effective in tracking criminals as it is at screaming at you, by name, to buy Gap and Lexus.
The biggest change we see is in the world of Precrime, which is probably what most people remember the most about Minority Report. Anderton is less of a hard-boiled detective sifting through case files, and more of an orchestra conductor, the violent imagery from the minds of the Precogs his symphony. We watch him, in black gloves with lit fingers, standing before curved screens, where he’s able to move backwards and forwards in the vision, split shots apart, zoom-and-enhance, all with sweeping gestures that push the images around the screen as easily as leaves in a pond. The Precogs (who are kept in a state of drug-induced slumber) reside in a specially-designed, nutrient-filled holding tank in a sealed room lovingly called “the temple,” their visions seen in their raw form on screens suspended above them.
Underneath the self-driving cars, and eyeball transplants (the latter of which gives us one of the most heart-stopping – and viscerally disgusting – sequences of the film), there are questions that keep us questioning the nature of free will and determinism 20 years on. Minority Report, time and time again, asks us if knowing the future means that we can change the future – or if the future is as inevitable as the slow march forth of time itself. We’re made to question whether the trio that predict these crimes are themselves prisoners, as they are kept in a state of suspended existence and forced to witness, day in and day out, grisly murders of all different shades, with no real say in whether it’s something they can handle. It even allows us to ponder things that it doesn’t even necessarily ask about: if you imprison someone with zero due process, simply because you believe the future to be so inevitable that there’s no difference between committing a crime in the past and committing one in the future, is that truly justice? Does the concept of “justice” require a victim, or is ill-intent the only requirement? Minority Report, like the best works of Dick, is careful to lead us to these questions, but it never truly tells us what we should feel about the idea of precognitive crime prevention.
Though adaptations of Dick’s books and stories can be pretty hit (Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly) or miss (Paycheck, The Adjustment Bureau), Minority Report feels like it took all the right lessons from the future noir landscape of Blade Runner, which also pairs classic detective fiction with believable future landscapes – even if Minority Report finds us in a much less bleak world Ridley Scott’s masterpiece did. That blending is perhaps what made the film such a critical and commercial hit; critics praised the fact that it was such a thought-provoking and sleek sci-fi thriller, while audiences made it the 10th-highest grossing film of 2002 (just behind the unexpected hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding), which is nothing to sniffle about. The film’s popularity was enough that Fox even tried to make a television series based on the story/film in 2015, though it was an abysmal failure that only made it 10 episodes. No huge loss.
Though it can take a couple viewings of Minority Report to fully grasp the tangled web of crime and corruption that exists in the film – and especially to understand the exact chain of events leading up to the murder that is given a big reveal in the film’s climax – the film still holds up two decades after its release. Beneath the action, the fight scenes, the excellent technology, and the thoroughly engaging mystery, there’s an ocean of questions about crime, time and free will that will simply never become irrelevant or passé. And even if you don’t want to ask yourself whether we actually make our own choices or if our lives follow tramlines that push us from one event to the next, this film is still one of the most unexpectedly fun whodunnits of the aughts.
The post Holy Hell! Minority Report Turns 20 appeared first on Spectrum Culture.