Minority Report (2002)

[Dave]

I can't remember now where I found that piece of obviously useless infomation.

I'll be seeing this next week, then I'll post in your review thread.

 

[Tabitha]

I hope you enjoy it, even without the sex...

I sure did!

Why has no one else here seen it yet? That's what I want to know!!!

 

[tokyogirl]

i was going to go see it next week, but now i'm going on my trip...

 

[Dave]

you must read this thread from another board, not just the initial post, but all the responses to it, it had me rolling on the ground.

Similarities between Mission Impossible & Minority Report

BTW those are interesting forums, but I hope we don't ever get that guy spamming here, he has placed similar posts in each of their forums.

Personally, I can't see any similarity between the two films.

 

[Tabitha]

That was funny - I especially liked the reasons why they are NOT similar.

Sounds like that poster is very popular round those parts

Think I might do some browsing over there if I get the chance...

 

[Tabitha]

Well, I realised that my last post wasn't exactly a very successful review - I barely talked about the plot of the movie, or gave my overall impressions at all! Oh well, I posted that right after I saw the movie and was a bit over excited at the time

Here is an addendum that might make it all make a bit more sense.


Minority Report is a great movie - if you are looking for a futuristic action adventure that has you on the edge of your seat and somehow still manages to bore a little at the end.
Many have desribed it as the sister film to Spielberg's last SF outing, Artificial Intelligence, and they would have a very good point. The concept of the future is very similar, but while A.I. portrayed a fantastical and surreal vision, Spielberg's interpretation in Minority Report has left us with a glimpse of a latter 21st Century that is very plausible.
Well, apart from the pre-cogs and Cruise's superman complex, of course.
I say plausible because of the little things; large clothing chains, car manufacturers and popular drinks - all well known today - are apparently still going strong in this particular future. Frighteningly strong in fact, their advertisements address the passerby personally, and can draw on details of your previous purchases to present the perfect sales pitch. The omnipresence of the media and security forces, who together have eyes and ears literally everywhere is stifling, but not unimaginable. Take a look around the next time you visit a mall, there are cameras everywhere, surely it is not that hard to see the stores one day using them for more than just security.
Externally this future looks little different from our present. Extras are not dressed in far out clothing, and the only concrete differences between the present and the time of this story are the advances in technology and the existence of the gifted pre-cogs, upon whom the crux of the story lies.

As you may have gathered from the advertising, Tom Cruise plays Detective John Anderton, a member of the Pre-Crime police force who act upon warnings from three individuals who can see murders before they happen. In my opinion the movie got off to somewhat of a shaky start with the use of the 'red ball' device. The pre-cogs see a murder happening, the names of the Killer and Victim are carved into the surface of small red balls, roughly twice the size of a golf ball. It is never explained in the entire movie how exactly this process happens. How does the information get from the pre-cog's brains onto the surface of that ball, what is controlling the device that does the carving? If the information is gathered somewhere before carving the ball - why bother with the ball at all, wouldn't an email be quicker? Arrgggh...
This was in the back of my mind for the entire movie - and it never got resolved

So, the movie begins with a pre-cognitive vision, a red ball is carved, and the detective goes to work. Apart from my gripe with the red ball, I cannot fault this entire sequence. I was spellbound. We are introduced to the bells and whistles at the disposal of Pre-Crime, and I was hooked right then. I loved the method of searching through the incoherent footage of the pre-cogs' vision, the computer and monitor system was fascinating and it had me wanting to try it for myself. It was like a cross between touch-typing and semaphore, weird.

Colin Farrell's FBI character appears to make trouble for the experimental department. As Anderton realises the newest pre-cog vision shows him as a murderer, he begins to think he has been set up and goes on the run to clear his name or get away. The alternative is to be 'stored' in something akin to suspended animation along with all the other potential criminals he has locked up.

Spielberg plays it for unneccessary laughs a few times too often, this is a film more suited to wry smiles at clever references, not shots of Cruise scarpering after some eyeballs in a corridor, or chugging down mouldy sandwiches and milk while blindfolded


The ending, urg. Again, I can see the similarities with A.I. - this movie just went on for twenty minutes too long. I would like to have seen the robot, David's story end at the bottom of the ocean in New York, his impossible search for a fairytale character ending in failure, but then it just went off the rails.
Same happens here, Cruise simply finds he cannot beat the system and becomes a perp in storage, among the many he has helped to incarcerate. The pathos would have just been too sweet if we had just panned back and faded out here. Having now read PKD's original short story, I can tell you that is didn't end on this kind of negative note, but neither did it have quite the implausible connections being made in the Spielberg's finale - I mean how on Earth does Anderton's wife have the knowledge and ability to break her husband out? It just doesn't ring true for me at all.
The sub-plot, which is finally resolved in this last section, has become overbearing by this stage, and this viewer wished more of it had been played out off screen, I would have prefered a little wordy exposition to the repetition of the same scenes again and again.
The only redeeming feature was the hint of a confirmation that the pre-cogs were not talented enough to get it right every single time - note the differences in the vision of Anderton's murder at Burgess's hands, and the way things look as events actually unfold. I like to think that Agatha is actually creating this false premonition on purpose...

 

[King Donut]

beautiful movie!

this was great but maybe they should of ended it a bit earlier...

 

[tokyogirl]

hehe. i like the part about the sandwich and the milk

 

[Dave]

Wow! Excellent!

I think you've covered most things already but I'll add my bit anyway.

It was a little like the A.I. future, we are just seeing Spielberg's influence, but the film itself was much better. Incomparable! I'd go as far as saying it's the best thing I've seen for years. I mean that. 'Attack of the Clones' was a great spectacle, but I was disappointed in the story development, and that we will have to wait for Ep. III for all the answers. Last year, I was really looking forward to 'Planet of the Apes' and it didn't live up to my expectations at all. I guess that I must be a Tom Cruise fan because even though as Tabitha said:

Tom Cruise is, well, Tom Cruise

I like his films. 'Mission Impossible' is still one of my favourites, and I even like 'Cocktail'.

Anyway, the rest of the cast were excellent. I read a spoiler that Max von Sydow was the bad guy, but he was so good, I didn't believe it until it happened!!

I thought that the PreCog Agatha was great, and very believable. I must have been hard to bring life to such a strange character, but still make her likeable.

I loved that part where Anderton was on the run with her in the shopping Mall, using her psychic abilities to evade the cops: The umbrella, the balloons, and the money for the beggar -- that was just icing on the cake.

The Lexus cars were cool, but I'd stay off those roads!!! I think I'll work from home in the future.

And the world was not all beautiful, there was still squalid tenements, illegal drug sellers and blackmarket Doctors. It was a realistic portrayal.

The other interesting part not mentioned was the mystical, religious discussion. In a Hi-Tech world of VR, the PreCogs are thought of as having visions from God. The Cyber Parlor man Rufus Riley even knealed down and crossed himself.

I had a few nits.

And they were mainly from the ending, which after seeing 'A.I.' also just hit me like another Speilberg add on. He loves to have everything come to a happy ending! "Real Life" often doesn't have a happy ending. I partly agree with you about it ending 20 minutes earlier, but the resolution of the sub-plot would still be hanging.

I don't think that Burgess would shoot himself. Why? Nothing was proved against him, and while alive he could still plot something else.

Suddenly, everyone started believing Anderton might be innocent. Why? His wife knew Burgess was guilty, and the guests saw the precognition of Burgess killing Anne Lively, but all the evidence on the other two murders still pointed to Anderton.

About the eyes -- presumably someone would have died first -- so doesn't that make Anderton an accessory to murder.

Dr. Solomon -- if he hated Anderton enough to fill the fridge with those things, why not just take his money and not do the op. I was going to say: take the money and kill him, but no that wouldn't have worked

My biggest problem was with the murder of Anne Lively itself. If PreCrime only operated in Washington, why go to all that trouble at all, why not hire someone to kill her in another State. Come to think of it, how many hitmen would work in Washington anymore?

The problem with the Spielberg ending is that it wouldn't be a happy ending at all, after 6 years of zero murders, the numbers would go back to the astronomical proportions that they were before.

I don't think that the treatment of the PreCogs was right, but in that "Real Life" that I talked about they would never be allowed to move to the country and read books for the rest of their lives.

 

[Dave]

To answer some of your earlier questions:

The Red Balls: It was explained that the red balls were wooden, and carved like that the pattern in the grain could not be faked. (I didn't fully understand that explanation either) But, maybe wood is very rare now, and there is a limited supply. Also, I have to say that if you could fake a realistic picture of a boy who died 6 years ago, good enough to fool his father, you could easily fake an email.

How did his wife release Anderton: She put a gun to the technician's head and said "Release him!" What wasn't explained was why he didn't reply that she wasn't really going to use that gun, otherwise there would be two more red balls rolling down the tubes. But when people have guns pointed at their heads they don't think logically.

 

[Tabitha]

I'm glad you liked it Dave!

Originally posted by Dave
To answer some of your earlier questions:

The Red Balls: It was explained that the red balls were wooden, and carved like that the pattern in the grain could not be faked. (I didn't fully understand that explanation either) But, maybe wood is very rare now, and there is a limited supply. Also, I have to say that if you could fake a realistic picture of a boy who died 6 years ago, good enough to fool his father, you could easily fake an email.

My problem was with the process of how the names got from the pre-cogs brains to the red ball - I get how they might be carved. It is implied that that part is infallible - but they don't really tell the process. Do the pre-cogs whisper it to their 'keeper'? Or do the computers glean the information direct from their brains? If the latter is the case, then why do they need to spend all that time getting more detail from the visions?

Originally posted by Dave
How did his wife release Anderton: She put a gun to the technician's head and said "Release him!" What wasn't explained was why he didn't reply that she wasn't really going to use that gun, otherwise there would be two more red balls rolling down the tubes. But when people have guns pointed at their heads they don't think logically.

What I really meant was how come she knew her way around the inner workings of the facility? In the novel Anderton's wife is also an employee of Pre-Crime, but I don't believe she is in the film. It's only a small gripe, but a valid one

Originally posted by Dave
I loved that part where Anderton was on the run with her in the shopping Mall, using her psychic abilities to evade the cops: The umbrella, the balloons, and the money for the beggar -- that was just icing on the cake.

Oh, I loved that part too - especially the balloons scene. Samantha Morton gave a fantastic perfomance, considering the odd nature of her role. 10/10!

I too wondered about religion and it's role. It makes me think that perhaps these kids would not have ended up in quite the perfect Spielberg ending that neither you nor I were happy with - could you imagine them being drawn into a cult like the Fosterites that Robert Heinlein describes in Stranger in a Strange Land?

I never really thought about the problems with Burgess shooting himself - it made sense to me at the time. He had just been revealed to a large group of his peer as a murderer, the central part of his political life (i.e. pre-crime) had just been proved very very fallible. Was he not facing incarceration? I think for some people it might be preferable to take one's own life than to be put in that kind of hell forever.

If the movie had ended 20 minutes earlier, the sub-plot(s) wouldn't have been resolved, but I think if the sub-plot regarding Agatha's mother's murder had been left out altogether this could have been a tighter movie. Burgess would still have the reasons for wanting to cover up Witwer's discoveries, knowing that there were occasionally discrepancies in the pre-cogs visions. All the sub-plot did for me was draw a convenient parallel between Cruise and Agatha - the loss of a parent/child. I am sure I have forgotten some important plot point here, but I think it may have worked without that particular subplot.

 

[angelle myst]

That was just gross, i gipped when i saw that.

So anyway, i have a question about the end (should this go in spoiler space?)

Spoiler

Why putting them in some remote place stop their precognitions? The murders would still happen no matter where they went.

xxx

 

[Dave]

I haven't read the book, but I think that the altered film ending caused these plot problems, and the book might explain it better (though it's only a short story, so it might not.)

When I watched the film, I wondered how they could only see murders in Washington? (The project was a local one, and was only now about to go national.) If they could see murders everywhere, how did they block them out, or stop them interfering with the ones they were concerned with? Maybe they only have a very limited radius of precognition. That would answer your question too.

Out on video and DVD now!!!

 

[angelle myst]

So what were they do when it went national? Move them around the country? ah well, it was an ok film overrall. What did actually happen to his son? And did nobody care that the cute federal guy was dead (or missing as far as they knew?) nobody mentioned it after he was killed. Did i miss a bit of the film where this was all explained? Cos it is quite late and i havent been to bed yet, so maybe i just blacked out? I dunno

xxx

 

[Tabitha]

I think moving them away from everyone else would free them from all the drugs and other methods the authorities used to enhance their precog abilities. They would still have some talent, but it surely would not be as strong without the enhancements.

I will reread the short story if I can locate it in my room (trust me, no easy task), but if I recall correctly there was very little background on, or even direct involvement with the pre-cogs. There wasn't much of a story after Anderton's own, and it is very hard to compare the movie and the book, as all the movie really lifted was the 'concept', very little of the original story survives.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Minority Report

- - - - - - - WARNING!!!! POTENTIAL SPOILER!!! - - - - - - - - -


Bah! Again, effects without proper imagination to back it up. After watching it, my girlfriend and I spent the rest of the evening ripping it to shreds.

Before it ended, she thought the climax scene - where Tom Cruise confronted Leo Crowe, she thought the Precog had set the entire thing up herself so that she could be killed, and thus relieved of her suffering. I thought it was a pretty cool idea, and better than the plot progression opted for.

It claims to be based on a Phillip K Dick short story - but I've read enough of him to realise that the original short must surely have been devoid of the silly predictabilities and holes present in the film. Also, was missing his extreme irony. Anyone know which story it was, and what actually happened in it?

 

[SirRob]

Re:Minority Report

The story its based on is also called Minority Report. It is about 50 pages long and is included in a hardback collection of Dick shorts, released to tie in with the film. The collection is good. Minority Report is class and there is many others in there as good as it.


The actual story is very complex for its short length and does bear a some resemblance to the film. But only up until a point.

In the story Anderton's victim (god, I've forgotten his name) is a retired army general Leo Kaplan, who, like Crow, he kills. But thats where the story ends; with Anderton and his wife exiled to a colony planet.

At the end Pre-Crime survives, due to the murder which also stops a military plot, and the Precog reports turn out to all be seperate minority reports. There's a whole lot more to that part, but I won't (well, can't) explain it well.

The buildup is completely different - no eye business for one. The Precogs are all congenital idiots and do not leave the tank or play any part except for providing the reports. Anderton has no son. Witwer's in it, but he isn't meant to be so brash.

Get the book if you can; i'm sure it will be in some local bookshop and its only £7 despite being hardback.

I enjoyed the film itself after I managed to ignore the total differences. I'm far too dumb to pick it apart much and I'm a sucker for thrilly films of that kind.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Re:Minority Report

I read "We can remember it for you for wholesale" a long time before I saw "Total Recall" - and it's claim to be based on that Phillip K dick story. Oh, how they missed on the original's superb ending! So I figured that Spielberg had been as loose with Dick as the writers then. (and don't forget the superb irony at the end of "Do androids dream of electric sheep?" absent from "Bladerunner" - but that was and still is a quality film).

 

[Krystal]

Finally could see Minority Report and I have to say that I enjoy it. It was fun and very cool. My favorite part was when the Pre-Crime cops chase Anderton. All the thing about the process of how they try to locate the crimes was cool also. It was a very entertaining movie with lots of great moments.

Krystal

 

[Dave]

Originally posted by tokyogirl
hehe. i like the part about the sandwich and the milk

I just watched this again without all the hype and that is the best part.

As a whodunnit it doesn't really work, and 'man on the run' has been done to death, the product placement is too much, but I still like it.

And I don't know where the sex business came from. The review I read that in must have watched some other film entirely.

I think I can answer my own question regarding the wife threatening the technician - Anderton was off with Agatha at the time and she was the most important of the three precogs - it's the same reason that Witwer was surprised by his own death. (The cute Federal Guy - BTW Anderton was also charged with his murder - though on what evidence?)

Originally posted by angelle myst
What did actually happen to his son?

No idea, the faked photos were not explained - if they are that easy to fake then why believe them? How do you kidnap a child from public baths and no one notices?