Science Fiction at its finest: Minority Report

I’ve always thought that Philip K. Dick was a philosopher masquerading as a novelist. Minority Report - starring Tom Cruise - is an excellent film of science fiction, done in the category of film noir, by an amateur of film noir (Spielberg), but nonetheless done very effectively. The premise is an immemorial philosophical problem. Recall the lines (after throwing a ball):

John Anderton: Why'd you catch that?
Danny Witwer: Because it was going to fall.
John Anderton: You're certain?
Danny Witwer: Yeah.
John Anderton: But it didn't fall. You caught it. The fact that you prevented it from happening doesnt change the fact that it was *going* to happen.

You catch your wife of 20 years in bed with your best friend. She has had an affair. You’re in a rage and you form the intention to kill them. All of a sudden, a storm of police barrage the house, and before the intention could grow roots for half a second, you’re under arrest for the future murder of your wife and best friend. But I haven’t done anything yet, you think!

Cruise is John Anderton. He is in charge of the Department of Pre-crime in Washington D.C. It is the year 2054. The city swallows the earth. There is no Nature. This is a dystopia that gives Orwell’s 1984 a run for its money. Technology has reached its zenith. Advertisements follow you around like pop-up ads on the Internet, only they're tailored to suit your every need, and addressed to you personally. Cars race to and fro, horizontally or vertically. Homes are equipped with state of the art technology. Everything seems to be voice activated. Bottom line: this is the future Marty didn’t go far enough to see!

Remember your wife and the best friend you caught in the act? Remember those guys who arrested you before you did anything? Well, that’s the Department of Pre-crime - and Cruise is the ringleader. The Department gets their leads from a very reliable source: the precogs. There are 3 of them, but of the 3 Agatha is the most powerful. They can see the future!

As with any government agency that is both highly successful and morally questionable, the Justice Department has to stir the pot to keep everyone accountable: or are they jealous?

Art direction, production design, and cinematography are spectacular. Nearly every edited scene is full of details that repeated viewings won’t be able to exhaust. Consider the computer Cruise manipulates with his hands like the conductor of a technological symphony. Every image can be moved, adjusted, magnified, closed out, opened, highlighted, superimposed. Classical music plays in the background. Disks are made of glass, inserted in some high-tech CPU, and our imagination just swims and gets lost in all these details. This is a world we can’t wrap our heads around.

A problem happens when the pre-cogs see Cruise commit a murder. The hunter soon becomes the hunted and the story shifts to a fugitive theme. There is a very affective scene of Cruise and Agatha scrambling through a mall away from the cops with insightful directions about where to stand, for how long, who not to look at, where to run: she knows what would happen if you didn’t do what she said.

Another cool scene happens when Anderton is fleeing from the spiders. There is an aerial scene, showing the camera hovering just above all the adjacent apartments, after ‘spiders’ are sent in to do exhaustive retina scans. The jet-pack fight scene strays away from the cartoonish acrobatics of Spiderman or the nature-defying stunts of the post-Matrix era and stands firm in realism. It's actually one of my favorite action sequences. 'Don't run, John', advises his long time partner. 'Everybody runs.', quips Anderton.

This is one of my favorite science fiction movies. It has a great story with an unpredictable twist and all the while juggling some hefty philosophical problems. One can’t help but focus on the paradox in nearly all time-travel movies. If Anderton did something that the pre-cogs didn’t see, then why didn’t they see ‘that’ instead? But I’ll quit there.