Minority Report: File This One
Under Masterpiece!

Film critics have a tendency to overuse the word "great." I know I do. I routinely write things like: "This is a great film" or "That actor gave a great performance." Stronger language is needed for a new movie opening this Friday, June 21. How about this? Steven Spielberg's Minority Report is a great, great, great, GREAT film.

How great? This is the first movie of 2002 that I would declare an unqualified masterpiece. This is the kind of movie that will have me buzzing for the next month, regardless of whether I sit through 30 days of mediocrity or whether movies like The Road to Perdition (July 12) and K-19: The Widowmaker (July 19) can keep that buzz going. How wonderful it is to fall in love with a movie again, and Minority Report is that movie!

Directed by Steven Spielberg, the film is set 50 years in the future. Tom Cruise stars as John Anderton, a detective in the pre-crime unit of Washington, D.C. This high-tech law enforcement division is a test project that uses three special psychics call "Pre-Cogs" to predict murders before they happen. Max Von Sydow is Lamar Burgess, Cruise's superior who hopes to continue the unit's important work even as a public vote looms on whether to extend federal funding for the project and take it national. Colin Farrell is the government agent assigned to find any weaknesses in the system.

The way the detectives go about solving murders before they happen is just fascinating and masterfully realized on screen. The Pre-Cogs' visions of the future can be placed in video files that the cops display on glass screens and manipulate to search for murders. Remember how Rick Deckard in Blade Runner used that machine to zoom in on images within a single photograph he found in a suspect's apartment? Cruise and his team can basically manipulate the recorded visions in the same way to hone in on a house address or a street sign out a window. The visions are timed down to the second that the murders happen. It's only a matter of whether the police can reach the victim in time.

The movie, thanks to Spielberg's talents as a visual storyteller and an excellent script from Scott Frank and Jon Cohen (based on a Philip K. Dick short story), is smart enough to throw in little clues in its first hour that the system may not be as perfect as Anderton and Burgess believe it is. When one of the psychics' visions reveals John to be a murderer 36 hours into the future, the hunter becomes the prey and all of the department's high-tech pursuit and surveillance gadgets are brought to bear on him. John maintains that he was set up by Farrell, that he has never met the man he is supposedly going to kill. His only hope is to find the rumored Minority Report, a forbidden file of previous killings that the psychics were wrong about but has been buried by ... someone.

Damn, it's exciting to talk about this movie! I literally can't type fast enough. This was the kind of motion picture that a few film-lover buddies and I stayed around in the parking lot for an hour afterward just talking about this cool thing and that cool thing. The movie has at least six virtuoso BIG sequences in it, and I am not just talking about the usual running and jumping. There is a sequence in a future shopping mall that is so well choreographed, I almost wept. My favorite involves the "spiders"--tenacious, little, electronic devices that crawl like arachnids through buildings scanning retinas to find the guilty Spielberg sets up this sequence perfectly with the cops announcing that the spiders will be coming through the building. Then, he gives us a seamless series of winding, twisting overhead shots of the various floors of the rundown apartment building being invaded by these devices as people's meals, naps, arguments, and lovemaking are interrupted for the eye scans. Anderton is in the building, temporarily blind and hiding in a tub full of ice cold water. In Mission: Impossible, a single bead of sweat was his worst enemy. In Minority Report, it is one tiny air bubble.

I could go on and on about the detective aspects of the story, the stunningly complete future vision that Spielberg and his crew deliver, and the various action sequences ... but I will leave all of that to your surprise. What I want to speak of in closing is courage. Spielberg and Cruise are arguably the two biggest heavyweights in Hollywood. They could have made just a visionary action film and we all would have been happy, content, and momentarily thrilled. But they had the courage to go far beyond that with Minority Report.

As great as the film is, there will still be some who absolutely hate it. They will hate it for its 150-minute length (one hint, dear readers ... where you think the movie is gonna end, you got another half-hour to go after that--some will say the film's last third drags, but I was entranced). They will hate it because it brings up real issues of personal privacy and civil liberties and questions what direction we as a society are headed in. Most of all, they will hate it because it has the courage to be ... and here's a word ... sad! Just as E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial was really about a boy dealing with his parents divorcing and not a space alien coming to visit, Minority Report is really about a parent coping with the loss of his child and not a constant run from the law. John Anderton is haunted by the abduction of his son years earlier. It's why his marriage broke up. It's why he is a drug addict. It's why he helped spearhead the pre-crime unit and make it his life's mission to prevent what happened to him and his boy from happening to other families.

Spielberg accentuates the sadness of the Anderton story with a stunning new filmmaking technique. He and Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski filmed Minority Report using Super 35mm film and a laboratory process known as bleach bypass, wherein the grain of the stock comes to the fore and the characters' faces are drained of virtually all color. Background hues, though, are left in tact. The result is a film that is as dank and ominous as "Seven," but with a mood and a feel all its own.

One of the downsides of being a film critic is I often have to go to press events and hang out with dozens of film snobs. I have heard the name Steven Spielberg scoffed at more times than I can count from critics and other film journalists who believe that documentaries about starving kids on the streets of Burma during the winter monsoon season are the only worthy artistic endeavors. I want to shake these imbeciles. I want to tell them how lucky they are to be living in an era where we will (God willing) have many more years to look forward to new Steven Spielberg visions on the silver screen. In the future, the one thing I can accurately predict is that moviegoers yet to be born will look back on Spielberg the way we look back on Frank Capra or John Ford or Alfred Hitchcock today.

Minority Report represents Spielberg at his most daring and inventive. I mean, jeez, this is a film where Tom Cruise chases his own eyeballs down a hallway! This movie deserves Academy Award attention. This movie deserves Scooby-Doo-like weekend grosses.

This "Report" deserves your immediate attention.

Minority Report is rated PG-13 for violence, language, and thematic elements.