"minority Report" Review

[Guest chirs3]

Starring: Tom Cruise, and some famous old guy whose name escapes me at the moment.

 

Setup: It's 2054. Detective John Anderton is a leading officer of the PreCrime program, which operates solely in Washington DC. It's running its course of a test trial, to see if it's safe for use over the entire country, and so far the results are staggering: NO MURDERS ANYMORE! A vote is scheduled soon to allow PreCrime to operate nation-wide.

 

Also worth noting is John got into PreCrime because of his son, who was kidnapped and presumed murdered. John turned to drugs as a result, and despite the incident occuring six years ago, he's haunted by it still today.

 

So anyway, here's how it works: there are kids, who were born from parents who had become junkies on some drug that sounded like "Heroin" but wasn't. (Meroin?) Most of the children died, but the few who lived were haunted by dreams of murders - it took little time for someone to realize these weren't dreams, but pre-visions. So they hooked 'em up to wires and tubes, and thus, PreCrime is born. The cops see the visions, and arrest the perpetrator BEFORE they commit the murder.

 

PreCrime is under investigation from the Attourney General right now. Anderton is down with the "PreCogs" (the psychic's) when one of them pops out of the water and grabs him, muttering: "Can you see?" On the screen, a vision of a past murder is played.

 

Curious, John visits the archives to dig up a little history on the murder. PreCog's #1 and #2 show their accounts of the murder, but #3, the one who grabbed John, her vision is missing. As are a few other pieces of the puzzle.

 

John has it on his mind, especially since they're being investigated, but suddenly everything goes topsy-turvy when a new murder is called in by the PreCogs - it turns out that John is planning a pre-meditated murder of someone he's never met before - A Mr. Crow. John flees the scene, and the mystery unfolds.

 

The Good: It's pretty? I dunno. The performances were mostly good. And the four molecules of moral fat they give you to chew on are nice.

 

The Bad: "You are aware of the moral ramifications of PreCrime, right?"

 

"Here we go again."

 

Those two lines sum up ALL of the moral debate in this movie. This is an action/mystery thriller with a moral dilemma that they NEVER expound upon. There is no "For every 1000 arrests, there are 5 innocents" brought up, there's no "Violates the Bill of Rights but it works most of the time", they just completely ignore it.

 

SPOILERS

 

Another thing I hated was at the end, Cruise and "old guy" confront each other, with "old guy" intending (supposedly) to kill him. Cruise says "You kill me, PreCrime is a success, and you go to jail. You don't kill me, PreCrime goes under."

 

The problem with that is, IT COULD HAVE AND SHOULD HAVE BEEN APPLIED TO THE MAIN CHARACTER! Cruise finds a man who (supposedly) killed his son, and he's faced with the dilemma: Kill the man, and the PreCrime system he KNOWS is flawed will be correct. Let the man live, and the guy who killed your son goes free. But they tack it on at the end, INSTEAD OF WITH CRUISE, in the stupidest of spots.

 

And ANOTHER thing - Spielberg's Syndrome strikes again, as the movie goes 20 minutes out of its way to get the happy ending, when there was SUCH AN EASY WAY OUT OF IT!

 

Lara: ... but I never said she drowned.

 

Old guy: John told me.

 

They walk out to the reception, end it there, he gets away with it, BETTER MOVIE. But, much like AI, it runs longer than necessary just to give us the good guys winning. Whoo ha.

 

Not to mention most of the action sequences are sub-standard popcorn fodder and the movie is pretty predictable.

 

Overall: For a movie that supposedly echoes books like 1984, there's surprisingly little moral and ethical debate in this movie. Nothing to even spark the audience into thinking about it for themselves. It's a background object conveniently forgotten about.

 

Still, given what they had to work with, the actors do a reasonable job of keeping interest.

 

chirs3 gives "Minority Report" five tabs of "Clarity" out of ten.