Minority Report

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: No
Watched With: Tyler

Steven Spielberg directing a Philip K. Dick based story? Yes please.

What starts out as a Sci-fi action thriller steadily turns into a detective noir. As usual with Dick's stories, there's a great central conceit that leads to many morally and philosophically grey areas. In this case, arresting someone before they commit a crime.

I've always loved this film and what stood out to me most watching it through again, besides now knowing Anne Lively was played by Jessica Harper from Suspiria and Shock Treatment, was the great sound design and music and how it works almost subconsciously on the audience to keep complicated multiple plot threads recognised as they pop up and interweave.

If I have a problem with this film it's that it almost feels episodic. Don't get me wrong, it has a very clear, linear and compelling story driving everything through but they way it goes about telling it can sometimes feel like segments from different films. Sequences like Lois Smith's delightfully bizarre exposition in the greenhouse feel so radically different than the Jet Pack chase that comes before it or Peter Stormare's funny and icky surgery scene straight after. Pretty much all the supporting characters get there one scene and then that's it. So while everything has a great pace and if you don't like one segment chances are you'll like the next, it does make getting to the finish a bit of a chore. Each time you think you're getting a handle on the situation it changes up.

Perhaps that's not a bad thing at all, but watching it so late at night it does make it feel very long, each time you're ready for it to get to the end it picks up a plot thread you forgot about. And there is quite a lot in there, they do the work of fleshing out our main character with a damaged past and tying it in to story arc well.

And each segment is filled with cool stuff. I love all the future design stuff they came up with. That tricky area of being just slightly in the future, so recognisable but with some subtle and some not so subtle changes. Jet Packs are always awesome. As are those little spider eye scanning robots that suspiciously resemble the Tripods of Spielberg and Cruise's next collaboration.

It's also filled with wonderful and often eccentric performances from supporting cast. Like I said before, they don't all get much screen time but they do make some pretty big choices to ensure each one is unique and memorable.

Technically it's immaculate, as you'd come to expect. What can you say about a John Williams score? This one probably sounds the most like a mash-up of other work he's done but there's still really great stuff in there.

However I think this was the first film where Janusz Kaminski's cinematography started to get on my nerves. This is probably the highest contrast, bleached out grainy looking of Spielberg's films. That's fine, it suits the story. But Kaminski really went to town with his usual diffuse light glowing look. It's so pronounced it really started to bug me, peoples faces just became a shiny line of hi-lights. Probably made compositing a nightmare for the FX houses too.

Speaking of FX, I can't tell you how many times I've been asked to replicated the "Minority Report computer interface" style graphics. Although references seem to have moved forward to Ironman, this still crops up.

But despite all the cool sci-fi shine and the dark detectivy noir story, the usual warm beating heart at the centre of the story is there and there are some quite unexpectedly moving scenes towards the end.

I've heard theories about the end of this film, for the people that find Spielberg's happy everything's-neatly-tied-up endings too syrupy. Without giving anything away, there are lines planted, particularly by Tim Blake Nelson, that suggest the last few scenes may not be real at all, just a dream inside someone's head while they are incarcerated. Like other Phillip K. Dick stories, I'm thinking Total Recall here, it actively supports both readings, neither confirming nor denying either. So the cynical among you could debate the happy ending to your hearts content. While I'm not a big fan of the way the end just wraps up so quickly and so happily considering everything that came before it I do feel like what we are seeing is true, just because those references are so slight and, after all it IS Spielberg.

But perhaps you should give it a watch and see what you think.