*** Official MINORITY REPORT Review Thread (1 Viewer)

[DerrickRemmert]

I just got back from seeing this flick. It was OK but more a popcorn movie. The ending was retarded and whoever was in charge of security at the Precog center must have been on vacation. Minority Report is worth a rental but that's about it.

A+ on the cinematography and the score!

 

[DAVE_B]

I usually like how Spielberg will interject some humor but the way those eyeballs went rolling down the ramp was a little farfetched.I did enjoy the movie enough to see it twice however. Haven't done that since Total Recall.

 

[Bruce Hedtke]

Great film. It lived up to my hopes and expectations fully and had enough smarts as well as razzle-dazzle to feed both the cerebral and the popcorn crowd. Loved every minute of it.
While Tom Cruise headlined (and did a damn fine job), Samantha Morton stole the film. I know it's early and she would probably be a darkhorse candidate, but I've already reserved a spot for her on my Oscar wish list for best supporting actress-I loved her performance that much. There were times when the hair on the back of my neck was standing up simply because of her scenes.
Minority Report :star: :star: :star: :star:
Bruce

 

[Edwin Pereyra]

Minority Report does not have the vagaries, ambiguity and depth of Steven Spielberg’s last film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. But it does succeed in its own way as a science-fiction film where the visual effects does not upstage the actors and the film’s storyline unlike another film in the same genre released earlier this season under a popular franchise title.
A combination of mystery, thriller and film noir, the film captured my attention from beginning to end. While it does have its own hiccups, it is still a well-done film from start to finish. Production values are high including some amazing visual effects, set pieces and a striking cinematography.
In the end though, the real assets to the film are Tom Cruise in a very polished performance and Steven Spielberg for his vision, ingenuity and creativity.
Minority Report rates (out of four).
~Edwin

 

[Dalton]

I'll keep it short because most of the things i liked were already described in some of the above reviews. I thought Cruise was great and the movie had excellent pacing. Didn't seem like 2hrs and 20 minutes. I give Minority Report :star: :star: :star: :star: out of :star: :star: :star: :star: :star: . A very enjoyable film.

 

[SteveGon]

Well, I wanted to like this movie. I won't go into detail as a lot of what I didn't like has already been discussed. I will however, echo one sentiment: the ending was TERRIBLE! Pretty much ruined the movie for me. How the hell could they do that to what could have been a classic SF film? Strange Days redux!
That aside, I did find the Precog scenario and the futuristic visuals interesting.
:star: :star: 1/2 out of :star: :star: :star: :star:

 

[Dean DeMass]

Finally saw MR yesterday and I was thouroughly impressed. Spielberg has always been my favorite director and he has again impressed me one more time. I loved A.I. and and had very high expectations after reading Ron's review. Every one of them were met. Like Mr. Crawford said earlier, I didn't have to check the watch one time and this was a 2 1/2 hour film. The film moved along at a very nice pace. Cruise's acting seems to be getting better and better with every film he choses. The man is picking some A+ films to work in and he is bringing his A game acting chops with him.
Everything else about the film has already been said, but I wanted to add one more. Spielberg's camera movements and choice of angles always impresses me. MR is no exception. There is one shot that is at the end of Anderton's and Burgess' conversation at Burgess' house that was fantastic ( I believe this was the scene). It was a simple camera movement, but it was just spectacular to see.
Minority Report, like A.I., really had me thinking about the morals of pre-crime and the use of the Precogs. For that, Minority Report gets :star: :star: :star: :star: out of :star: :star: :star: :star: .
Another Spielberg masterpiece.
-Dean-

 

[Stefan A]

I also liked this film (what I saw of it). What I want to comment on is the music used in it. I really liked the use of classical music in several scenes. It reminded me of Kubrick a little. I thought it fit in perfectly. On the other hand, I really didn't like John William's contribution. For me, his music is just not working anymore in movies. It just sounds like re-hashed scores from his previous movies. The same style. It really got in the way of me enjoying some of the chase scenes. It's as if for Steven Spielberg, using John Williams is a no-brainer. I think a bit more consideration should be taken.

But, maybe that's just me. I'm one of those guys who has a knack for identifying composers based on their style. Once you have heard enough of a certain composer's music, you start to recognize their style. Even though I don't find JW a particularly original composer, his style is still written all over it. In Minority Report, it just sounded used and old to me.

BTW, I had to leave the film about a half and hour before the end because of an allergy flare-up. I was starting to lose concentration (and enjoyment) of the film about an hour into it. It really sucks having allergies...REALLY. I may even go to see it in a $2 just to see the ending. Or, I could stick it out and wait for dvd. Any word on the DVD?

 

[Ernest Rister]

MINORITY REPORT
(d. Steven Spielberg; ph. Janusz Kaminski; scr. Scott Frank and Jon Cohen)
"You can choose."
-- Agatha (Smantha Morton), MINORITY REPORT
****
One of the reasons Steven Spielberg has been so effective as a storyteller is his ability to find a central idea or theme in a work, and focus on it, rather than becoming bogged down by a myriad parade of themes and ideas. It is precisely this focus that has caused sharp criticism from those who find his approach simplistic, no more so than his tendency to outline those ideas with a black magic marker, when the work speaks for itself.
If Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan have a shared flaw, it's their codas, where Spielberg dots his "i"s and crosses his "t"s to such a finite degree that no one could fail to grasp the idea he was trying to get across. In Schindler's List, the idea was the extraordinary value of a single human life. In Saving Private Ryan, the idea was that Americans should honor the sacrifice of the soldiers of WWII by making sure the present day America "earned" that sacrifice.
In both instances, Spielberg left little doubt to his point by having central characters actually come right out and bluntly state the theme of the film. From Schindler's breathless discovery that a little gold pin could potentially have saved another life ("One person...a person, Itzhak..."), to Captain Miller's dying words to an unborn generation ("Earn this"), the messages in Spielberg's latest films have not been hard to find. They have not been expressed as much as they have been downloaded.
And so, here again, in Minority Report, Spielberg's screnwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen find a way to sum up the theme of the drama in a single sentence, and they have no less than three characters re-iterate that theme in dialogue, which is, "You have a choice", "You can choose."
Minority Report covers much of the same ground dramtists have been exploring since the beginning of time -- from Sophocles' Oedipus Rex on up to pop films like Back to the Future...the question is -- are we trapped within our destinies, or do we have the wisdom to shape them for the better?
Sophocles didn't think we had a choice. In his Oedipus Rex, a man hears a prediciton that he will murder his father and marry his mother, and so he flees his home to avoid this fate, and in so doing, causes the chain of events that make that fate a reality. Oedipus loses his eyes along the way, a metaphor for the folly of trying to "see" his destiny. Tom Cruise's John Anderton will follow a similar path.
Modern Man isn't as humble before God as the Greeks, and therefore our recent works that explore the concept of fate take a more cheerful approach. Back to the Future's Marty McFly uses his knowledge of the Future to avoid his fate and shape it to his benefit. In Minority Report, John Anderton is baffled by the prediction handed down by three Oracles, and instead of running from it like the King of Thebes, or jumping through hoops to alter it like Marty McFly, John Anderton struggles to understand it. He doesn't run *from* it, he runs *to* it (the story is rather similar to the noir film D.O.A. in some respects...a man running to his doom).
This is not the Festival of Dionysus, however, and Modern Man believes they are not as confined to their fate as the Greeks believed, and so, Spielberg presents us with three characters who understand or come to understand the theme of the film..."You have a choice." We can control our fate. And all three state a variation on those words.
There's a reason this repetition does not come across as pedantic as the closing moments of Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. Well, actually -- there are two reasons -- the first is that it is undeniably comforting for us to hear that we're in control of our lives. Who doesn't like to hear that? The second reason is that the most powerful moments in Minority Report come when characters find themselves on the brink of fate, and they either step away from the abyss or dive right in.
All dramatic stories aim to illustrate some form of truth -- a drama is an argument with a thesis and an answer to that thesis. Even Sophocles ended Oedipus Rex with a concluding statement by a priest who puts the final stamp on the drama. It would be easy to fault Minority Report for continuing the Spielberg tradition of wrapping everything up in a tidy package, but these moments are so well-written, so well-staged, and so beatifully performed, they are ultimately no more offensive than a soliloquy from Tiresias or Antigone. They are not coming out of left field -- they are coming straight out of the drama of the moment.
Which leads us to an alarming question -- is Spielberg actually getting *better* as he matures? Some artists peak early, gaining instant fame with a single work (and Spielberg's own Jaws continues to stand among his best films). But unlike, say, Michael Cimino, or Peter Bogdanovich, Spielberg actually shares tendencies with his friend Martin Scorsese and his early role models like Hitchcock, in that he actually seems to be gaining in momentum as the years progress.
It is not a surprise that this new found rigor and creative stamina is coming from tackling increasingly difficult material. It is the no-brainers like The Lost World and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that now stand among Spielberg's least effective films, and for this reason, I stand with those who hope Indiana Jones 4 and Jurassic Park 4 are never made. Who needs another trip to that well, when Spielberg is clearly at his best when he's trying something new? He is at his worst when he's spinning his wheels on sequels like directing Last Crusade and The Lost World, and plotting out story notes on Jurassic Park 3. Throw something new at him, like Catch Me if You Can and Minority Report, and he continues to surprise.
In Minorty Report, you'll see the Spielberg from the early 80's firing on confident thrusters again, working within a new genre...sci-fi noir. Like James Cameron's Aliens (which found a new way to explore the War film), Minorty Report takes an old genre staple and breathes new life into it by combining Greek tragedy and 1940's detective noir with an all-too-familiar possible post-terror sci-fi future. Spielberg's trademark authority and choreography are back in a big way, and the resulting film is a joy to watch.
Tom Cruise plays John Anderton, a homicide detective and estranged husband who works in Washington D.C. for the Department of Pre-Crime. Working within a system that predicts homicide, Anderton and his co-workers have become so good at stopping murders before they happen that no homicide has been committed in Washington D.C. in years.
And then, one day, the psychic Oracles who forsee the murders make a new prediction -- Anderton himself will kill a man with pre-meditation, in less than 72 hours. Anderton's friends become his enemies and his enemies become his friends. He collaborates with the underworld he despises, and soon he comes to find himself at the homicidal brink so many of his "pre-crime" prisoners have reached.
There is a special moment in Minority Report where Tom Cruise reads a criminal his miranda rights. I will not say when or where this scene happens, but when it does, if you're not too invested in the moment, you may find yourself marvelling at how good Tom Cruise is in this film. The entire acting ensemble in Minority Report is superb, and what's shocking -- maybe even scandalous - is that it merely continues a streak of performances in Spielberg films passed over by the Academy. I could go on and on about many of the bravura moments of directorial choreography in Minority Report, from a dazzling unbroken shot of apartment dwellers being eye-scanned by robot spiders, to the single, simple two-shot of Cruise and Morton looking in opposite directions that has become the most famous shot of the film. But I won't dwell on such things at this time -- with each Spielberg review, I try to bring up something different and yet unversal to his work, and I think it is only fitting that with [/i]Minority Report[/i], we talk about the acting.
Consider for a moment that no actor has ever won an Academy Award for a performance in a Spielberg film. Not one. Many have been nominated, but even Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List lost - amazingly - to Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive (the excuse being that Tommy Lee was due for a body of work, while Ralph Fiennes had his whole career in front of him...rewarding excellence, or politics? Discuss amongst yourselves)
They say the definition of a great performance is that you cannot imagine anyone else in the same role. Ask yourselves which of the following actors you could replace in the roles they have appeared in -- Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, and Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws, Harrison Ford and Karen Allen in Raiders, Dee Wallace and the kids of E.T., Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover in The Color Purple, Christian Bale in Empire of the Sun, Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, and Ben Kingsley in Schindler's List, Jeff Goldblum and Richard Attenborough in the Jurassic Park films, Djimond Houndsou and Anthony Hopkins in Amistad, Tom Hanks and Jeremy Davies in Sacing Private Ryan, Haley Joel Osmet and Jude Law in A.I....and Tom Cruise and Samantha Morton in Minority Report. All of these are indelible benchmarks in modern film acting. Not a single Academy Award among them.
Spielberg can move his camera, he knows his lenses, he knows the language of film like Mozart knew the piano...and yet he also knows actors, and it is high time he has been recognized for his gift with his most important assets -- his on-screen human talents. Cruise has been nominated three times for an Academy Award, and he was shamefully overlooked for his incredible work in Rain Man. He deserved an Oscar nod for Minority Report.
All it takes to appreciate Spielberg's talent with actors is a hard look at the last half hour of the film, which includes maybe the most emotionally powerful reading of the United States miranda rights ever put to film, as well as a scene between two estranged parents that must have hit the divorce-sensitive Spielberg right where he lives. Divorce and parental tension haunt many of Spielberg's films, from Sugarland Express all the way up to Catch Me If You Can. The primary reason Spielberg's films may be so effective is that Spielberg has a gift for revealing a palpable sense of internal longing in a visual context -- he can show and demonstrate what a character feels, and in the process, he can also find a way to make us identify -- all through visuals. Spielberg's characters have hidden pains and private wishes. Isn't that the vast majority of modern Americans in a nutshell -- the longing and belief and wish for a better tomorrow, while we endure the pain of the moment? The struggle within modern realities, while we dream of tomorrow?
Minority Report is a noir / sci-fi / action film riff on a famous Greek tragedy, as well as a ripping good crime mystery. The fact that Spielberg can make such a film and still keep himself and his world view intact on so many levels, from the humanization of his antagonists on down to his ultimate optimism -- is no small feat and it should not be underestimated. I've heard some grumblings about eyeball scanners, some soft-pedaled sex and gore, and an undeniably optimistic ending, but there's no valid argument I've heard that can dispute a powerful fact -- Minority Report is a solid, inspired movie made by a man with extreme confidence in what he's doing. For some, it falls short. For me, it is unmistakably one of the highlights of the new century of American film, and one of the best films Steven Spielberg has ever made.
- ER3