Minority Report: review

Tom Cruise as John Anderton

A 2002 science-fiction actioner directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise, Minority Report is a near-future tale about freedom versus predestination, societal intrusiveness and oppression, and survival versus self-sacrifice. It's based on a 1956 Philip K. Dick novella, The Minority Report. The film also stars Max von Sydow, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Neal McDonough, Patrick Kilpatrick (playing a heavy as usual), Lois Smith, Kathryn Morris, Tim Blake Nelson, Peter Stormare, and Mike Binder. This was my introduction to Colin Farrell, whom I casually thought to be American.

John Anderton (Cruise) is a neuroin-addicted cop in 2054. Six years earlier, his young son Sean was kidnapped and never found. Devastated and motivated by the loss of his son, John works with Lamar Burgess (von Sydow) to take an idea developed by the geneticist Dr. Iris Hineman (Smith) to create Precrime, a system that takes advantage of the clairvoyant gifts of three genetic mutants who are blessed or cursed with the ability to see future crimes, especially premeditated murders. Sudden crimes of passion are harder to predict. Precrime has gotten crime-prediction down to a science: the "precogs" have a vision that is transmitted to the officers, led by Anderton, who decipher the images' clues, then rush to the scene of the imminent murder in time to stop it from happening. As a direct result of this agency, crime in Washington, DC (where much of the story takes place) has dropped by 90%, with murders becoming so rare as to be almost nonexistent. But there are people who have trouble with the idea of arresting someone for a crime that hasn't been committed—among them is Agent Danny Witwer (Farrell), a young and ambitious Department of Justice functionary and former seminarian who sees flaws in the Precrime system and has grave philosophical misgivings about Precrime's role. Anderton, by contrast, is a believer in the system, so he and Witwer take an immediate dislike to each other. Lamar Burgess, the head of Precrime, is about to take the program to the national level, and as Precrime's nationalization is on the verge of coming to a vote, something happens to John Anderton.

What starts off as a routine Precrime case goes haywire when Anderton discovers, to his horror, that the precogs have named him as an imminent murderer of a man named Leo Crow (Binder), whom Anderton has never met. Immediately suspecting that he has been set up, Anderton evades attempts at arresting him and goes on a search that takes him to the residence of the now-reclusive Dr. Hineman, where he learns that, on occasion, the three precogs occasionally disagree in their visions of the future. Two of the precogs are male, but the strongest precog, Agatha (Morton), is usually the one to produce a minority report. Per Precrime policy, minority reports are generally purged to keep up the appearance of infallible predictive ability, maintaining trust in the Precrime system at the cost of total honesty. Anderton is desperate to find out whether a minority report exists for him, and Dr. Hineman confirms that, even if the record has been destroyed, Agatha still retains her own imprint of the future crime. Anderton must somehow infiltrate Precrime headquarters, kidnap Agatha, and persuade her to give him her alternate visions—assuming she does, in fact, possess a minority report in her head. Infiltration of Precrime will be a messy business: the world of 2054 is one of total dominance by both a governmental surveillance state and utterly intrusive corporations that use your personal data to target their marketing right at you. (Sound familiar?) Much of this is done by an advanced form of ubiquitous retinal and facial scanning, so Anderton realizes he will have to switch out his eyes and alter his face to be able to go anywhere without being scanned and identified. How far does the mystery of the setup go? Does Anderton end up killing Leo Crow? Does he succeed in extracting Agatha and acquiring his own minority report? Who, ultimately, is the person who set Anderton up, and why?

Minority Report doesn't lack for action, mystery, thrills, dystopian futurism, and philosophical questions about fate and freedom. Coming hard on the heels of Spielberg's unsuccessful 2001 A.I., this much more successful 2002 effort features magnetic cars; newspapers and cereal boxes covered in marketing-driven animated imagery; creepy eye-replacement surgery in filthy conditions; modern, engineered drugs; and a futuristic Washington, DC that combines grimy retro architecture ("the Sprawl") with sleek, futuristic home designs. A kind of rudimentary, not-quite-3D holographic tech serves as entertainment, but there are still recognizable elements of our era's civilization, such as huge department stores and, out in the countryside, quiet farmhouses. Minority Report succeeds with its washed-out, futuristic visuals; nifty sci-fi gadgets (wouldn't we all want a sonic shotgun?); fast pace; and the emotional motivations of its main character.

But the movie fails on multiple levels—something I either didn't see the last time I saw this film years ago or just didn't remember. On the basic, superficial level, there's the problem of Spielberg's perennially sloppy "movie logic," which takes away the seriousness of scenes that could have been more impactful had they been scripted better. Why do the precogs, who are a hive mind when together, occasionally sink under the water of the pool they're lying in ("the Temple")? How does Anderton, during a chase scene, manage to survive the car-assembly factory without getting entombed inside the car he's hiding in while it's being assembled by robots? Where are the assembly line's guards? More importantly, how is Anderton able to use his original eyes—now in a Ziploc bag after his eye-switching surgery—to penetrate Precrime's eye-scan security? Wouldn't Precrime have locked him out as persona non grata the moment he became a suspect? Even Anderton's ex-wife (Morris) uses Anderton's eyes to break into a detention center to rescue her ex-husband. None of this should be possible. At the detention center, which is run by the organ-playing guard Gideon (Nelson), the prisoners are held in a dreamlike state of suspension similar to a coma, unable to move and trapped with their own thoughts while Gideon plays his organ to soothe them (and why are they standing?). When Anderton first visits Gideon as a non-prisoner, Gideon guides Anderton to a particular killer who had supposedly murdered a woman named Ann Lively (Jessica Harper). What struck me about this scene was the unnecessary bizarreness of it: To access the relevant prisoner, Gideon and Anderton telescope out on a gantry that moves among the prisoners, who are stored in vertical columns that can move up and down, obligingly dodging out of the way, like a slow-motion game of Whack-a-Mole, as the gantry moves in and swings from side to side. While this spectacle looks very pretty, it's strikes me as utterly unnecessary: why not just go directly to the prisoner in question? Why wade through an undulating sea of prisoners to get to him (see the scene here; ignore the added music)?

But Minority Report, despite its timely warnings about rampant corporatism and government intrusiveness, fails on a much deeper level: It fails in its exploration of the philosophical question of fate and freedom. Freedom and foreknowledge cannot coexist: If you know—in the rigorous, philosophical sense of know, i.e., know infallibly—that some future event is going to occur, then that's possible only because the future event is already there to be known. This is what is known as the B-theory of time ("block theory"). When knowledge is diagrammed out, there's the knower, the act of knowing, and the thing known. If you're able to change the "outcome" of what you think you know, then that outcome was never predestined. 

The movie uses a kind of visual shorthand to demonstrate its own Precrime-justifying logic: Anderton rolls a ball along a curving console toward Witwer. When the ball reaches the edge of the console and is about to drop to the floor, Witwer catches it. John asks why Witwer caught the ball. 

Witwer: Because it was gonna fall.
Anderton: You're certain?
Witwer: Yeah.
Anderton: But it didn't fall. You caught it. The fact that you prevented it from happening doesn't change the fact that it was going to happen.

Do you see the flaw in Anderton's logic? The ball didn't fall, which already means there is no fact that [the fall] was going to happen. Witwer was there to catch the ball. Later in the movie, Agatha tells Anderton, "You always have a choice," something that Anderton later tells his boss Lamar. Precrime assumes a kind of metaphysical determinism that is necessary for citizens to believe that Precrime truly possesses reliable predictive power. As Witwer suggests, though, there's a paradox in claiming to be able to prevent the inevitable.

The movie ultimately agrees with my above argument, and it sides against this smug version of "early" Anderton and with the cause of human freedom. And the fact that the precogs can have alternate visions of the future means that the future isn't set. So it goes back to Yoda's wisdom: Always in motion is the future. This ties back into an idea that I have seen over and over again in books and movies, and which I've talked about in many previous reviews: Evil entities always talk and think in terms of destiny, inevitability, and inescapable outcomes; good characters always talk and think in terms of choice, freedom, and open futures. The idea that You can alter your destiny is incoherent: if you can alter your future states, then you don't have a destiny. By definition, a destiny is inalterable. Applied to Minority Report, this way of thinking about good and evil means that Precrime's emphasis on metaphysical inevitability makes it an evil entity.

As a result of all of these superficial and deep problems, I enjoyed Minority Report a lot less, this time, than I did on previous viewings. In many ways, it's still a "good enough" movie: well acted, bleakly color graded, creepily dystopian (we're living that future now), and disturbingly prescient in its extrapolation of certain economical and governmental trends into the near future. But the sloppy way in which the movie handles details and plot logic and the deeper ways in which the movie fails to grapple properly with the philosophical questions it seemingly faces mean that Minority Report, which I used to think of as an awesome film, is merely a good film—and good only for people uninterested in deeper questions of fate, freedom, and Orwellian trends. Even by the end of the story, the larger oppressive society in which Anderton lives hasn't been undone by the story's events. I've even seen fan theories speculating that the movie's conclusion, which bizarrely includes an out-of-nowhere voiceover narration by Anderton, is at best an illusion: Perhaps Anderton is still trapped in prison, living out a fantasy while in an induced coma. If that's true, then I have to tip my hat to Spielberg for being even darker than I ever imagined he could be. Years ago, Minority Report would have gotten an enthusiastic thumbs-up from me. Now, at best, it gets a thumbs-sideways.