Minority Report: The Future of Police Work

Hello everybody, today we have the dystopian police film Minority Report.

MINORITY REPORT

DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg

STARRING:  Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Max von Sydow

GENRE: Neo-Noir, Science Fiction

YEAR: 2002

COUNTRY: United States

In the year 2054 A.D. crime is virtually eliminated from Washington D.C. thanks to an elite law enforcing squad “Precrime”. They use three gifted humans (called “Pre-Cogs”) with special powers to see into the future and predict crimes beforehand. John Anderton heads Precrime and believes the system’s flawlessness steadfastly. However one day the Pre-Cogs predict that Anderton will commit a murder himself in the next 36 hours. Worse, Anderton doesn’t even know the victim. He decides to get to the mystery’s core by finding out the ‘minority report’ which means the prediction of the female Pre-Cog Agatha that “might” tell a different story and prove Anderton innocent.

Let me just say this right now, Tom Cruise is a great action star (most of the time). Minority Report is an interesting dystopian future where the police force has “oracles” that can predict future crimes. This allows police to arrest perpetrators for future crimes. Tom Cruise does a decent job as a futuristic cop, even though his character seems quite similar to his Ethan Hunt character from the Mission:Impossible series. The setting and general theme is appealing to me too, which I am happy about. I have seen too many dystopian future films to be disappointed by one of the supposed better ones. It definitely wasn’t too poorly written and that was a major plus!

The problem I have with these kinds of films is that they hardly ever actually play by their own rules. Besides all of the various glaring plot holes, Minority Report constantly breaks its own rules that it created. For instance, the film makes it clear that since Pre-Crime was instituted 6 years ago, there has been a 90 percent drop in murder. Five minutes later a cop turns around and says that there hasn’t been a murder in 6 years. What happened to that 10 percent?? Director Steven Spielberg’s strength, beyond his amazing showmanship, has always been his ability to cut straight to the heart of his characters and his audience. Many of his characters are very poorly developed, which is quite unfortunate.

PROS:

• Dystopian future done right.
• Decently written.
• Tom Cruise performance.

CONS:

• Plot holes.
• Breaks rules of its own universe.
• Lack of Steven Spielberg soul.
• Poor character development.

SCORE: 7.2 / 10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH-6UImAP7c

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