Force Fed Films: "Minority Report" (2002)

To help me catch up with some of the movies I should have watch but never did, Jim got me to watch “Minority Report”.  It features Tom Cruise before he went coo-coo for Katie Holmes. But I still have much respect for the guy, namely for his role in “Top Gun”, the “Mission Impossible” series and “Jerry Maguire”. All I really knew about this movie before going into it was that Cruise does these cool gestures on a glass pane that makes images move. Hopefully this movie is just more than eye candy, after the jump I retell what this movie has to offer.

In the near future, the homicide rate in Washington D.C is nearly 0. This is all thanks to the ‘Precrime’ law force. The force uses three gifted humans, Pre-Cogs who predict the future, to help them stop murders before they happen. Agent John Anderton (Cruise) is head leader of this force and is a true believer that this system has no flaws. But not everyone is a believer; Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) is the lead investigator trying to see if the Precrime force is the real deal or just a scam and if it is ethical. Just as John is being questioned, he finds out that the Pre-Cogs predict that he will kill someone in 36 hours. But to his confusion he kills someone he doesn’t even know. He needs to find the ‘Minority Report’, a special memory in one of the Pre-Cogs that can prove his innocence. Is the system flawed or is John a murder?

|Both Cruise and Farrell put a great performance.

Besides Cruise putting on a good performance, I think who I really enjoyed watching was Colin Farrell. Even though he lacked the screen time, I thought he was the perfect cat to Cruise’s mouse. And it was great to see Max von Sydow, he has never let me down when playing a leading role. These three really bring their respected characters to life. And when the characters and acting are good, this just helps out the story even more so.

This leads me to the hook; the hook is obviously the weird futuristic problem that goes with predicting the future. The agents can stop the murders before it happens and arrest them for going forward with that plan. Now most countries do have laws for ‘attempt of murder’ but at this point the suspect has admitted the full plan to the authorities. Is it right to arrest someone because a few predictions saw they are going to do so? Does that mean we all have a pre-destined future and have no sake of freedom? And this illusion of freedom we perceive just shutters that blind us from the truth? Because later on in the movie, there are some weird scenarios but I won’t spoil them for the few that haven’t seen it.

The cool touchless computers are the new wave of technology, and it's pretty.

Now I don’t really want to get all philosophical, I think the movie handles the paradoxes rather well. It is neat to see a future with all these problems we don’t see right now. And what really got me scratching my head was the mystery. I really liked this part of the movie, it was involving more times than not. I was always surprised when led around another corner of the movie. It kept me on the edge of my seat and I find it rare that movies do that now a days. The twist was rather … spirally.

To end it off, the movie is a cool glimpse into the future. I don’t know if we will ever get the problems of the illusion of freedom anytime soon. But I do fear that automatic self-driving cars will take over the near future. Spielberg truly made a mind tingling movie entertaining, with much help from the actors. And I didn’t talk about the cool special effects of the movie, but to cut it short it was easy on the eyes.