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From The Goliard
Blog
Minority Opinion. I went to
see the film Minority Report this past week, and while I found it a
pleasant enough diversion, I must disagree with all the critics who
gave this film a rapturous reception. Minority Report is simply not
a four-star film, and here are a few reasons why. (WARNING: Plot
spoilers to follow.)
• Logical flaws: Any modern
high-tech movie thriller can be expected to have its share of
problems with logic and plausibility, but Minority Report has a plot
hole big enough to drive a giant eyeball through. I am speaking of
the iris-recognition devices that are everywhere in the movie's
world, controlling access and tracking just about everything that
people do. When Tom Cruise's character, John Anderton, is accused of
a future murder, and the entire Washington D.C.
"pre-crime" unit is chasing after him, you might think
that a) his access to sensitive installations would be cut off, and
b) any attempt of his to gain access to such places would allow the
police to instantly locate him (especially since they were able to
do just that when Anderton's eyes were scanned at subway
check-points). But no. Anderton is able to get into the most
sensitive part of pre-crime headquarters using his own eyeballs,
because no one has shut off his unlimited access to everything even
though he is wanted for murder; and what is more, the men who are
hunting him only notice that he has entered the extremely-sensitive
area when they spot him through a window.
There are a number of other, less
glaring problems as well. For instance, are we supposed to believe
that Anderton, a very smart policeman with an illegal drug habit
that must be kept secret to prevent his whole life from coming
crashing down, would be so stupid as to leave empty drug containers
strewn about his apartment in plain view for the Justice Department
man to find? And how about when Anderton's eyes are replaced, and
the underground surgeon warns repeatedly that if he takes the
bandages off in any less than twelve hours he will go blind? The
bandages are removed from, and a light is shined right into, at
least one of the eyes after only six hours, and the result is…what?
Is Anderton left blind in one eye? Was the surgeon wrong? We are
never told, and the little plot thread is just left hanging.
• Scenes that just don't work:
The end of the movie is full of such scenes (see below), but there
is also a standout offender earlier when Anderton pays a call on Dr.
Iris Hineman, who developed the pre-crime technology. Quite simply,
very little of what Dr. Hineman says or does in this scene makes
sense or is believable. (The same goes for the things she would have
to have done offscreen in preparation for this scene.) The total
effect is just too self-consciously weird.
• Over-elaborate technology: The
difference between a believable future world and an unbelievable one
often lies in the technology. In a believable future world, the
technology may be whiz-bang amazing, but it is also rarely more than
is necessary to accomplish the tasks that future people demand of
it. In an unbelievable future world, everything is high-tech, and
flamboyantly so, often for no better reason than that the movie's
art director figured out how to do it and thought it looked cool. In
your humble author's opinion, Minority Report was too often the
latter sort of film, starting with the strange business of the
wooden balls at the very beginning of the picture.
• Under-developed ideas: The
thought-provoking potential of Philip K. Dick's original idea of
"pre-crime"—that is, that the authorities might someday
develop the ability to arrest someone for a crime he has not yet
commited—is mostly wasted in Minority Report. An exploration of
the subtle contours of intentionality, malice, premeditation, "thoughtcrime",
guilt, and fate is forsaken for yet another spin on a familiar plot
line: mankind develops a promising new technology and implements it
with the best of intentions, but it winds up ruining lives as well
as improving them…at which point the technology's creators, who
have become corrupted by their Promethean ambition, try desperately
to cover up the failures and preserve their invention even at the
expense of humanity's well-being. Been there, done that, already
have the t-shirt. The "pre-cog" Agatha's exhortations to
Anderton that he "can still choose" his future could have
been the jumping-off point (or perhaps the culmination) of deeper
and much more original lines of inquiry, but instead they stand
alone, almost a signpost indicating that Steven Spielberg is willing
and able to take his examination of the human character this far but
no farther.
• Under-developed characters:
John Anderton lost his son and his wife and is therefore a man in
great pain. Check. He could have saved his son if
"pre-crime" investigation had been active at the time, and
therein lies his fervent commitment to his job. Check. Now what? It
is possible that if these aspects of Anderton had been more fully
and subtly developed, and if a few additional, smaller defining
details had been thrown in, Minority Report might have found itself
with a compelling and fully-realized main character. Alas, this did
not happen. Anderton's history is simply laid out in front of the
viewer, as if the bare facts—taken together with a scene where he
watches home movies while inhaling the crack cocaine of the 2050s—would
be enough to render him a three-dimensional movie hero. Not quite;
he only rises to the level of a two-and-a-half-dimensional cipher,
and this is not enough to make the viewer deeply sympathetic towards
him. I'm not sure I would go so far as to say Tom Cruise was wasted,
however—that would unduly flatter Cruise's acting abilities. It is
far more certain that the supporting cast was wasted: the role of
Lamar Burgess, for instance, compels Max von Sydow to play a stock
villain out of a penny-ante white-collar-crime melodrama, and he is
one of the lucky ones.
• Far-too-tidy ending: Even many
of Minority Report's boosters admitted disappointment at the film's
ending. Salon's review by David Edelstein pithily noted that
"the last 20 minutes…play more like a third-rate episode of
Murder, She Wrote than anything by Philip K. Dick". The final
reel steps wrong in more ways than I care to discuss here; I will,
however, note one problem that loomed particularly large in my mind.
It is this: once Anderton's former wife springs him from suspended
animation, everything that he then does is accepted, believed, and
taken at face value by everyone in the film's world. When a movie
hero has been wrongly convicted of a crime, certainly the viewer
expects that the character will find a way to clear his name; but it
is also expected that the hero will have to produce some sort of
evidence and persuade people that he is innocent. Anderton, by
contrast, appears to gain instant absolution of any and all crimes
he may have committed through the simple expedient of ruining
Burgess. Perhaps such an ending seemed just fine to James Carville,
but it did not sit well with me.
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