Steven Spielberg’s crime-prediction thriller is tense, thoughtful and convincing about its future. Tom Cruise and Samantha Morton give it emotional weight, though the later plotting takes longer to explain than it should.
Minority Report is a persuasive, troubling science-fiction thriller, even when Steven Spielberg lets the chase run too long. Its premise asks how much power we would give the police if they could stop a crime before it happened. We know the attraction immediately, which is why the film does not need to make its future look openly monstrous. The useful machines and professional assurance do much of the persuading. Spielberg understands how an efficient service might make an appalling intrusion seem reasonable.
Alex McDowell’s production design makes the gadgetry look ready for everyday use, which helps sell the promise of a more orderly society. Janusz Kamiński’s photography gives the future a cold metallic sheen that makes it an uninviting place to spend time. The technology is interesting enough to distract us briefly from what it permits, and that distraction serves the story. We can admire the equipment while remaining uneasy about who gets to operate it.
Tom Cruise plays Chief John Anderton with a drive that keeps the ethical questions from turning into a discussion programme. He gives the pursuit an emotional pressure that physical exertion alone could not provide. The danger with a star-led chase is that concern for one man can crowd out concern for everyone subject to the same rules. Cruise’s intensity sometimes brings the film close to that, although his performance also makes its heavier passages worth staying with.
Samantha Morton, as Agatha, is crucial to the quieter side of the film. We were disturbed by the scenes involving the precogs, because the supposed benefit of predicting violence looks harder to defend when we attend to the people providing those predictions. Morton makes that concern immediate, without needing to compete with Cruise’s momentum. John Williams’s music gives the thriller urgency, though its insistence can make us wish for more space around the performances.
Michael Kahn’s editing handles the demands of the action confidently, and Spielberg rarely loses our attention within a sequence. The difficulty is the accumulation: at 145 minutes, the film keeps extending a pursuit whose underlying questions have already gripped us. The later plotting requires more explanation than it can absorb comfortably. The screenplay by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen becomes too occupied with getting its elaborate plot into order, and we begin to notice how much explaining remains to be done.
The film belongs to the chase thriller, but its interest in free will gives the running consequences beyond the next escape. We are asked to consider what guilt means when the relevant act has yet to occur, and how readily public safety can become an excuse for coercion. These are substantial questions for a film that also enjoys its gadgets this much. Spielberg makes room for them without treating the action as an obligation to be hurried through.
We recommend it for an evening when a thriller needs to offer something to argue about alongside the action. It rewards attention, but it does ask for patience with the later explanations. Leave time afterwards to disagree about how much certainty the police should be allowed to claim.
