Minority Report (2002)
Minority Report (2002)
1. The first introduction: Spielberg vs Verhoeven
There’s a line in Andrew O'Hehir’s article on of this film, “Meet Steven Spielberg, Hardboiled Cynic,” that made me laugh:
“If you really want to be cynical, you might call this the best Paul Verhoeven film since ‘Starship Troopers.’"
You see, O’Hehir hit the nail-on-the-head and he didn’t even half know it. One of the oddest bits of trivia about this film, but one that that’s illuminating, is that it wasn’t supposed to be a stand-alone film. It was originally supposed to be a sequel to a film by Director Verhoeven, but not the one mentioned above, instead “Total Recall” (1990). Had it been a sequel, Verhoeven might have Directed, but because it wasn’t, and it went to Spielberg with everything tuning out different.
“Total Recall” was loosely based on the Phillip K. Dick short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (1966). A plot element in the film but not the original story was Psychic Mutants. The idea was to follow up on that idea, and have those Mutants enslaved by authorities who use their precognitive ability to solve crimes before they were committed, called the Pre-Crime division. The sequel would be adapted from a second Dick short story, “Minority Report” (1959).
That envisioning of the project goes back to 1992, but the idea of a sequel was apparently dropped when an early version of the script by Jon Cohen was presented to Director Steven Spielberg and Actor Tom Cruise in 1997. Those two had been friends for more than a decade and looking for a project to collaborate on. Rewrites were demanded to bring Cohen’s Script up to the point that Spielberg thought it was film-able, and then there were issues regarding Cruise’s over-booked schedule, delaying the project for years. Each delay was put to good use though, Scriptwriter Scott Frank was added to the team and Spielberg supervised the accumulating changes. The plot of Cohen’s early version was already removed from the original Dick story and became even more so as the ideas continued to percolate.
An important difference between Spielberg’s and Verhoeven’s style of filmmaking is Spielberg’s commitment to encouraging compassion for the Characters, and that proves key to this movie. Though O’Hehir rightly sees this as Spielberg’s most cynical film, it still asks us to be compassionate towards Authorities serving an unjust System and lying to themselves about the System’s virtues. In this film, only the Villain seems honest with himself enough to understand the system’s corruption and takes gleeful pleasure in exploiting the lies that only he can see. I can confidently speculate that this is a much better film than the one that never made for that very reason.
Don’t get me wrong, Verhoeven is a hell of a director. He has proven he can build complex worlds, stage-manage complex action, clarify complex plots, but he’s also proven he lacks the sensitivity to communicate the human consequences of many of those complex ideas. I’m sure he’s a nice person in real life, but films leave me with the impression that his cynicism is less a product of enraged moralism than it is a reaction to his own self-contradictions. He’s become extremely wealthy making mega-budget exploitation blockbusters that rage against capitalistic exploitation; his feminist-themed satire, “Showgirls” (1995), was demeaning of women (as well as not funny); and his satire on the seductions of fascism, “Starship Troopers” (1997), proved to be the bluntest piece of fascist propaganda of its decade (as well as not funny).
2. The second introduction: Echoes in Reality
Both the original story and the final film had two key themes: The first was Political -- that abusive Systems are obligated to be perfect to justify themselves, and when they are not, they are obligated to lie to themselves about their imperfections. The second was more Spiritual -- the conflict between determinism and free will.
The original story favored the Political while the film favored the Spiritual. Surprisingly to me, the Political themes proved the harder to communicate in what is essentially a Crime Thriller than the Spiritual, so the film ultimately proved not only much different, but far superior to, the original story.
Before I get to everything I loved in this film, I want to address my disappointment in the failure to focus on the Political: I’m from New York City, and the same year this film came out, my city instituted a controversial policy that eerily echoed the film's SF devise of "Pre-Crime."
All Police forces in the USA engage in what’s called “Terry Stops” (from the Supreme Court case “Terry vs Ohio” (1968)), basically stopping and questioning someone not necessarily suspected of a crime, but Officers acting on their instincts when observing the person. Many places have policies to assure Terry Stops are limited in number, or limit what the Officer is permitted to do during these stops, but NYC changed its policies to expand the Officer’s power to engage, what the Officer could do, and finally set quotas demanding more of them; this became to be known as “Stop and Frisk.”
The idea was mostly about reducing gun-crime and the hope was that it would be a prophylactic: as Criminals became aware that they could, later inevitably would, be Stopped-and-Frisked, they’d stop carrying guns around, and therefore not use them on the streets. It was an extension of 18th c. English Philosopher and Social Theorist Jeremy Bentham’s idea of a “panopticon,” a concept in Prison design wherein all Prisoners could be observed by a single Correction Officer. Although it is physically impossible for a single Officer to observe all the Inmates at once, the Inmates can’t know when they are being watched or not, and this was supposed to motivate them to act as though they are being watched at all times. Given that goal, Stop-and-Frisk was only encouraged, later insisted upon, in “Hot Spots,” meaning High Crime neighborhoods.
It seemed to be working. Stop-and-Frisk was an official policy from 2002 through 2013. During that time, NYPD seized well more than 500 illegal firearms through the program and NYC’s Homicide rate dropped to breath-taking historic lows.
But the problems were painfully obvious too. For Stop-and-Frisk to work, it had to be broad-based, so the number of them increased until 2011 (then NYPD backed off a little because of low Crime and increasing Public Pressure). It was a given meant the wholly innocent needed to be Stopped-and-Frisked (that’s where the quotas come in) or the whole prophylactic part wasn’t going to happen, because what good is a condom if you don't wear it? Depending on the year, there were 97,296 to 685,724 Stop-and-Frisks recorded. Police doing this to a Innocent person is rightfully viewed as Harassment and, over-all, less than 12% of the Stop-and-Frisks resulted in arrest, which translated into tens to hundreds of thousands of Innocents Harassed. (There’s an irony here, the years that recorded the fewest Stop-and-Frisks also recorded the highest percentage of arrests but arrests never made it up even 20% of any year’s total.)
As High Crime neighborhoods were the only places with quotas, and these were generally Minority neighborhoods, there was built-in racial profiling. About 70% of all Stop-and-Frisks being done on Blacks and Latinos even though they are only about 50% of the NYC's population.
There was also age profiling, because Police almost never stopped-and-frisked the middle-aged or elderly.
Worse still, even though this was supposed to be about gun crime, Police were pressured to make all possible arrests that the Frisk warranted, so most of the Stop-and-Frisk arrests made were not for guns, but minor crimes like Possession of a Marijuana cigarette. In NYC Blacks were 4.2 times more likely to be arrested for Marijuana possession than Whites even though no one believes Blacks smoke it more than Whites, and though these were generally treated as sub-Criminal violations by the courts, they were still part of one’s permanent record, so the arrest could have life-long impact.
Most New Yorkers understood everything in the last four paragraphs. Many (most?) thought that the minor Harassment of the Innocent was an acceptable trade-off for a lower Homicide rate, but very likely those accepting the trade-off were those who were never going to get Stop-and-Frisked anyway, because they were too White, too old, and/or not in living in a Hot Spot (basically, people like me).
Stop-and-Frisk ended in 2013 when a Federal Court Judge deemed it un-Constitutional. Many of us feared a spike in Homicides. There wasn’t. In fact, during 2014 the Homicide rate actually went down. And it did the next year. And the year after that. Finally, we realized then that we never really understood why the Homicide rate dropped between 2002 and 2013 in the first place, only that it wasn’t because of Stop-and-Frisk. Simply put, since Stop-and-Frisk wasn’t saving lives, we were Harassing all those Innocent people for nothing.
In retrospect, the failure of Stop-and-Frisk should’ve been foreseen. What Homicides was it designed to deter? Gun homicides. What kind of gun homicides? Those outside the killer’s own home, requiring the killer to transport the gun from one place to another. Stop-and-Frisk could only, potentially, inhibit impulsive shootings on the street or gang-related shootings, and those were only a tiny percentage of the Homicides in NYC in 2001, the year before the policy was initiated.
Like I said earlier, Abusive Systems are obligated to be perfect to justify themselves, and when they are not, they are obligated to lie to themselves about their imperfections.
In the USA, other seemingly “Pre-Crime” Criminal Justice tactics have been recommended, and implemented, both before and after, Stop-and-Frisk. They often extend from an undeniable truism, that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, and often the policies are obviously reasonable, like longer sentences for Recidivists than First Offenders. Some involve intensive Covert Surveillance of those whose history indicate they will again commit Crime, which sounds logical, but even that could encourage scandal.
Since 1965 the Los Angeles Police Department has an elite unit called Special Investigations Section which is famous for Surveilling high-risk Recidivists, especially Robbers and Burglars. Predictably, many of the Surveillance targets do return to Crime, and ironically, the biggest scandal to beset the SIS unit was the least “Pre-Crime” thing about it: In 1988 it was revealed that SIS had developed a practice of standing-by during Criminal activities, when citizens were being Victimized and/or put at risk, and only apprehending suspects as they left the scene. Though not stopping the crime that they had successfully predicted seems counter-intuitive but then-Commander of SIS, Capt. Dennis Conte, explained, "Public safety is a concern, but we have to look beyond that because if we arrest someone for attempt, the likelihood of a conviction is not great."
This was a controversial statement, as was the fact that the usually twenty-member team racked up twenty-eight Suspect kills between 1965 and 1992, an extraordinarily high number, though it must be said, SIS was specifically designed to focus on more-dangerous-than-average Suspects.
The most disturbing Real-World example of I’ve read of was never realized. Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker was a renowned Internist and Psychiatrist who was elevated to Advisor to President Richard Nixon regarding the nation’s Child-Care Polices. He famously championed Daycare for preschool children in low-income neighborhoods. But he also became infamous after a memo that he wrote became public, it he recommended running of mass tests for "pre-delinquency" and putting the poorly-scoring juveniles in "camps" for rehabilitation. It should also be pointed out that Hutschnecker was a refugee from Nazi Germany and a vocal critic of Hitler.
3. The Plot
The year is 2054. Washington DC has been conducting the most radical Criminal Justice experiment in this Nation’s history. The Constitutional issues it raises are terrifying, but its undeniable success is so breath-taking that the media pundits rarely even argued it anymore and there are plans to expand it Nationwide.
Three Mutants called Precogs have a miraculous gift, they can see Murders before they take place. (Amusingly, they are named after famous Mystery Writers, Arthur (as in Conan Doyle), Dash (as in Hammett) and Agatha (as in Christie).) If the Murder is premeditated, they can see farther into the future than if it was impulsive, but as they transmit all their visual information to a TV screen, even given the short-lead time of an impulse Killing (as most real-life Murders are) the dedicated Cops at Pre-Crime, a division of the Metropolitan Police Department, can see the face of the Killer, the Victim, and the location. If the Cops can interpret the information fast and accurately enough, they can make an arrest before anyone dies. An early scene demonstrating this process is pulse-pounding.
An important plot point is that this only works for Murder, not embezzlement, robbery, simple assault or rape. The SF explanation for this is bogus but speaks to the film’s spiritual themes: human lives are so precious that its violent erasure causes a ripple in the Space/Time Continuum like nothing else.
The Killer-who-has-not-Killed-yet is then sentenced to indefinite Suspended Animation. They seemed to be denied the Right to a Trial. And all of the almost-Killers get the exact same sentence.
The Washington DC setting is significant for two real world reasons:
First, DC’s relationship with the Federal Court system is a little odd, and Civil Libertarians can win, or lose, major battles there that the rest of the country will blighty ignore until when, or if, the Supreme Court steps in, and sometimes this requires not one, but two trips to the Supreme Court. Perhaps in this world, the Supreme Court hasn’t gotten around to this case yet, and if so, they’re sure taking their time. It seems being a domestic Criminal in Suspended Animation is a lot like being a foreign Terrorist held without trail at Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp which, like Stop-and Frisk, was established the same year this film came out. The movie doesn’t go into any of that, but I thought you'd like to know.
The film does spell out the second reason more clearly. Real-world Washington DC is one of the USA’s most Violent Cities. Those years that it isn’t this Nation’s Murder capital, it never drops below second or third place. But it this movie’s 2054, the Murder rate is zero, and has been for the previous six years.
As it says in the film’s dialogue, "That which keeps us safe, will also keep us free." So, the choice is explicit, Due Process for those not Guilty yet, but undeniably Dangerous vs. total safety for the Good Citizens. Which side would of this trade off would you pick?
Our hero is Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise). He has saved many lives over the last few years, and his Faith in the System is absolute. That faith is not only born of professional experience, but a way of coping with what haunts him most: Before Pre-Crime existed, his son was kidnapped and believed murdered in a crime that remains unsolved. Among the fall-out of that tragedy was his marriage crumbled and he developed a carefully disguised drug dependency.
Then comes the terrible day where John’s watching the monitors of the Precogs’ thoughts and sees himself Murder a man he doesn’t even know. From that moment on, he’s a Fugitive, desperate to do too many things at the same time: not get caught, clear his name for a Crime that hasn’t happened yet, and save the Victim even though he doesn’t a clue who that person might be.
The key to John clearing himself initially seems to be what’s called a “Minority Report,” a rare occurrence where the three Precogs don’t see exactly the same thing. These are dismissed, filed, and forgotten, because to worry too much about them would be to question the System’s perfection, "The Pre-Cogs are never wrong, [but] sometimes they disagree." The Minority Report, which suggests that time is mutable and alternative futures are possible, is central to the original short story. Here, it proves a McGuffin, John chases it for the whole film, but it is only of limited consequence to the resolution.
What does prove important is when, in desperation, John Kidnaps one of the Precogs, Agatha Lively (Samantha Morton). This shuts down the System and changes the trajectory of the plot. It also rearranges allegiances, because Agatha was the system’s Slave (though her keepers were aggressively, willfully, ignoring that obvious fact), so she instantly sides with her Kidnapper because she knows the fugitive Cop is her only chance at Freedom.
John’s antagonist is Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) from the Federal Department of Justice. Even before John became a Fugitive, the two disliked each other on sight because if Pre-Crime goes National, its jurisdiction will become Federal, and Danny might be able to push John out of his job. While on the run, John is sure Danny is framing him, but the audience recognizes that is improbable. Danny proves an honest and intelligent Cop, lacking John’s unquestioning faith in Pre-Crime, but drawn to it like moth to flame. Danny’s an ex-Seminarian, uncomfortable with, but fascinated by, how Pre-Crime is becoming more and more like a Religion as the Precogs become "deified" because they imply "hope of the existence of the divine," making the Pre-Crime division, "more like clergy than cops." Because Danny gets closest to the Truth the fastest, he suffers a Martyr’s fate.
Meanwhile, John knows when this killing is supposed to take place, 36 hours after the Precogs first sensed it, but not who or where. The clock is ticking, and when time finally does run out, John discovers that everything he did to free himself merely tightened the noose around his neck.
And even when that shocker arrives, the movie’s not quite over.
4. Cast
This is a complicated plot, not as twisty as the original short story, but still plenty so. Before I move on to the impressive making of this film, let me address the cast, because given all the story mechanics, it was this flawless bunch of Thespians that made it worth it to the audience to pay attention sort out all the details.
Tom Cruise is probably the world’s most popular Action Hero, but an Actor of substance as well. His best performances are generally when he’s cast most against type (“Rain Man” (1988), “Born of the Fourth of July” (1989), “Interview with a Vampire” (1994), “Jerry Maguire” (1996), and “Vanilla Sky” (2001)). Here he got a rare opportunity to merge his two career identities. John has a more-than-passing similarity to Cruise’s character in the “Mission Impossible” series (first film 1996) but many times better written. Also, though the film exploits Cruise’ athleticism (as well as that of his stunt doubles and CGI) we are repeatedly reminded John is no Super Hero; he loses fights, fumbles, fails, and makes some really bad decisions because he’s blinded by panic and other, more deeply seated, emotions.
Colin Farrell, as the mouthpiece of the film’s more abstract concepts, is stuck with the most difficult part and he really bites into it. His Danny is as professionally focused as John but torn by inner doubt. He’s not allowed to be as appealing as our hero, but Farrell makes the exposition he is forced to spew an expression of inner turmoil, not a speechifying laundry list.
Samantha Morton gives the film’s finest performance as Agatha, moving from a cypher to the strongest Character with flawless grace. Beautiful and a bit strange looking, she is both alien and deeply human in the same gesture. There are moments where she projects things so emotionally raw, you will be stunned.
Then there are all the excellent cast members I didn’t mention above, because I was trying to keep this simple:
Max von Sydow had reached an enviable point in his career wherein he was consistently hired for small, but highly visible, roles in films focused on Characters young enough to be his children or grandchildren. His job was usually the lending of Gravitas. Here we have a film with actual Gravitas, and he plays John’s boss, Director Lamar Burgess, trying to defend the System from outsiders like Danny. He could not be more perfectly cast.
Neal McDonough is John’s colleague and best friend, Gordon "Fletch" Fletcher. Like all other members of Pre-Crime, he’s a True Believer. Then he expected to assist Danny in arresting John, and he hates it, but True Believers do as True Believers do.
Kathryn Morris gives a strong performance as Lara Anderton, John’s estranged wife. It surprised me she wasn’t singled out in most of the reviews of this film I’ve read, but then this is a movie with a lot of Characters. Her importance is mostly in the third act, when the film pulls off its most surprising twist -- but it’s not a plot twist this time, it regards character focus. That shift was heralded by…
Lois Smith as Dr. Iris Hineman. She gets only one scene in which she provides essential exposition, she knows more about what the Precogs are and how they came to be than anyone else. This is made captivating because the Actress displays such wonderfully wry humor. Hineman also pontificates some feminist pomposities which prove to be fore shadowing because her arrival marks the point in the film where John ceases to be the main Hero and Agatha and Lara take over.
Peter Stormare is Dr. Solomon P. Eddie. He also gets only one scene. Sinister and funny, he’s a Criminal the John needs to turn to while on the run. I’ll get into this more later, let’s just say now, Solomon takes real relish in cutting John’s eyeballs out to further the cause of dissidence.
5. Execution
One way that Director Spielberg did borrow from Direcotr Verhoeven was the remarkable immersion we get in this future. Verhoeven best displayed this in “Robocop” (1987) and “Total Recall.” Before this film, Verhoeven’s eye for the kind of details that lent verisimilitude was surpassed only by Director Ridley Scott in “Blade Runner” (1982, and based on yet another Dick, “Do Android Dream of Electronic Sleep?” (1968)). Verhoeven not only gave us futures that were as lived-in as Scott’s, but more livable. To surpass Verhoeven’s achievement, Spielberg had a bigger budget and more advanced FX, but his real luxury was more time.
Spielberg spent the years of delay in Production reaching out to Scientists and Engineers, picking their brains about what the Near-Future might actually look like and do. He contrasted currently impossible technologies and with already one-hundred-year-old suburban houses and comfortable, contemporary clothes. Spielberg astounds us with stuff that is imaginary now, but we just know will be in a Sharper Image catalogue real soon. He's preceptive enough to realize that the people in the Future will treat all that stuff is as casually ubiquitous as cell phones are today: voice activated lights and appliances, cereal boxes crawling with animations, a thoughtlessly accepted total Surveillance State that goes so far that casual retina scans of pedestrians present personalized commercials flashing before them, Jet Packs, and cars that don’t exactly fly (too improbable) but are no longer earthbound. The first arrest in the film shows John wearing Data Gloves, manipulating Computer-generated images floating in mid-air, coolly, but quickly, examining evidence with the gestures of a symphony Conductor, which proves a hell of a lot faster than anyone could flip through paper files.
We are now blessed with a cinema where visualizing literally any impossibility is possible and integrating a live human into that image is probable. We are also cursed because these gifts have created a lazy reliance on eye-candy and Filmmakers not fully appreciating the fact that though CGI can do more, it isn’t any easier to pull off than the practical effects of the past.
“Minority Report” was released the same year as Director Sam Rami’s very fine “Spiderman,” but the latter’s very expensive, high—quality, CGI looked odd when compared to the superior scenes with real actors. That was also the year of Director George Lucas’ “Star Wars: Episode II, the Attack of the Clones,” where Lucas’ reliance on CGI was technically flawless, but failed in a different way, as it distanced the Actors from the action they were involved in and his top-shelf cast was mostly terrible.
Here, the CGI is blended seamlessly with the live-action shots. To the eye, it is impossible to tell where the post-production effects end and the practical begin. More importantly, Spielberg never loses sight of the fact that his film is peopled, so neither does his Cast.
Some scenes are almost all CGI. John escapes a car that he no longer controls, and leaps from moving vehicle to moving vehicle, all of them speeding along the face of a skyscraper, so a completely vertical incline. That’s great eye-candy.
Better still, this faux-reality is indistinguishable from the no-FX scene wherein John and Agatha race through a mall being pursued by Cops. As Agatha can see the future, she coaches John’s every move to evade his Pursuers. It’s suspenseful and witty, but it also brings the story’s themes home. When Agatha tells John to throw some coins to a beggar, and the beggar bends over to pick them up, he trips a Cop, and thereby demonstrating that the Future can be altered.
This is key and is returned to in the scene when John confronts the man that he’s supposed to either Save or Kill. Now the idea is explicated: Is it possible that the act of accusing someone of a Murder could begin a chain of events that leads to the Murder? The whodunnit (who will do it) suddenly becomes a whydunnit (why will he do it or not).
It is understood that Spielberg is Director Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest living Student. Spielberg absorbed techniques, which he’s quite open about, but only occasionally does Suspense films, and almost never executes overt homages. Other Directors, like Dario Argento and Brian DePalma, have built their careers on explicitly demonstrating which Teacher they loved the most.
One thing explicitly Hitchcockian about this film is its fear our Authority and the plight of the man on the run. Hitchcock's take on these themes was a little different than many other Filmmakers, because Hitchcock was deeply Catholic and his films were infused with a sense of Original Sin -- wrongful Accusations were generally reflections of some other shameful, but lesser Sin. That idea is here more than any other Spielberg film.
On top of that, and maybe for the first time, Spielberg does offer us an explicit Hitchcock homage, though ironically it is based on a scene Hitchcock never shot. Hitchcock planned an elaborate dolly-shot along an automobile assembly line for the movie, “North by Northwest” (1959), but his Scriptwriter, Ernest Lehman, couldn’t figure out how to fit it into the story, so it was dropped. Spielberg made a variation on that scene a part of one of the chases -- the Robots in the factory blindly construct a vehicle around the fleeing John, and then he drives it away.
There’s a near-identical scene in that year’s “Star Wars ...” Both are technically flawless, but Spielberg’s is superior.
And that was not the film’s only homage. Spielberg had become a late-in-life friend of Director Stanley Kubrick and after Kubrick’s death, completed Kubrick’s long-in-limbo, “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence” (2001). The scene where Dr. Eddie cuts out John’s eyes, to replace them with the eyes on another to evade Retina Scans, explicitly references the famous torture scene in Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1971).
That scene was immediately followed by Robot spiders scurrying around a crowded tenement building, scanning the retinas of residents as they search for John. John is hiding in an ice-cube-filled bathtub, knowing he can’t prematurely remove his bandages, or he will be permanently blind. Quite scary.
Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski muted the color scheme, which enhanced the specific type of Dystopia Spielberg created. This Dystopia actually looks like a nice place to live until John has to hide out in a poor neighborhood. Outside the neighborhoods of the social outcasts, quality-of-life seems more than adequate, so most people are happy with the trade-offs just like most New Yorkers seemed OK with Stop-and-Frisk, because they are on the correct side of the line and Pre-Crime will never come after them, right?
In these affluent settings the muted tones make it all look corporate and clean. In poorer and dirtier places, it so monochromatic it evokes the black-and-white of an old-school Noir. Kaminski and Spielberg had worked together before, notably on “Schindler’s List” (1993), which was actually released in B&W.
Composer John Williams is another frequent Spielberg collaborator, mostly known for music of magnificent bombast. He takes a different tone here, less attention demanding, more echoing Hitchcock favorite Bernard Herrmann, and that proves effective.
It is almost impossible to list how many people did extraordinary work here. Michael Kahn probably should’ve been nominated for an Oscar for his flawless Editing but wasn’t. On the other hand, Sound Editors Richard Hymns and Gary Rydstrom were. In IMDb, the over-lapping responsibilities of Production, Art, Set, Costume, and FX list more names than the entire cast and crew of many other films, really, several other films combined.
6. Symbols
As almost everything in cinema is communicated by images, so everything becomes a symbol, whether intended or not. Symbols that call attention to themselves are generally less effective than those that integrate in the environment, playing on the subconscious, being a subtext serving the primary text. This maybe Spielberg’s most consciously symbol-laden film, but his hand is defter here than the sometimes heavy-handed “A.I…”
Explicit symbols are in the dialogue that references Religion. They are mostly coming out of Danny’s mouth, but even Chief Lamar Burgess says, "You don't choose the things you believe in. They choose you." The keeper of the Inmates in Suspended Animation (Tim Blake Nelson) tells a prisoner (who can’t hear him), “You're part of my flock now." And the keeper of the Precogs (Jim Rash) refers to that unacknowledged Prison as the “Temple.”
Less overt, but everywhere, is the water imagery: Both the Inmates in Suspended Animation and the Precogs float in it. John’s son was Kidnapped from a pool and another Murder that proves key to the plot was a drowning. John attempts to escape capture by hiding in an ice-bath. During the film’s very first arrest, there’s even a sprinkler feeding a suburban lawn in the background. The list goes on-and-on.
The water/Religion connection is obvious, Baptism, but I believe the water was primarily meant to lead us elsewhere. Water flows mostly predictably but can be full of surprises because chaos is a fact of the physical world, containing enough variables that some of it flow remains beyond computation. In the Real World, predictions are essential, but never prove wholly accurate, in other words, the future is predictable, but not deterministic.
Determinism is more a matter of vison than fact. Though water is supposed to be clear, its clarity distorts as well, refraction redirects the light rays passing through it. We call it “blue” not because that’s its real color, but because of its reflective quality, so when water is blue, it is obscuring something behind its partial mirror. Blue hues dominate this film, definitely in the dark corners of skid-row, but often even in the nice suburban houses and clean government buildings. This brings us to the films second symbolic fetish…
This movie is obsessed with eyes. Retina Scans, and then the physical eyeball, are worked into the plot over-and-over, sometimes quite ghoulishly. Both of the Prisons we get to see are laid out as a Panopticons even though the design serves no practical purpose in one of those cases. An eyeless skid-row bum proclaims, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." Soon after, Surgeon Soloman tells John, "To see the light, you have to risk the dark." Agatha, free from her water-bondage, repeatedly asks, "Can you see?"
Symbols can also be unintended; do you really think that the makers of Slasher Films really wanted them to be as misogynistic as they turned out?
In this film Spielberg is trying to shed his long-cultivated image of the greatest preacher of the USA’s Suburbs being Heaven on Earth. But he made one very odd choice that I doubt he was conscious of, yet really sticks out like a sore thumb: The are almost no Black people in the movie.
I’m not just being PC here; we wouldn’t have expected Black characters in Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” or “Saving Private Ryan” (1998) and there weren’t any. We wouldn’t have expected any major White Characters in “The Color Purple” (1985) and there weren’t any. But Washington DC is less than 50% White, and the single largest demographic is Black, this is even more pronounced in its Metropolitan Police Dept, which is 52% Black. So, what happened between 2002 and 2054 because there are almost no Black Cops, Black shoppers, or even Blacks in the poorest Neighborhoods? Spielberg made a movie about local Police being granted an abusive authority in an all-White world.
7. Budget, Release and Distribution legacy
One tactic Spielberg employs to control budget expenditures is that he’s paid out of profit, which is a risk and there have been films he never got paid for. He did get paid for this one, but what he hadn’t been? He spent five years on it. I guess it helped that he owned the studio that produced this movie, so he had other income coming in.
When he casts a very big star, like Tom Cruise, he expects that Actor to accept the same gamble. I guess it helped that they had been friends for more than a decade.
This film was Spielberg’s follow-up to “A.I…” which was profitable but seen as underperforming given percentage return on financial investment, its gross was less than two-and-a-half times the initial $100 million budget. As “Minority Report” was a Chase Thriller, it was expected to perform better, and it did, but still there was some feeling of disappointment, as it grossed only about three-and-a-half times the initial $102 million budget. As a film’s recorded budget doesn’t include marketing or distribution costs, that three-and-a-half-times isn’t as profitable as sounds.
On its opening weekend, the box-office was an impressive sounding $36 million. Unfortunately, that was nearly $20 million less-than the asinine “Scooby-Doo.”
Now, the largest audience for any film streaming (I haven’t seen the inside a movie theatre since 2017). One, imperfect, way to measure the continued popularity of a film is to see if it is being streamed, and how. Free streaming generates income from commercial breaks, just like network TV. Being exclusive content on a paid subscription streaming service is usually considered a bit better, especially when the film wasn’t produced by the service itself. Most impressive is when a film can draw an exclusive audience in one the various forms of pay-per-view.
Now, go Google a handful of Spielberg films, old and new. Most of Spielberg's films, including “A.I…” and “Minority Report” both of which are more-than twenty-years old.
That bodes well for big-budget films of such ambition even when they underperform in initial release.
On the other hand, that's also true of "Scooby-Doo." Can you believe that some people are still watching that crap?
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