Minority Report
With Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, Max von Sydow, Lois Smith, Peter Stormare, Tim Blake Nelson, Steve Harris, and Kathryn Morris.
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The parallel with porn is more apparent when one reflects that most futuristic, gadget-ridden science fiction is selling something that has more to do with the present than the future: “investing in the future” is mostly about buying now, and the hype about “experiencing the future” through the latest technology is an invitation to dig into our pockets today. Maybe that’s why most SF veers more toward the right than the left–because it’s usually selling not the fancy trappings but the status quo.
Minority Report, Steven Spielberg’s enjoyable new thriller set in Washington, D.C., in 2054–full of more alluring gadgets than you can shake a stick at–performs its own bubble dance, for good and ill. Derived from a Philip K. Dick story that’s more about action than nuanced commentary, it doesn’t have a vision that incorporates a poetics but functions as a grand entertainment; part of its central plan is to always give you more to look at than you can possibly take in. Some of my colleagues have been calling it a thinking person’s action movie, but the drive of its narrative and the heft of its visuals don’t give you much time to think–basically you’re reduced to gawking and following.
This isn’t to say that Minority Report espouses having a special bureau to predict crimes (or disasters); in fact, it implies that there might be a price to pay for such meddling. Yet insofar as its bureau depends on the exploitation of three mutants, whose predictions can be recorded and played back like movies, its view of the future is neither utopian nor dystopian but a vaguely formulated conflation of the two. (If Spielberg as SF auteur has any single preoccupation, it’s cinema itself as an all-purpose agent, instrument, and metaphor.)
More impressive is Samantha Morton as Agatha, the most powerful of the three mutants–a religious icon clearly designed to suggest Stanley Kubrick’s Star Child in 2001 and Carl Dreyer’s Renee Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc, but also a striking figure in her own right who doesn’t depend entirely on those references. However, she–like her mutant partners, Arthur and Dashiell–is named after a classic mystery writer. (Guess who.) Her name–like the credited clip from Rouben Mamoulian’s The Mark of Zorro and the uncredited clip from Samuel Fuller’s House of Bamboo playing on the wall of the surgeon’s lair and the bits of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony heard in the precrime bureau while Anderton or his antagonist pull together precrime clips with grandiloquent gestures–is there to provoke our recognition not of the future or even of the past, but of the media-savvy present.
