I saw Minority Report on opening night, but didn’t get prompted to comment about it until after I read these two articles:
The first from the Village Voice:
Minority Report is the new lord of the allegories, dethroning that movie whose screenplay was basically rants from Society of the Spectacle with the word “Spectacle” crossed out and “Matrix” written in in crayon.
Difficult to imagine Cruise or Spielberg, avatars of wealth, privilege, and domesticity, lasting more than five minutes in a Philip K. Dick worldview. Dick, like Burroughs and Kubrick, is all about the disintegration that occurs when doubt unravels belief in a Perfect System. Dick didn’t believe in systems or in Mom and apple pie, which is why he seems so prophetic now, when the corporatization of consciousness has become such a totalizing, repressive, and relentless force.
And the second from Slate…
Minority Report has virtuoso grit, but it wipes off with one swipe, like waxy buildup in a commercial. Philip K. Dick’s original hero dreads noir betrayal by his dame; Tom Cruise’s wound is the morally irreproachable loss of a child. (Cruise says boosting the kid theme was his big script contribution.) Cruise is great, huffing street drugs like the Bad Lieutenant – but his grief lets him off the moral hook. What’s his depraved kink? Watching 3-D home movies of his angelic son and his perky ex blushing coyly in a PG negligee.
Sure Minority Report pushed the right tech buttons and will give nightmares to the Adbusters set, but it didn’t sit well with me. It’s basically a wind-up toy movie. Events happen for no other reason than to advance the plot. After stewing on it for awhile, I’m now convinced that the movie ended when Anderton went down for the count in the stasis chamber and that everything that transpired afterward was his dreaming.
Still it’s nice to know that Broguiere’s Dairy will still exist in the future – and that it’s milk will still be sold in glass bottles