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Minority Report
by Judge J. Howard Sundermann
I went to Minority Report
with great anticipation. The film combines one of the greatest
directors of all time, Stephen Spielberg (Indiana Jones, Close
Encounters, Schindler's List, Private Ryan), with superstar
Tom Cruise. It is a science fiction film, which is one of my
favorite genres, and the film was uniformly given excellent reviews
all over the country. In his review, Roger Ebert said Minority
Report "reminds us why we go to movies in the first
place." But I thought it was just OK, maybe a six on a scale
of ten. I would recommend it, it is certainly better than Spielberg's
A.I., but I found it to be well below my expectations.
The set-up is good. About fifty years into the future, a way
has been found to predict murders ahead of time and the department
of pre-crime, headed by Cruise, finds and arrests the potential
murderer before the killing takes place. How the pre-crime department
knows about the murders in advance is an inherent fault in the
film. People called pre-cogs are somehow picking up the thoughts
of would-be murderers and these thoughts are fed into computers.
The pre-cogs seem to be lying in an indoor swimming pool twenty-four
hours a day with wires attached to their heads. The names that
identify a potential murder come rolling down a shute with the
name written on something like a pool ball. The pre-cogs are
100% accurate.
 Good
science fiction can make us look at the world in a new way, and
this story accomplishes that by bringing up some interesting
legal issues. Obviously, people are being arrested for crimes
that they have not yet committed but, according to the film,
are certain to commit. Can people be arrested who have not committed
a crime but who are certain to commit one? In the film, The District
of Columbia has been murder-free for six years and the program
is very popular. I suspect that a program like this, which has
accuracy near 100%, would be approved easily today. This question
is particularly relevant considering the current terrorist problem.
Also the pre-cogs are effectively slaves, devoting their lives
to predicting murders. In the film, the audience is never told
if the process is voluntary on their part or whether the pre-cogs
are taken by the State when they are found to have the needed
abilities. Would we be willing to take away the lives of a few
to save thousands? There is also the possibility that the accusation
of a crime could lead to a murder attempt that would otherwise
not have taken place.
Cruise himself has his name
given as a potential murderer and looks for the victim, whom
he would not have known but for the prediction. Spielberg had
the imagination and the funding to ask scientists and engineers
to predict some future devices that are employed in the film.
Many devices are voice-activated as on Star Trek. The
way cars move around is interesting, and when one goes into a
store, a computer conducts a retinal scan and you are addressed
personally and directed to what you might be interested in. Also,
small robotic spiders search a building for Cruise by performing
a retinal scan of everyone there.
But to me, the failure is in the story itself. Cruise, after
being accused of a potential murder, becomes a man on the run,
a la Hitchcock. The chase scenes were disappointing and rather
pedestrian. A character from the justice department is for some
reason opposed to Cruise and the pre-crime program, so he is
seemingly introduced just so there can be a bad guy. But the
real bad guy turns out to be the director of the pre-crime department,
played by Max von Sydow, who is afraid that when the program
goes national he will lose control. My take on the film as a
reviewer is another minority report.
Posted July 19, 2002
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