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Minority Report

October 13, 2023

I reviewed a lot of films on this website and in almost every review I mention the name of Steven Spielberg. It's not because every movie I review is made by Spielberg. But it seem like every director can be viewed on a scale of Spielbergness. And the higher you go on that scale the better. At the top there is Steven Spielberg himself.

The 2002 movie Minority Report that he did starring Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, commonly known as Tom Cruise, is a very interesting movie. It's one of those rare Spielberg films where the main character is not an ordinary person, so to speak. While somebody like Roy from Close Encounters is not even connected to the main event of the movie, making the event seem larger than life. In this movie the hero is one of a key people of the event. Even though the event is still epic in scope.

The story of this film was written originally by Philip K. Dick. And while somebody like Ridley Scott preferred to adopt his "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" into Blade Runner. Spielberg's interests were more aligned with his "The Minority Report".

As we all know, Spielberg is a political man. He made a number of highly political films throughout his career. And most of them have rather similar messages. You can think of Spielberg as one of the hackers. A person similar to Richard Stallman. A person in pursuit of Freedom. Yes, Spielberg has an iPhone and makes most of his money from copyright. But perhaps he was never presented with a political aspects of movements like the Free Software Movement. So maybe we should all write to him or his agent darian.lanzetta@caa.com about Richard Stallman, in hopes that he will make a huge biopic about the man ( and maybe even release the movie under a Free license, who knows ).

Spielberg's political movies are dramas for the most part. And even if the movie has some kind of violence or action, those movies do not try to be flashy about it because they tackle real life problems. Minority Report is different since it's pretty much a high energy action thriller, that is set in future. And the reason for this is that Minority Report acts in the same way something like Orwell's 1984 does. It's a story of potential future that is very bad and should not happen. But while Orwell describes the world in his book in such dark tones that you are obviously going to hate all of it. Minority Report is more subtle.

Spielberg was a very good friend of Stanley Kubrick before Kubrick died. And Kubrick had a very interesting political movie that he made in the 70s called A Clockwork Orange where he did something very controversial, but something that was worth trying to do. The film is about how cruel the criminal-detention systems could be. And while other films already existed that already criticized those systems, Kubrick was not satisfied. Most of the stories of how the system could be cruel revolves around a like-able protagonist being mistaken for a criminal. He or she didn't commit the crime. Or if they did, they did it for a very good cause and they are very good people inside. Or something like this. And therefor you should question the system because... look: an good person is being badly treated.

But if you think about it, this is not what the discussion is about. Criticizing criminal-detention systems is criticizing their treatment of all criminals. How ever terrible those criminals would be. And therefor in A Clockwork Orange Kubrick specifically chose the main character to be an awful human being. So that the moral question would be proper. It's about treatment of criminals. Not about treatment of innocent people mistaken to be criminals.

Minority Report does the same trick. There is this system of futuristic police that makes all murders almost impossible. And it's done by looking into the future. The police has precogs, people with an ability to predict murders. And the police stops those murders before they even take place. A "good idea" on the surface. But with a lot of human rights implications. The police in the movie literally arrests people that didn't commit any crimes. Because the police is able to arrest them right before they do so. But the movie doesn't make it sound like some kind of a terrible idea. Even though it is a criticism of the idea and throughout the film you learn a lot about why it's bad. The movie still shows precrime actually working and doing good things. So you are properly conflicted about the subject as an audience member.

In the beginning of the film it's presented in such a way that you would start to agree with precrime, then the movie questions the integrity of the system. It question the morality of the system. It goes into various ways to either rig the system against those who people in charge do not like. Or for people in charge to hack it, so they could still commit murders. And so on. It's unfolding as a good political thesis.

On top of that, the movie also tackles themes like problems with back doors in self driving cars and mass surveillance. The film famously has tech on every corner where ads are being shown to people on the street based on who they are. Similar to what we have today with various surveillance online and in our phones. Which also allows the law enforcement to track the movement of every person everywhere. In the film it's bit different than the current reality. They use eye scanners there. So there is also different privacy techniques that people need to use to avoid surveillance. In the real world there is Tor or other types of electronic security. In the world of Minority Report there are surgeons that can swap your eyes to new ones, which will fool the scanners.

Films like Kimi tackle similar types of political views. But Kimi is more of a part of the Snowden Effect. Minority Report was released in 2002. A decade before Snowden said anything to the press. Which a lot of people think has something to do with the 9/11 attack instead. After the attack the amount of mass surveillance in the US skyrocketed. And some people claim that the film is trying to address those issues. But, if you really look at the dates, the film was finished filming before 9/11. And the project was developed through the entire decade before that. Meaning Spielberg already had views on mass surveillance, even before it became a real problem. It kind of reminds me Richard Stallman again. Because he was fighting against surveillance and other digital mistreatment way before Snowden and way before 9/11. And he had a very good time, probably, saying "Told you" when Snowden revealed everything to the press. Would be interesting to see a movie about Stallman from Spielberg. You know: darian.lanzetta@caa.com is a good place to mail this idea to.

Okay let's focus on the movie itself. The writing in Minority Report is beyond awesome. Spielberg likes to not write anything himself. He probably knows how cheesy his dialogue sometimes could be. So he hires often multiple writers for different qualities in them. He might hire the main writer to do most of the script. And then hire a few people that are good with, say, specific type of humor, or good with writing expositional dialogue. And use all of them as "brushes" on his story canvas. And this makes extremely good scripts. Even reading the final script for Minority Report is awesome and interesting.

There are a lot of little details in the movie that Spielberg glosses over in just the right way, to make the movie so much more re-watchable. I saw this film countless times. And every time I see it I notice more details that I haven't noticed before. How do you make something like this?

Directing-vise it is one of the best directed movies ever. The shots! Oh my god! The shots! The camera work is fucking fantastic! The flow! Oh my god! The flow! The editing and the way the movie was shot for the editing is flawless. A lot of people say that the best cut in the film history is in Lawrence Of Arabia, or something. No! The best cut is in Minority Report. I would not spoil it too much. But it's towards the end, when it cuts to Agatha, played by Samantha Morton being lowered back to the precog bed, by Wally, played by Daniel London. It's so good. This one cut made me realize that directing is not only about basic coverage of the scene. But every little move matters.

Spielberg likes to dirty up the frame a lot. So do not expect it to look pretty in the normal terms. The world is bleak both thematically and visually. There is a funny quote from Wikipedia on this subject:


Another thing that you can notice about the movie is that it has this blue filter on it. And it is not digital. It's not color corrected. It was done using chemicals on the film itself. They really got wild with making this movie as dirty as possible. Not only that, but the film also has sequences of visions of the precogs. And those are even dirtier than the rest of the film. Which is just wild. But the whole thing works so well. There is nothing to complain about. In some strange way, this dirtiness made the movie look awesome.

There is a lot of very good tension in the movie. It is as if the movie never stops throwing at the audiences something interesting. And not just interesting, but also tension inducing. Which makes the movie a blast to watch, since at no point you feel like anything is over. You know in the movies, there is often an action scene and then it ends. And then you get some plot development in between. This movie has two completely original action scenes with a lot of humor and tension and interesting ideas in them happen one right after the other. You have this feeling that an action scene is done and you relax yourself. Just for the other one to start immediately after. Which ends in such a weirdly unexpected way, that you can't help yourself but smile.

The movie has a very iconic car design that doesn't make much sense in the world of the film, unless you look at it from the perspective of this car being somewhat of a super-car. There are a lot of vertical roads in the movie and most cars have their middle sections rotate, so the people inside could still sit comfortably while the car goes up and down the roads. But there is a Lexus that the main character gets in the middle of the movie and it is just a normal car with 4 wheels. Maybe those are two different forms of transportation. Or maybe since it's a super-car, it is different. By the way, the car is actually real and is really made by Lexus as a concept car specifically for the movie. And it is called Lexus Minority. It also appears briefly in a movie by Michael Bay called The Island, which Spielberg produced.

The movie has also a very interesting type of user interface on computers. The film starts with Tom Cruise looking over images produced by precogs to investigate where will the murder happen. The script of the film simply states that it is a computer display of some kind. In the movie you see something else. It's this curved glass surface which is operated entirely by gestures. Today in smartphones and tablets we have something similar. And a lot of people who developed the early touch gestures often said that they were inspired by the interface in Minority Report. Given that Spielberg's father Arnold was a computer scientist that has invented a lot of technology to make computers what they are today. It's interesting that touch swipes and other gesture controls in modern computers were inspired also by a Spielberg. Which makes me believe that Spielberg is more than capable of comprehending a topic of Free Software. So he could be a good director for a biopic on Richard Stallman. You know: darian.lanzetta@caa.com - this is the email of his agent. I guess we all should spam it with messages about Richard. But let's not have any prepared scripts. Or I fear the emails will end up in Spam.

There is a lot of dark humor in the movie. In one scene Tom Cruise's character chases his own eyes as they are rolling down a corridor. Then there are a lot of funny criminal type characters. The two best are played by Jason Antoon and Peter Stormare. In both cases the humor comes from some derange characteristic of the character. Making for very funny, but also very dark jokes. There is an expositional scene with an elderly woman played by Lois Smith in which they talk about some truly terrible things some of which are political. But the scene is hilarious. And it has one of the most weird character moments in the entire Spielberg's filmography. I'm not gonna spoil it. But I'm pretty sure you will notice it.

The movie is heavy on visual effects since it's a movie about future. But even though the movie is from 2002, the effects hold up very well. There is slight fakeness to some of it. Like the shots where you see the futuristic roads go in weird directions. But it's not like it doesn't look convincing. It's just today with path-tracing, rending something like this would give you a better result. There is also a scene with little robotic spiders crawling everywhere. And they look very convincing. And if you think about it, they look like miniature versions of robotic spidery things from another movie Spielberg did with Cruise. I wonder if one influenced the other in some way.

Also this film has probably one of the best soundtracks from the legendary John Williams. Not the best. But one of the best. There are a lot of good compositions in this films that I like to listen to even just for fun. Some of which are very emotional. While others are very tension inducing. One, titled "Eye-Dentiscan" is just so hilarious. It's a proper showcase of musical humor. And combined with the scene it is just pure movie magic. It is beaten only perhaps by another composition by Williams that he did for Spielberg. And it is "Presenting Bianca Castefiore" from the Tintin movie.

So to end this review I want to remind you of one email address. This one: darian.lanzetta@caa.com. And the name: Richard Stallman. And a genre: Biopic. Please do something with this information.

Happy Hacking!!!

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