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Date Posted: 17:33:42 07/01/02 Mon
Author: Perceptor II
Subject: Minority Report, um, report

I went to see Minority Report over the weekend. I'll attempt a review with minimal spoilers below.

In the movie's world, it is the year 2054. For six years, an agency known as "Precrime" has been allowed jurisdiction in Washington, DC. The agency uses a trio of pre-cognitives, kept in a half-asleep, half-awake state and wired to a computer so that the images they see can be recorded, to predict when a murder will occur and then arrest and incarcerate the potential murderer before it happens. The agency is directed by John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise), a man whose young son was murdered years ago, which has led him to believe totally in the cause of Precrime. The trouble begins when the pre-cogs predict that he will murder someone he's never met. Naturally, he believes it's a mistake and runs, all the while trying to find a way to prove his "innocense" (that being a relative term in this case, since really, he can't know that for sure).

Two interesting technologies are presented in the movie's futuristic world, particularly since these technologies are in their fledgling stages right now, so it's interesting to see one view of how they'll look when more fully developed. One is electronic paper. We see an animated cereal box, an animated cover of U.S. News and World Report and we watch as the front page of U.S. Today suddenly changes to include the breaking news of the John Anderton chase. The other is advertising automatically tailoring itself to its viewers. The ads read a retinal scan and presumably look up the identity in a database, then alter themselves to talk directly to the viewer, by name sometimes. Of course, for law enforcement, these pervasive ads have the added benefit of being able to track anyone in city limits.

I found the movie to be quite entertaining. The action sequences and special effects are well done. The futuristic world is both imaginative and plausible (except the explanation of how the precognitives came into being, which struck me as a bit "comic book", though later that origin become very important to the plot of the story). In between the action sequences, the movie has a lot of interesting things to say, and invites the viewer to think about all the moral ramifications of a "Precrime" agency.

What this movie does quite well is playing with predictability. Twice in the movie it presents the viewer with a situation where it seems obvious that one of two things will happen. There is an agonizing pause when the viewer is invited to predict which of the two possible outcomes will happen, and then...we are presented with Outcome #3! This has a very nice payoff, and it's more entertaining to watch than simple unpredictability.

All in all, this is a very good movie. It's a good action movie AND a quality piece of sci-fi doing what sci-fi does best. It deserves it's PG-13 rating; it has enough sleaze in it that I would not recommend it for more impressionable viewers. However, for mature viewers I do highly recommend it.

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