Posted on 06/27/2002 9:14:39 AM PDT by Korth
Steven Spielberg has seen the future - and much of it, in his enthralling new SF thriller starring Tom Cruise, is already here.
Minority Report is set in 2053, in Washington, DC. But the metropolis Cruise inhabits is an eerie extrapolation of big cities everywhere today where civil liberties are being eroded in the name of public security. In the new, improved future, crimes are detected even before they can be committed. People are detained without evidence of their wrongdoing, save what an elite pack of psychics foresee as their criminal intention. Last week's arrest in the US of the "dirty bomb" suspect, currently held without charge, trial or jury in a military prison, springs to mind with horrible timeliness.
Psychological profiling of such potential perpetrators in the film has been fine-tuned to the point of precognitive prediction of their evil doing. Incarceration as a form of rehabilitation has collapsed along with the prison system. Instead of jail cells, criminals are put into permanent hibernation, standing upright, which saves space and doesn't require them to be fed, watered or receive next-of-kin visits at the community's expense.
Ubiquitous CCTV cameras identify a person by their retinal image and pursue a wanted man who's been spotted with a vocal commentary far more insistently than "Stop, thief!" Cops are organised into literal flying squads. They descend from the skies and make vertical arrests thanks to jet packs on their backs. It all seems a heavy price to pay for peace in the streets - the murder rate is down to zero - and an absence of traffic jams since cars now run up the sides of buildings and are parked in air ports outside owners' flats.
Adapted from the SF writer Philip K Dick's short story, Minority Report is an eye-dazzling tour de force of a world whose menacing outlines we can discern already. The catch is, the rulers may become wanted men themselves, simply on the say-so of an unchallengeable machine.
Tom Cruise plays John Anderton, top man in the Justice Department's Pre-Crime unit. His job is interpreting the visions of crimes yet to be committed that are fished out of the extra-sensory perceptions of a trio of so-called Pre-Cogs, psychics nurtured in a flotation tank, whose soothsaying has never been proved wrong. Pulling together their fleeting premonitions like a conductor taking an orchestra through the score, Cruise and the cops zero in on the criminal - like the crime passionel in the film's "overture," foiled with seconds to spare before a jealous husband can knife his wife and her lover.
A man dedicated to summary justice ever since his child was abducted, Anderton has no more reason to mistrust the system than we have to doubt the now routine DNA testing in criminal detection. Until, that is, the Pre-Cogs transmit a vision of himself committing murder. Faster than it takes to say "Futurology," Cruise goes on the run, suspecting he's been framed by the FBI's ambitious young upstart (a powerful screen debut by Colin Farrell, a Dublin-born actor whose terrier-like attack snaps at Cruise's heels, reminding us how much the senior actor is cruising on star charm these days).
Underneath all its visual caveats about the way security mutates into tyranny, Minority Report lapses into a standard manhunt format - but what brilliant top dressing, what magnificently devised action sequences, what irony and suspense Spielberg packs into its 150 minutes. Cruise grapples with a jet-propelled security cop, sending both of them cart-wheeling into the air like a missile going ballistic as they zoom crazily up the walls of buildings, into apartments, through ceilings and out of the roof.
He hides out in a tenement house which the police then "infest" with tiny robot spiders that scuttle under locked front doors and subject the occupants to retinal identification while they're eating dinner or enjoying sex: a vivid dramatisation that the concept of privacy ain't what it used to be. Cruise and Farrell do battle on a rolling conveyor belt in an automated assembly plant where the fugitive finds himself being built into the body parts of a futuristic automobile - perhaps Spielberg's bow to Alfred Hitchcock, who always yearned to begin one of his own films with a corpse being discovered in a new car rolling off the assembly line. A host of hi-tech jokes are taken at the run, like the retinal recognition sentinel in a shop which greets Cruise, who's had his eyeballs swapped for a stranger's in order to avoid detection, with a friendly call of: "Glad to see you back, Mr Fukuyama."
Filmgoers may occasionally hanker for a bit of precognition themselves to understand the plot's convolutions. But fathoming our political masters' motivations is now ingrained in the government systems controlling most of our lives today. Minority Report is a populist warning on the potential for control that the techniques of surveillance are creating while we stand by and watch civil liberties being consigned to the past.
Botton line...rent "Bladerunner" on DVD instead
Oh, well, a work of fiction is allowed to have an unrealistic premise.
Another Philip K. Dick tale.
My favorite Dick yarn is a short story he wrote about a guy who worked for an ultra-secret company for a few years, doing some work that was so secret that, as per prior agreement, they erased his memory of the years of his employment at the end of his contract.
At which point, he discovers that back during the course of his employment (whatever it was), he voluntarily signed away the entire million dollars or so of compensation that had originally been agreed upon, and chose instead as his full compensation seven small, ordinary objects... an ordinary bus token... a key... a used ticket stub from the theater...
Isn't that just like the government... take your million dollars and give you a bus token...LOL
Except that in the Philip K. Dick story, it was a voluntary sign-away of an agreement with a vastly-powerful private corporation.
And... although he walked away from his exit interview/ final payment meeting with the corporation in absolute shock, he would soon discover that those 7 small, entirely ordinary, apparently worthless objects in his pocket would quickly become far more valuable than the million dollars he left at the table... there may be times in life when nothing but a bus token can help you...
(BTW, does anyone know the name of this story?)
The name of the story is, simply enough, Paycheck.
The actual term of employment was two years, and the sum of money was 50,000 -- dollars, maybe?
Anyway, given that the story was written in 1952, I mentally translated what it represented -- "a whole heck of a lot of money" -- into the modern-day equivalent of "something like a million bucks."
Jennings, after all, is one of the very best at the kind of technical work he does, and the contract had some unusual requirements, to say the least.
"Jennings stared down at what he had in his palm. From the cloth sack he had spilled a little assortment of items. A code key. A ticket stub. A parcel receipt. A length of fine wire. Half a poker chip, broken across. A green strip of cloth. A bus token.
"This, instead of fifty thousand [..]," he murmured. "Two years ..."
A reviewer wrote:
The main messages of 'Paycheck' may be that sometimes seemingly normal objects can be much more valuable than money -- and that you can't trust anyone if you can't trust yourself.
The rights to make "Paycheck" into a major motion picture were purchased in 1999. Planning is already in the works!
I love his writing... but he was "out there"
OK, let me be the first: SPOILER ALERT
- Why would the security system at police headquarters and the prison still allow Anderton to enter? That access should have been cut off immediately, so that the change in parts (if you know what I mean) would have been unnecessary.
- FOUR balls should have dropped: two each for Ms. ?Lively?, one for "John Doe" and ONE FOR the von Sydow character.
any others?
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