Minority Report: A Report

I loved it uncritically, without hesitation. Usually I am not this forgiving to movies, this completely open to whatever brand of reality they wish to impart; I am trying to figure out why exactly I feel this way. I think it is largely, although not entirely, due to a kind of nostalgia about Tom Cruise. He is excellent in this, and excellent in the way that only Tom Cruise in this particular kind of movie can be: incredibly angular, vaguely troubled by some long-passed trauma, prone to jogging at night in some gothically hooded sweatshirt, capable of making complex hand gestures. I found myself euphoric while he was running around wearing black, so fast, so Olympian, escaping not just his particular pursuers but the whole corroded logic of his future-history. I think that he runs with his hands flat, unclenched. More areo-dynamic, is the idea behind that.

Fingertips cutting through the air.

I truly believe that our demographic will somehow forever feel a strange awareness of Tom Cruise's incredible career. Our maudlin sentiment is presumably not unlike that of pulp "classics" of generations before us. Cruise has catapulted to such an amazing place in our societal consciousness, yes? That interview on Good Morning America? These roles that he refuses to ignore. Marrying an actress girl who is twice his younger after converting her to Scientology, which maybe was all just a publicity stunt? I really love how he has been laying low recently, helping us forget.

In many ways, however, Minority Report is safe. While -- to take another recent example -- Children of Men deals with a plausible and "contemporary" version of the future, Minority Report happily trolls through a political landscape which will never happen, not conceivably, and not without major societal restructuring; and so, even when it doles out heavy-handed moral quandaries, it doesn't actually "talk about" anything. However, this is somewhat of an advantage. Since it's not particularly allegorical, it doesn't relate to anything happening today, it lacks the classic tropes of science fiction (post-apocalypse, cold war), and it's neither utopic nor dystopic, it's in some ways incredibly refreshing, original Science Fiction.

One could argue that Minority Report deals somewhat interestingly with the classical battle between free will and determinism; I am unconvinced. It's a bit too specific -- what with the pre-cogs, and this endless taking out of and putting back into of the pre-cogs into of their primordial ooze -- to fall squarely into a useful metaphor. Certainly in the case of our Crusian John Anderton, the prediction of the murder drove the act, which couldn't have been defined as murder, anyway, since the "Leo Crow" character very much shot himself. Agatha's whingey claims -- "You can choose"-- seem to be generally ignored by everyone. Maybe it's not determinism as much as "determination:" People, once informed of their futures, become forcefully possessed with the idea of enacting them. Is that free will?

In the end, though, I'm a sucker for Minority Report's interfaces: practically transparent screens controlled by motion-sensitive gloves and verbal commands, capable of projecting filmed memories onto the pragmatic "real" world. It's so flawless, except for the fact that characters are always trundling around clear plastic data cards, moving them from slot to slot in the interface: Why, in a world where clairvoyant triplets bathed in ooze can predict the future, do people still use, essentially, floppy disks? The idiosyncrasy of this, and of Cruise's character eating cereal out of a box while engaging with a hyper-futuristic immersive data screen, is thoroughly humanizing and does a great deal for the film's believability. The interfaces are very Spielberg. Beautiful, it's true; yet classic tepid reactions to what may or may not be "the future of technology." Just like the future of SETI in War of the Worlds (hello Independence Day) and -- uh-hum -- the reversal of roles with A.I. and E.T. -- both of whose acronyms allude to some kind of hopeful (mis)understanding in a different consciousness.

"Thanks for having such an optimistic viewpoint on things, Steve."

Fuck.