Dreams of the Future
Dreams of the Future
Tuesday, March 13, 2018
Another late addition to my collection of Spielberg Film Society film reviews, this time written 16 years after the fact. I enjoyed Minority Report on first viewing in 2002, but I had a tough time covering the movie as a writing assignment, investigating its labyrinthine visual effects. Perhaps that’s why it has taken me this long to record my thoughts on the film, while researching an upcoming new Cinefex Spielberg story, in LA 2018. It holds up as a terrific thriller, a thoughtful rumination on fate and love, and it packs a punch.
Dreams of the Future
by Joe Fordham (March 2018)
Minority Report was Part Two of a Spielberg science fiction double-punch.
He had just finished perhaps his most secretive and mysterious production, the robot fable A.I., and before the paint was dry on those visual effects, he launched directly into production of a second, quite different futuristic story, a hard-boiled adaptation of a Philip K. Dick dystopian sci-fi novella, a police procedural set in 2054 where citizens were found guilty for premeditating their crimes.
Minority Report had a long gestation that began with drafts in the 1990s, floated as a sequel to the Arnold Schwarzenegger Total Recall adaptation. It then gathered steam, fairly rapidly, filmed back-to-back with A.I. and appeared, almost exactly one year later, in the summer of 2002. I covered both films as Cinefex assignments, and Minority Report was a particularly tough one, a detailed, multi-layered show, with multiple strata.
The film had its critics, people who found fault in the mismatch of Philip Dick’s paranoid storytelling sensibilities with Spielberg’s rambunctious vision of the future. But what they missed was the bigger picture, that leapt far beyond the novella’s themes. In Dick’s story, published in 1956, Anderton is accused of murdering a man he has yet to meet and he elects to accept his fate to validate a process that has defined his life. In Spielberg’s film, with a screenplay by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, Anderton was a Hitchcockian victim of circumstance, a drug-addicted cop whose life has been wrecked by the abduction of his young son, and who is subsequently played as a pawn to a larger conspiracy. Dick vaunts precrime as an inevitable future; Spielberg dismantles it.
Anderton’s descent into the underworld leads him to seek a new identity from a blackmarket surgeon (Peter Stormare), a sniveling wretch with a streaming head cold, who revels in torturing Anderton while surgically replacing the chief’s eyeballs. Spielberg plays Anderton’s slide into narcotic delirium by accompanying the scene with a malfunctioning wall-screen TV that plays blurry images of Sam Fuller’s gangster classic House of Bamboo, and tortures the blindfolded Anderton with a rotten sandwich and curdled pint of milk.
But the scene flips from gross-out humor into one of its most harrowing and poignant scenes. Anderton slumps on his bed, waiting for his new eyes to take, and his drug-addled memories take him back to the moment that he lost his son. It is the film’s only use of full color, a riotous blast of Technicolor hues, as Anderton larks about at public poolside with his little boy, Sean, who is dressed in vivid red swimming trunks. One moment he’s there, Anderton dips into the pool, and the next he is gone. With this deceptively simple graphic, Spielberg lets us know everything is about Sean.
Spielberg films the precog Agatha (Samantha Morton) with the same reverence that he showed to his earlier cinematic extraterrestrials, Puck and E.T.. Agatha is a terrified, tender creature. “Is it now?” she asks Anderton, staring shivering at the city flowing past the window of Anderton’s stolen car. She has only ever known the inside of the ‘temple’ where she floats with her fellow hive minds, Arthur and Dashiell. The religiosity of the precogs is another witty theme, cited early on by Witwer, who is in the habit of kissing his talisman crucifix necklace in moments of duress. “The priests have the power,” he notes, comparing the precogs to the oracles of old. Spielberg bathes Agatha in unearthly light. Her clairvoyance appears to quite literally radiate around her. And, as Anderton’s
attempts to access her submerged memories in a sleazy virtual reality arcade, she slumps in his arms like Christ in Michelangelo’s Pietà.
But the core of the film – and a highlight of John Williams’ score – is a heartbreaking piece titled ‘Sean by Agatha.’ Here, for a brief interlude, Anderton and his estranged wife (Kathyrn Morris), are suddenly caught unaware by this strange, gentle precog that they have invited into their former home. Agatha takes them through the life their son never lived. “The dead don’t die,” she tells them. And it is this that makes Anderton stop running to face his real fate. A powerfully human vision of the future.
Images © 20th Century Fox / Dreamworks SKG / on-set photo: David James