User reviews

Worst Spielburg yet? I think so. I've had never turned off/walked out of a Spielburg film until last night. With me, Spielburg has always been a hit or miss director, but his misses have never been so wide as with Minority Report. After a few hours (I watched another, much better film) I returned to where I'd left off in Minority Report and was pleased to see that the film did improve (however slightly) during the latter half.

The first image the audience is handed in watching Minority Report is a robotic lathe that looks like it was drawn up with some 10 year old CAD software by a drafter bent on one night of heavy drinking. This special effects showcase was off to a bad start to say the least. In fact.. the only special effects worth giving merit were the "spiders". The entire world's ability to go from muted color sharp photography in one frame to air-brushed soft focus (and poorly textured) CGI in the next was staggering. One minute I'm watching a grungy cop flick.. the next I'm watching Blues Clues as our hero pretends to jump from one moving vehicle to another without drawing undue attention to himself. I kept waiting for him to miss his mark.. look at the camera.. and then, upon looking down, fall with the full Looney Toon orchestral accompanyment. I couldn't suspend my disbelief for an instant.. special effects? 3/10

One of the worst sins of this flick was the touchless interface used in the pre-homicide detective's work area. Sure.. it looks cool... I thought we'd be in for a real treat when the lights dimmed, Cruise lowered his head, raised his arms, and we saw a spectrograph form across the middle of the screen. I figured Spielburg would incorporate some music after creating such an image of a Hi-Tech conductor. No.. no.. instead we see yard-long hand motions made to do the same functions (select, drag, zoom, focus) I can do with my mouse, one hand, and 12-18 square inches of area to move within. If you're going to create a futuristic computer interface, at least try to make it more practical than what we currently have. A keypad, a mouse and two jog-wheels would have made the whole process 10x more productive. The set being filled with lexan screens that were glued together with ugly, poorly formed seams was a letdown as well. I figured the future would have something better to offer.

The storyline was very contrived, yet used very basic character generalizations. There was nothing difficult to figure out since every aspect of the plot was spoonfed to you, so the intellectual aspect was ruined.. if you try to actually sink your brain into the intricacies of the plot, you see it holds less water than a sieve.

Anderton undergoes 12-16hours of pain to have his eyeballs swapped out, so that he won't be IDed by the sensors in every public domain.. only to whip out his old eyes (during one extremely pointless scene) so that he can scan himself into the Pre-Crime headquarters. Good thing he got those new eyes... or ..or else *shrug* Anderton purposefully enters the room where he's been fated to murder someone (with the murder weapon armed) simply because he's a moron... There is no reason established for him to enter the room, other than to advance the already disgusting plot.

Didn't know Colin Farrell was in this one until I saw him step into view.. If that was his first mainstream exposure to an American audience, I bet he's glad some people saw him in good flicks like Tigerland before passing judgement... what a poor role.

Bottom Line: Cold pointless summer flick that doesn't hold a candle to most others in the special effects, action or philosophical realms. Tripe.

Philip K. Dick has written loads of short stories that have evolved into screen-plays. Some have worked (Blade Runner, Total Recall) by basically developing a life of their own and becoming something independent of their source, while still staying true to the story their based on. However, this movie is not one of them.

The problem is not the craftsmanship. The digital effects are incredible, probably best viewed on the big screen. The acting is good, maybe sometimes a bit over the top by Agatha, the pre-cog. And Tom Cruise is, of course, his own flashy self. And a few moments of slapstick-humor to spice things up a bit. And yet, this movie seem like a waste of time. Why? Let's take a look at the story:

John Anderton works for "Precrime", an institution that predicts murders days before they are about to happen. They do this by using "pre-cogs", humans kept in a state of drug-induced helplessness, who get visions of the future and pass them on. Knowing what is going to happen, Precrime can act accordingly and stop any crime before it is committed. One day, Anderton sees his own name as a "future murderer"; however, the victim is no one he's ever heard of. He now has to prove his innocence against a system that seems to know his future before he does.

Great and imaginative story. And yet, the movie wasn't satisfying.

It might be because Steven Spielberg and Philip K. Dick are completely incompatible in regards to their world-view, and come to opposite conclusions. And that poses a gigantic problem for the script:

• Dick sees the future as something that cannot be changed, not by our own individual choices at any rate. However, because of free will, there our several "alternate" futures, which is also the reason for there being THREE pre-cogs. They "vote" for a future that is the most likely to happen, but knowledge of that vote naturally changes the course of events. But the fact that you'd change your mind if you knew about your future can also be foreseen by the pre-cogs, so their vision changes accordingly. Therefore, the pre-cogs are always right, no matter what you do. This idea is reminiscent of the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece.

Stiil with me? I knew you were.

• With Spielberg, it's an entirely different matter. He views free will as an entity in itself. For him, there are not millions of preplanned events, that we slide through by taking this path or that; there is only ONE way, one that we determine by the choices we make. Therefore the pre-cog system doesn't work, as by these choices we can negate any "vision" of the future that is brought up. This is a very individualistic ideal, and, in a sense, the ideal that Hollywood and, specifically, Stephen Spielberg have always represented.

Now imagine a Greek tragedy, done in a "Hollywood" way. See the problem?

My advice: Read the short story, hate it or enjoy it depending on your world-view, but skip this movie. It just doesn't know which direction to take...

Saw this in the original theatrical run and was impressed at the time. It exceeded my hopes for an adaptation of one of Philip K. Dick's best stories. Flash forward 10 years and I wonder what I ever saw in it (the film, that is). Visually it holds up, though the CGI segments are looking shabby already. Action scenes are well paced, plot nuances are treated deftly. Some of the supporting roles are badly miscast--I laughed out loud at the abrupt appearance of Mike "Mind of the Married Man" Binder--but Peter Stormare and Jason Antoon were both great and Max von Sydow probably carries the film.

Still the preponderance of bad easily obscures the good. The clever bits are more or less forgettable, while Spielberg's knack for clichés and remarkably immature sense of humor stink up the film (like when the robot spiders canvass the apartment building, or when Cruise chomps down on some spoiled food, etc. etc.) Then there are the pervasive cornball Spielbergisms--anybody who remembers Close Encounters, Hook, Jurassic Park, and the rest knows what I mean. The primordial will to schmaltz is always right below the surface, even during his most imaginative and skillful storytelling. I think the worst might be when the precog is narrating to Cruise and his sickly-looking waif/wife about their kid going off to college and falling in love, blah blah blah (this unbearable moment of fake drama is soon shattered in a preposterous shift).

With the last 20 minutes the movie degenerates rapidly. In retrospect, an oddly mediocre effort!

Why was it shot in that weird blue hue? Too gloomy for words! The story was really too short to turn into a full length movie so at times I felt I was watching padding.

Not even the special effects are something special! I was really tempted to leave the cinema after one hour! Spielberg is a great entertainer, but for this kind of themes you may need some elegance, or at least, a better script! It is almost as bad as A.I.! I would like to know what about this film could be better than "Time cop" for example! A victory for the bad taste! What's on the mind of the critics?

This is a Bladerunner clone, reviewed with revised future (2054). The technology and gadgets of our future are great, but not genius. It's still fun to see what's waiting for us. The plot is really dull & very predictible. The action scenes are nothing you have not seen in previous movies. The picture quality is grainy, shaky, quite annoying. Don't waste your money on this - made for dvd - movie.

Some effort WAS made to do a good sci-fi movie, despite the disappointing result. A big part of the problem has to do with the fact that Spielberg can't seem to make an honest to god sci-fi movie (I haven't been able to bring myself to see A.I., so I'll reserve judgement on that one, but I have my suspicions...., and Close Encounters isn't my sci-fi cup of tea for sure). The characters can't be motivated primarily by fear, nor do any of the issues of political infighting from Dick's story emerge strongly, but we do have a dead kid. That's Spielberg's answer to everything: throw in dead kids. Well, it's been working for him for a long time (from "Jaws" to "Shindler's List") so I guess he'll keep doing it until people stop pulling on their own heartstrings so hard.

Yes, that's this movie's excuse for a plot motivation (Dick's story had a political motive behind the murder in the majority report). Instead of being good science fiction, it just becomes another dumb shoot 'em up movie. It has great special effects, like all these 100+ million dollar movies do, but that's getting to be kind of standard-issue these days. This movie needed a compelling story to make the effects and this vision of the future seem special, and it didn't have one: all it got was this dead kid. Over and over again, Tom Cruise mourning and stalking around his apartment because of a dead kid. And of course it turned out that Max Von Sydow was behind it -- anybody who's seen any of these movies will expect that Sydow or Christopher Lee or Ernest Borgnine or whoever it is will end up being the bad guy.

No wonder when I saw it at a theatre in Berkeley CA I saw (and heard) at least five of the fifty or so people in the audience sleeping. In the middle of the afternoon. Yes, this film is siesta time.

Of course, it's not all bad. But it's got enough good stuff (good ideas from Dick's story, good actors like Tim Blake Nelson and Colin Farrell and, come to mention it, Tom Cruise) to make the pretentious, obvious film that emerges seem even worse because of it.

Is it a coincidence that Spielberg's now working with Tom Cruise, the last male lead in Stanley Kubrick's last film? I was amazed to discover that after Stanley Kubrick died, Spielberg was suddenly his best friend and wanted to make the movie he COULD HAVE made with Kubrick 7 years ago instead of "Jurassic Park 2". Of course, I don't really blame Spielberg for not wanting to direct a movie under Kubrick's production -- nobody really knows what that would have been like. But now he's making Kubrick's movies and working with the last actors he worked with. It's like some kind of sick hero identification, or midlife crisis or something, and somebody who cares about Spielberg should talk to him and tell him to make his own movies -- if he has any. It seems like his whole career he's been in the shadow of others (Jack Arnold, and now Kubrick).

Also, I'm getting a bit tired of all these movies going for the same urban/gothic/exotic look that Bladerunner established in the 80s. This film is one of the poorer ones to try so far -- the only one I've seen that does it with any success is the mid-90s "Dark City." I think sci-fi fans are getting a little sick of seeing this look over and over again -- I mean, enough with the cyberpunk hair cuts and fancy holographic photo equipment, if I wanna see it I'll take out my DVD of Bladerunner. I'd rather just keep watching one good movie than a bunch of imitations.

Why is it every time I see a Spielberg movie, I always leave the theater feeling as if I have just been manipulated? This movie is no exception. Everything about this movie (the music, the script, the photography, the editing) serves the purpose of making sure I share Spielberg's viewpoint about the movie's rather contrived situation. I especially resent this type of emotional manipulation when it tries to make a greater statement about our present day criminal justice system through questionable comparisons. The movie's premise is an interesting one and I think we would all agree that constitutional rights need to be protected but, at the end of the day, this movie is just another sappy, preachy Spielberg movie. (And why is it everyone in the future has a hovercraft? Even more importantly, when do I get my own hovercraft?)

Watch it in 2004 or don't watch it at all... This reviewer remembers enjoying this Sci-Fi thriller when it was released and somehow wanted to pay homage to its director Steven Spielberg by watching it again 20 years later (still 30 years before the supposed events unfold).

The viewers should know that in the future, as "precognited" by a team of sixteen future experts assembled by Spielberg to brainstorm out the year 2054 for him:

• 5' 8" white males are the best runners,
• Covid-19 is called the "common cold",
• you can show flu-like symptoms and still talk to your employee without wearing a mask,
• climate change has been tackled,
• one must throw one's arms towards all directions to access videos on a screen,
• one can flick an image or play a video backwards with one's fingertips in the air but you have to physically download a file on a plastic card to upload it onto the computer located two feet away from yours,
• wood polish and car paint take microseconds to completely dry,
• prisons are made up of a lot of cylinders, all having to go up and down in a beautiful ballet-like sequence when you want to access a specific detainee,
• energy conservation is not a thing anymore,
• it is apparently better to build one small open elevator for each policeperson rather than one big closed one,
• one still has to say "overhead" out-loud in the kitchen otherwise you stay in the dark to do cook dinner,
• huge screen-less images of political propaganda display at night in areas where no one is watching,
• magnetic cars follow the gutter laterally and not straight-forward,
• Aquafina bottled water is still a thing,
• physical "newspapers" are still read in the subway,
• factories use laser beam in the open,
• Lexus is the only car manufacturer,
• cops run towards fugitives without shooting their non-lethal weapons only waiting to be shot at (which makes sense, otherwise this nonsensical movie would have ended from the start),
• eye surgeons don't make the difference between viruses ("cold symptoms") and bacteria (what antibiotics are used for),
• surgical assistants don't have to wash hands after going to the bathroom,
• there is no more consent before kissing or touching someone else's buttocks,
• dad jokes are still a thing ("she has her eyes on you", "it was an eye-opener"), as well as more subtle puns, mind you: "in that regard...",
• one can replace eyeballs and mend the optic nerves on the kitchen table but removing a bandage before 12 hours will ruin the whole thing,
• "mail" to Santa Claus is still a thing,
• old people smoke pipes,
• umbrellas haven't improved a bit,
• one still has to blow dust off "SD cards" like it was an old NES video game cartridge,
• leather jackets are still cool,
• injections are done directly in the neck, somewhere in between the carotid artery and the salivary glands,
• the TV show "Cops" has been reinstated,
• ivory can still be used to decorate revolver grips (which means that either elephants are now too populated or that poachers are legally killing them)...

A strange lifeless film by the Hollywood master, Spielberg. It follows the usual story arch, which we have seen too many times already, so nothing surprises. And despite this being a science fiction movie of sorts. Of sorts, because besides the premise, everything else appears to be only futuristic rather than science fiction, which is not the same. Somewhere along the line the energy dissipates. It becomes an empty exercise on pirotechnics (aka FX aka special effects) in an extended chase that does not add up to drama. Performances are well below average for all actors, all of whom besides Tom Cruise and Max von Sydow are unknowns or TV cops that eat on screen while they talk (same food as in 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s cop movies...). In fact, they fail to be believable. Cruise remains capable and saves the tedium with his charisma. Von Sydow tries hard with very little. Production design is flawless, cinematography superb, and direction capable without pulling it off as it should. Fails absolutely to deliver an exciting action scifi film along the lines of the classic of all classics, "Blade Runner." Pass the DVD rental unless you are a film student in need of some FX background.

...but unfortunately this movie is ruined by unsure direction, bad design, mediocre special effects and ill timed attempts at humor. Good old Spielberg just can't resist to be sappy and sentimental. Learn to trust the story you're telling, Steven! I think this would have worked much better on a smaller budget.

Having seen Private Ryan I thought to myself - Spielberg is not so bad guy after all. This movie proved me wrong. I would even dare to say that Private Ryan was directed by somebody else and labeled by Spielberg's name afterwards. Watching Minority report is a complete waste of time !! I tends to deal with a serious issues like a presumption of innocence in such an awkward manner that I kind of expected Tom&Jerry to jump out of the screen. The future life style and technology are depicted in a way that reminded me of Ed Wood's movies. The movie has bright moments too (eye surgery by Peter Stormare) but they fill out ten per cent of a total running time.

It is sad when critics reach the point where the name of the director automatically insures a positive review. Genius that he is or was, the last 2 films are by any standard poor. Here again despite the appeal of Cruise, is a movie that lacks any cohesion, sensitivity, vision, or logic. There is no "minority report". Rather there is an echo. There is no sympathetic character, only a world devoid of any redeeming characteristics. Craft maybe high but the story is totally lacking. Why is Spielberg so fascinated by the loss of children? How do you justify motivations covering 6 years? Why do the plots have to be transparent? Why does the movie drag on? Watch it without the thought that this was done by the same man who gave us Jaws, ET, Indie etc. Even the best directors often run dry, Kubrick for one. Here is another.

I have read quite a few comments regarding this film and wonder if these people saw the same film that I saw. I fail to see the genius in this movie which is a term many people are throwing around in regards to this film.

The basic story is very predictable. The movie is far too long for the content. I found myself looking at my watch wondering when they were going to wrap it up as it was obvious who set up John Anderton. Some people claim that Spielberg's 'vision' of the future was so vastly superior to other filmmakers whereas I felt that his vision was just an excuse to put as much product placement as possible into the film.

In Short....Too long....Too many holes in the plot....Too slow moving....Too predictable......I give it a 4

Here is a film that never draws the audience in. It stays detached from the outset. You never lose sight of the fact that you're watching a movie. I was not drawn into the film at all. The answers to plot points about Tom Cruise's son and who is trying to set him up were obvious to me very early on and left little to do but see how much annoying CGI they could cram into to the movie. One of the few bright spots for me personally was seeing Jessica Harper used effectively in a movie, something which hasn't happened in a long while. There were some inventive aspects to this movie, but they weren't anything that hasn't been seen in futuristic movies before and they seemed to detract from the audiences ability to achieve a suspension of disbelief. Overall, I was disappointed and ready for this movie to finally end.

For a sci-fi film directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise this is surprisingly bad. The story is lame and the supporting cast is terrible.

This is yet another Tom Cruise flick that swarms with gadgets, techno-babble and fast "car" hunts that only an adolecent pimpled kid can love.

I sure didn't, even if it had it's moments :-)!