Look what I saw: Minority Report

 Online Film columnist James Marples tells us to look at what he saw: Minority Report, starring the lovely Tom Cruise.

Ah, Tom Cruise. What happened to him? I’ll tell you: he’s gone peanut-bananas insane and now spends most of his time jumping about on peoples’ sofas and giving ridiculous amounts of money to a church created by a science fiction writer. We should remember, though, that despite the fact he is a couple of screws short of a picnic, he really can act when he puts his mind to it.  Or at least…he could act…I haven’t actually seen him in anything new since it was discovered that he had a few sandwiches loose.

Anyway, I got a chance this week to see one of Cruises’ better films, Minority Report. I haven’t seen this film in ages and I was surprised to find that I thought it just as cool as I did when I was 12. The story centres around John Anderton, a cop with a dark past and a serious case of ‘small man syndrome’, who is part of an experimental crime initiative which prevents murders before they happen. The imaginatively named ‘Pre-crime’ division is aided in this endeavour by a trio of seemingly omniscient psychics who have the ability to ‘dream the future’. They just do murders though, which is fair enough. The film would have been considerably less interesting if they utilised their amazing gifts to efficiently distribute parking tickets or something.

Naturally, everything goes all kinds of wrong when John himself is implicated in the future murder of someone he has never met. This leads to him going on the run from the system that he helped create in order to clear his name a bring down the evil Pre-crime division which…effectively…stopped murder. Yeah. The general message of the film gets a bit lost towards the end, but aside from some MASSIVE plot holes, it’s still enjoyable and entertaining.

The visual style of this film is brilliantly imagined; the cinematography is excellent and the CGI involved, whilst not being great (it was 2002), is not so bad that you’d notice. The drained colour pallet, whilst ultimately being very very silly (I mean…what? There’s no colour in the future? Does everything have to be monochrome? The future may be bright but it’s nowhere near orange), suits the sleek aesthetic of the environments. The hypothetical technology displayed in the film is also pretty cool…though it is single-handedly responsible for motion controls in gaming, a regrettable legacy to say the least. Basically, all you need to know about the technology in this film is that Cruise goes mental with a sound gun. A SOUND GUN! A gun. That shoots sound. In terms of admittedly geeky awesomeness, that’s right up there with the knife-on-a-chain.

In conclusion, this is a good film. Whilst I do think that the premise and central idea of the narrative (seeing the future, the illusion/realisation of choice…general temporal-mind-bamboozlement), could have been used better, there is enough good stuff here to keep you entertained. Slightly confused…but entertained.

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SOUND GUN!