A great movie, absolutely, and our most recent DVD entertainment. I can only wish that I live to see a future in which you get to drive cars up and down the sides of buildings, as well as on futuristic freeways. And I loved how Tom Cruise, et. al, controlled computers with their fingertips. If I could control this damn crash-a-holic Windows XP piece of crap operating system with a sledgehammer (hmmm...not a bad idea, now that I think about it) I'd be happy. I enviously noted that throughout the entire nearly three hour movie the sophisticated computers seemed to work flawlessly. Undoubtedly Microsoft was not part of the "Minority Report" future.
My main gripe with the movie was its lack of attention to deep philosophical questions, which, I guess, I also would leave out of a flick if I wanted it to be a commercial success. Time travel usually is considered to be impossible, if this means changing the past so it alters the future. Yet here the future was foreseen, and the cops ran off to prevent murders that were definitely going to happen, unless they intervened, so they couldn't happen. Maybe I dozed off during part of the movie, but I never got how this really was supposed to work.
In the first sequence, Cruise is desperate to stop a forecasted murder, and barely gets there in time. Now, he wouldn't have been so anxious if he knew that his prevention of the murder was as destined as the murder itself (which doesn't make sense, of course; how could two alternative futures both be destined?) So it seems, from the "pre-cog's" dialogue, that we have a choice about the future. We don't have to act in accord with our destiny. At least, this is what she keeps screaming at Cruise when he faces his own forecasted future, "You can choose! You can choose!" You'd think that one of the only three people who can see into the future would know what she is talking about.
But, if Tom Cruise can choose his future, and step away from murder, why can't the other people who get arrested for murders they haven't yet committed? I never understood this. Maybe Tom is special. Or maybe the precogs have caused a lot of innocent people to be arrested. Whatever, it was prescient of the moviemakers to anticipate Bush's Iraq policy so perfectly: "We know that you are going to use weapons of mass destruction in the future. So we will attack you now, to prevent you from using them." Except, atacking Iraq virtually guarantees that if Hussein does have such weapons, he will use them. Which proves the U.S. right, I guess, sort of like Miss Cleo saying that if you dial her 900 number you will learn your future: "A large charge will soon appear on your phone bill."
Comments