5 Responses to “Minority Report”

• By J. Nowell on Mar 11, 2010

  I’m a graphic designer and I know horrible art when I see it. That doesn’t even resemble Tom Cruise either.
  Rating: 1 / 5
• By Anonymous on Mar 12, 2010

  so i haven’t seen it but i have some things to say. First of all, no one gives credit to the writers. It’s always the director who gets all the fame and glory. However, if a movie bombs, people usually say it was badly written. Hey, it could have been directed badly! I say this because my friend and neighbor, JON COHEN, co-wrote this screenplay. So if you diss a movie, diss it for the right reason. If you feel there was just something that didn’t click, dont jump to yell at the writer. Well, you can if you try writing a screenplay for a major movie.
  Rating: 5 / 5
• By LanPB01 on Mar 12, 2010

  How does this movie get such good reviews from critics? I suppose it helps to have Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise’s names attached. But let’s call it like it is – this movie is lousy. It was so boring, I was praying for it to end.
  Rating: 1 / 5
• By Anonymous on Mar 12, 2010

  Ok, this move gets a little too futureistic with the pre-cogs and other things. It thouraly grossed me out.
  Rating: 1 / 5
• By Gary on Mar 12, 2010

  Dire cut and paste Sci-Fi with the ubiquitous Cruise set in a dips…dsyop..dystip…er, dodgy future. Giggles start early with that same industrial opening title sequence as ‘Blade Runner’ and some absailing cops. I was gobsmacked to see the ‘Solaris’ reference at the film’s close too as I had been thinking about that great film early on in this witless mess. ‘Minority Report’ is very reminiscent of Von Trier’s ‘Element Of Crime’ which also curiously borrowed from Tarkovsky. Lay off Andrei, guys. He made films for grown ups. That final image just made me miss him more and make unfavourable comparisans.

  Shot in that irritating sepia you get in trendy Brit commercials (the one with the cat doing the Matrix springs to mind) the preponderence of brand names adds to this banal recognition. The film’s absurd faith in corporate capitalism equals that of Kubrick’s ’2001′ with ‘Pan-Am’. Curiously, the only brand name most likely to have survived to 2054, the self styled ‘real thing’, fails to put in an appearance, unless I’m as blind as Cruise is at one point.

  Cruise’s disfiguring blankness has always been problematic and this third incongruous appearance in a left field project is making him an increasingly peculiar, eccentric and disquieting figure. A floating brand name in a sea of inconsequence. He seems to be disappearing before our very eyes and there wasn’t a lot of him there in the first place. Of course, Cruise has always had a penchant for putting himself through the mill before eventually triumphing in true American good old boy style but the brutal masochism of this triumvirate is positively perverse. I do wish he’d just get into S&M and take it behind closed doors, it’s getting painful to watch. He is without talent but highly motivated in true ‘semina’ style. Like a certain British tennis player at the Wimbledon Championships, he is forever ‘improving’ himself while with deft sleight of hand never seeming to reach any destination. It’s always fun to watch Cruise ‘focus’ with studied artlessness like he does on the cyber-board at PreCrime Headquarters where his arm swinging makes Ian Curtis of ‘Joy Division’ look like a tree. But now is not the time to ‘bruise the Cruise’. There is too much else to occupy us.

  I was watching Gerry Anderson’s (bless him) old Sci-Fi series ‘UFO’ the other day in which a secret accomplice to an attempted assassination of the splendid Commander Straker gives himself away with a little slip. “I never said HOW he tried to kill me!” Straker says sternly to the imprudent man. Goodness, what a great plot device. I mean, there’s no WAY a writer would be crass enough to use it 30 years later in a multi-million dollar Sci-Fi epic. Funnily enough, I was watching an old ‘Columbo’ the other day too, and Spielberg’s name cropped up as director. Why he should come fall circle to do hack ‘who-dunnit’ work like this is a head scratcher, as are various plot holes, the most glaring being the conversation about suicide near the beginning.

  The action fares even less well in the credibility stakes. Spielberg subjects us to a premature, over-long and ludicrous chase before we’ve been given the chance to invest any emotional attachment to Cruise’s character which in anycase fatally fails to materialize in a stilted and expositional final half. Also, why is Cruise super-human? Even the most experienced stuntman would have fallen to his death on those cars. And holding your breath in freezing water for three minutes? Please. Even the in-action is silly, such as the Pre-Cogs emmersion tank. Why doesn’t it keep turning yellow? I mean, Pre-Cogs must need a toilet break sometime. Does that poor chap have to keep wading in looking for ‘floaters’? Actually, they’re all fully clothed, so maybe not. But er, in which case, how? Never mind. We’ll move expeditiously on to pose the question as to why film makers keep jumping on the Philip K Dick bandwagon. Let’s face it, the man was paranoid. I don’t believe a nation that fought a civil war to end slavery would re-impose it, especially with it’s obsession with freedom and civil rights. Mind you, the state still executes people. Still, I don’t buy it, and neither does Spielberg. Slaves are suddenly given such an inexplicably benign future as to be positively laughable so why bother adapting Dick at all? Either way, these weird and nauseating ‘future shock’ films have homogeonised into one big, long ‘worst movie of all time’. I long for an old fashioned cowboy film with that fiery old horse that nobody can ride until, well, you know. Instead, the Pre-Cog in my bath (someone’s used girlfriend) reliably informs me that Tom Cruise is soon to make a film in which philisophical ferrets from the year 2098 arrive in a time machine and take over the US government, turning it totalitarian until it all turns out to be a drug induced dream inside Cruise’s head. Can’t wait. Actually, I won’t need to as the future’s yesterday. Hollywood is re-making ‘Solaris’, apparently. *Groan*. Now, ‘Logan’s Run’ I could stand.
  Rating: 1 / 5

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