Retrospective: Minority Report (Patreon)

Spielberg has always had good timing. He waited until the War on Terror to adapt Philip K. Dick's story about preventive detention and warrantless surveillance. The Department of Homeland Security was founded a few months after Minority Report's premiere. Congress passed the Patriot Act while the film was in post. Minority Report isn't less ahead of its time than a movie that checks the news every five minutes.

But more to the point, the first act of Minority Report is excellent science fiction. Spielberg, who knows how to hook an audience in seconds, establishes the film's themes through some brilliant visual storytelling. He lays out the stakes carefully: we have the weaponized clairvoyants, a clear family drama that's going to become homicidal any minute, and a fixed amount of time for Cruise to do his job. It's properly suspenseful, and contains some of the best storytelling of Spielberg's later career. In the Aughts, Spielberg becomes obsessed with science fiction about the horrors of Bush's America (this, A.I. to an extent, and The War of the Worlds). After a Nineties marked by generational classics, Spielberg goes for slightly less crowd-pleasing material.

The second act of Minority Report is a bit more of a slog, bogged down by manhunt antics, lousy greenscreen, and an interminable fight scene in a factory (a type of action sequence, between this and Attack of the Clones, plagued 2002.) Things get more interesting in the third act, when a major plot twist reminds the audience that the story is much bigger than Tom Cruise, and that warrantless surveillance of the mind is an evil that doesn't work just because one crook might get killed. It's clever, solid filmmaking. That Spielberg has 10 or 15 films better than this one speaks extremely well of him.