Jun. 22, 2002 - 1:36 am

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Minority Report (2002)

so i had somewhat high expectations for this newest film from Steven Spielberg after seeing his last film A.I. (2001). i know many people didn't care for it, but i loved it. and i really felt the Kubrick input in the film. and many people don't like Kubrick either, but i love a lot of his work. pure genius. so Minority Report was unexpected in many ways. i wasn't really sure what the plot of this film would turn out to be like, or what the general ambience would be.

the general idea that we were given from the previews is this: a cop in the future works with a special task force that prevents murders before they happen. he then realizes that the system is predicting that he himself will murder someone. he is then on the run. so there ya go and that's the first half hour or so of the movie. but it's 2 hours and 20 minutes total. this movie is not extremely futuristic in terms of the plot. sure, they throw in some cool gadgets, weapons, cars, etc. but mostly this movie is just a detective story that happens to take place in the future. and Spielberg is very open about this fact. the three forseers that you see in the water in the previews are named after some of the most famous detective/crime novelists of all time. Arthur, Dashiell, and Agatha.

interesting note about this, after the film i was asking my friend Leslie if she could figure out which novelist the name Arthur referred to. i was drawing a momentary blank. i said the other two were Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett. she wondered who Dashiell Hammett was and wasn't he the one who wrote all the Sherlock Holmes novels. no, said i. that was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

hmmm...so what did i like about this film? i think it had some great cinematography in it definitely. there was this one really beautiful image of Agatha quivering, leaning her head on John's shoulder, each one looking in opposing directions with a black background. that's just magnificent. also, if you go see it, watch for a particular high angle shot with umbrellas that i would call referential to Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964). somebody also needs to convince me by the way that i did not actually see Cameron Crowe on the metro. he's not listed in the credits, but neither is a character such as "man with newspaper on metro." hmmm...i wonder.

the character of Agatha and the actress who played her, Samantha Morton, is wonderful too. maybe i just have a thing for girls with both power and frailty. probably. Spielberg does have a way of creating some amazing characters onscreen though. just look at Teddy from A.I. - again, he's just purely a genius at times.

things that i didn't like about this film. i hated the supporting cast. Max von Sydow is always awesome, but everyone else was pretty useless. this Colin Farrell guy sucks it big time. and come on, who really includes Patrick Kilpatrick in a quality film? the actress who played John's wife sucked too. as far as plot/ending, the last shot of John and his wife is really stupid to me. as is what follows about the forseers. also, i felt too bombarded by advertising when watching this film. yes it's supposed to have kind of a double meaning because you're laughing at John's bombardment with it too, but you know that Lexus paid to be in this film and i just can't help but hating being forced to look at that. at least in a movie.

also, i'm not really sure how i feel about all the humor in this film. a lot of really disgusting humor, like the eyeball doctor who gets snot everywhere. i do love Peter Stormare though. he's hilarious.

so i would recommend seeing this film i guess just for discussion purposes, but i think it was somewhat shoddily conceived. it has some beauty, but registers a little too high on the suck meter for its own good. overall, 7/10.