Oh, fuck it. Here's a review of Minority Report. Or some thoughts, at least.

My mother purchased the dvd when I was back east for vacation. She actually got the full-screen edition, which answered the eternal question of who actually would buy one of those things. Anyway...

Luckily, it was a hit so my Philip K. Dick-inspired screenplay, Divine Invasions will make me rich, but I'm not sure it's worth seeing, otherwise. On its own terms as a summer thriller, the movie was fine, I guess, but as a Dick adaption, it was wanting. Spoilers follow, read if you dare.

It really isn't a Dickean nightmare if the system can be dishonestly manipulated by others against you. It's a Dickean nightmare if the system or reality itself is flawed, or if it turns against you or fucks up as a result of working properly.

The only flaws in pre-crime in the movie were as a result of user manipulation. If the minority reports were incorporated from the beginning, then it seemed like two dozen out of a couple hundred potential murderers would have been let off with a warning.

I was bothered by the lack of insight the psychics displayed. Could they distinguish between degrees of murder? When Tom Cruise shot the man, it was ultimately a suicide on the part of the victim, and I would think the pre-cogs would be able to identify the motives and reality behind the events, rather than projecting a purely visual display of the crime scene. If someone is going to stage a suicide to look like murder, and the psychics can't tell the difference, what good are they? In six years, you'd think it would have happened before. For a system dependent on psychic phenomena, it was used remarkably bluntly.

It seems like the filmmakers didn't think through the situation down to the details. How are actualy murders investigated or prosecuted, if at all? There certainly couldn't have been much of investigation into the other death pinned on him, otherwise detectives would have established that Cruise could not have committed the second murder he was blamed for, because he had a strong alibi, and his gun was in someone else's posession. Maybe it's my fault for thinking about it too much, but a movie needs to earn its suspension of disbelief, and MINORITY REPORT didn't.

I thought the rocket packs were a nice touch, actually; they seemed really crappy, in a Phil Dick kind of way. I like how the technology in Dick's stories seems to be carboard and scotch tape. In the story "Minority Report," the pre-crimes were reported as names on punch cards; the lack of nuance in the reporting is part of what propelled the plot.