Minority Report, already a brilliant film, will inevitably go on to immortality over time. It’s one of those rare champions that was successful right out of the gate, doesn’t tire, and picks up speed down the stretch.

Set in 2054 and loosely based on Phillip K. Dick’s short story “The Minority Report,” Minority Report tells the tale of Police Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise) on a mission to clear his name after being accused of a crime he hasn’t yet committed. Relentlessly pursued by Department of Justice hatchet-man Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) and aided by Agatha (Samantha Morton) one of the three psychic “precogs” who has already foreseen his every action, Anderton swims upstream against a current of political forces, his own personal demons, and the inevitability of fate. This against the backdrop of the paradoxes of pre-crime: Should a person be punished for something he hasn’t yet done? And what price are we willing to pay to live in a crime-free society? We are inspired to consider the question of fate versus free will as we join Anderton in a pulse-pounding race to escape his past and alter his future.

Originally intended as a sequel to Total Recall, Minority Report went through enough rewrites and revisions over nearly a decade to make it distinctly its own. Imbued with muted hues, desaturated and washed-out colors, and overexposed lighting, the movie has the fim noirish feel of a cold world trying to look warm.

Spielberg’s vision of the future of technology has proven to be both imaginative and prescient. Instead of starting where the last movie-maker left off, Spielberg did what Spielberg does: He extrapolated from what is to envision what might be. That gives us a sci-fi wild ride with its head in Anderton’s world and its feet in ours.

Thought-provoking and intelligent in true Speilbergian style, Minority Report dazzles with its visuals even as it stimulates the mind with its musing about the dilemma of fate versus free will. This one stands out as unique among an already-unique handful of movies of similar theme or style. More than others in the genre, Minority Report runs heavier on the science and lighter on the fiction. Blade Runner haunts us, I, Robot entertains us, A.I. disappoints us, and Total Recall leaps all over us. But Minority Report runs a finger down our spines and plays footsie with our minds. It’s a seduction unlike any other because it’s ultimately our own seduction of ourselves. It is the world as it will be based on the world as it is. It is distant yet familiar. Beautiful yet recognizable, the way going back to our old neighborhood feels familiar and strange at the same time. Only in this case, of course, we’re launched forward. Forward to a time where we manipulate computers without touching them; access information in an instant; live in a world of retinal scans, uniformity, and mass production -- a world where we are bombarded 24/7 with ads that speak to us more and more personally until we believe in our own illusion and buy in to what we’ve sold ourselves. It’s a world where peace comes at the expense of a few who must suffer, out of sight and very much out of mind -- all rationalized away as being for the greater good. Sound familiar? It should. Aside from the emission-less cars and the clean subways, it’s pretty much us.

(Today, you can already be arrested for attempted murder; to quote Sideshow Bob of the Simpsons: “Ha! ‘Attempted murder?’ I mean, what is that? Do they give out a Nobel Prize for ‘attempted chemistry’?”)

As for the much-maligned ending to this film, it’s much-maligned for a reason. Speculations that the pastoral wrap up are utopian ideals in the vegged-out mind of the imprisoned Anderton are just apologetic rationalizations to explain away an ending that’s climactic fizzle doesn’t match the body’s sizzle. Apart from simply being abrupt, the ending doesn’t make sense in the movie’s world or in our own. The premise behind the current ending is this: Director Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow), company top dog and ultimate insider, managed to use an elaborate machination to trick the precogs into overlooking him as the murderer of Anne Lively, Agatha’s mother. So after an otherwise unblemished record and a now 100% crime-free Washington D.C., the entire system is shut down and all of the criminals are released.

Forget logic -- that doesn’t pass the laugh test. So one guy at the top was able to beat the system. Big deal. He gets caught anyway, and the entire city is still crime free. It’s like the theatrical ending of Blade Runner -- that soporific Deckard voice-over as Deckard (Harrison Ford) and Rachael (Sean Young) fly off to the blissful paradise of Canada. In both cases, it’s a forced ending by a bunch of well-meaning but chicken-shit writers and movie-makers who don’t want to be caught endorsing a Big Brotherish world of total government oversight and a ubiquitous and militaristic police presence. It’s the same reason that at the end of action films, the bad guy always has to die in some overblown, excruciating manner like falling from a great height onto rotating helicopter blades. No one trusts the judicial system to do the right thing after the movie is over. We can’t leave the theatre thinking: “Oh sure -- put him on trial. He’ll just hire some fancy pants lawyer to get him off.” We need to see the bad guy’s guts all over the pavement before we feel like we’ve gotten our money’s worth. So Minority Report flakes out in the end. The message: “Everything was perfect but that perfection came at the cost of having Agatha live the rest of her life in a giant bathtub, so screw it all.” It’s unfortunate and rare to see a director with such big balls wimp out at the end. How about a little truth, just for the sake of consistency? Morally, society never does the right thing. The rich exist at the expense of the poor. The powerful prey on the weak. It happens millions of times every day. Most movies resolve this moral dilemma for us. They tell us that we’re actually all really okay. We have to be. After all, we just saw it on the screen. But we’ve come to expect a bit more from Spielberg. It’s his own doing. He’s the one who raised the bar. So don’t pander. Don’t patronize. Let us see ourselves as we are. Let us do what we do best: rationalize our immorality, don’t apologize for it and don’t fix it. We don’t need the contrived resolution of happily ever after. The movie would have been fine ending as it began: in paradox.

That rant aside and a goofy scene where Anderton chases his own eyeballs down a hallway, notwithstanding, Minority Report plays it straight and gives us an intoxicating blend of science, technology, philosophy, and metaphysics wrapped around a gritty detective story and some pretty vivid action sequences. It’s the same balance the Spielberg struck with Jurassic Park, and it’s nice to see an intelligent movie that borrows from several genres without being a slave to any.

There are some real gems among the Phillip K. Dick stories that have been made into movies. There’s no denying it. In Minority Report, Spielberg and company have given us a diamond among gems.

   -- Malcolm Matthews
www.malcolmmatthews.ca