-- WARNING: I might ruin the movie for you. But that's okay, the movie sucked, anyway. --
Okay, I'm sorry. I'm going to have to be the
dissenting voice here. To play on the node title, story title, and movie title, I'll have to submit the minority report. I'll put all the movie's little, struggling, contrived plot nonsenses away for this. Anyone who saw what was done to
A.I. will understand just how bad movie plots can go when you don't want to be "depressing."
If you are a sci-fi fan, than I would expect you to have at least heard
Phillip K. Dick's name. He wrote the novel that
Bladerunner was based on. He wrote the short story that
Total Recall was based on. As a side note, he was crazy: he thought an
advanced alien information system (called
VALIS (he wrote a novel about it)) was contacting him on a regular basis. But anyway. Dick's work is mostly dark and scary. He wrote about
manipulation of the masses through
mass media. He wrote about
large, oppressive systems propogating themselves, causing the masses to suffer either physically or by making them
non-people.
His short story "Minority Report" follows in Dick's dark, depressing style, but you wouldn't know it from watching Spielberg's piece of crap movie. Okay, that's not totally true. Spielberg did to a good job of keeping the
atmosphere dark. In fact, he did a great job. The apartment Anderton visits to have his
eyes changed is creepy as hell and those
little spider things made my skin crawl. BUT...
...The movie completely removes the two parts of the story that make it a really, really good one. First off, the movie removes the
intended conflict. In the movie, it is one man, who is a part of the pre-crime system, against another man, who is also a part of the pre-crime system. One wants
control, the other just wants
justice. The story, however, pits the
system against the people (pre-crime versus a
rebel alliance completely left out of the movie). The movie shows an
ego versus a
hero. The story shows the
system versus the people; the
powerful versus the
inspired.
Second, the movie removes the power of the warning Dick was screaming. Here's where I ruin it. In the short story Dick wrote,
the system wins and lives. In the movie, it doesn't. In the story, the
main character comes to terms with his
desire to keep the system he has helped create-- which is doing a damn good job of stopping murder-- alive. In the story, the main character takes the steps necessary to keep the system alive after finally understanding how much he wants to do so. In the movie his desires are completely opposite.
In the end, I could deal with most of Spielberg's little plot changes. I thought Anderton
losing his son was interesting. I thought Anderton being
divorced was interesting. I even found the kidnapping of the pre-cog interesting, although it was poorly done in the film. (I couldn't stop laughing during most of the scenes during this part. My friend commented that he wasn't aware the movie was a comedy.) BUT, I could not deal with the reversal of the ending, the removal of the intended conflict, and the hackneyed way Spielberg tried to throw lots of interesting ideas together.
I'm sorry, but Minority Report will not be a
classic of the sci-fi genre, and it is not one of Spielberg's better movies. Hell, it's not even a good movie.
Go watch
Bladerunner.