Spielberg's latest dares to defy the Hollywood status quo

The big assumption in Hollywood has been that, coming off the box-office disappointment of last summer's "A.I.," Steven Spielberg would go all out to make "Minority Report" an audience-pleasing summer blockbuster, dumbing down the script and emphasizing action way over any intellectual ambitions.

MOVIE REVIEW

MINORITY REPORT

DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg

CAST: Tom Cruise, Max von Sydow, Colin Farrell

RUNNING TIME: 140 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for violence, drug-content, some sexuality and brief language

WHERE: Cinema 17, Crossroads, East Valley, Everett 1-3, Everett 4-10, Factoria, Galleria, Grand Cinemas, Issaquah 9, Kent 6, Kirkland Parkplace, Longston, Meridian 16, Monroe 12, Mountlake 9, Neptune, Oak Tree, Parkway Plaza, Redmond Town Center, SeaTac North, Valley Drive-in, Woodinville 12

GRADE: A-

PHOTO GALLERY
Minority Report

That hasn't happened. True, this time his film has a bona fide superstar (Tom Cruise), a dash of swashbuckle and several white-knuckle chases. Also, its particular premise allows Spielberg to bombard his audience with images of splatter violence in a way that often borders on the exploitative.

But the film is every bit as melancholy, thought-provoking and complex a piece of future noir as "A.I.," and dazzling cinema that -- in the tradition of the golden age of literary science fiction that inspired it -- takes a relatively outlandish premise and builds a whole world of possibility around it.

Based on a 1956 story by Philip K. Dick (whose stories also provided the basis for "Total Recall," "Blade Runner" and this year's "Impostor"), it's set in 2054, when America is an intensely consumer-oriented, quasi-police state in which personal privacy has all but vanished in the onslaught of technology.

And in Washington, D.C., an experimental "Department of Pre-Crime" that's just about to go national has reduced the District's murder rate to near zero by using a trio of mutated psychics to "see" acts of extreme violence before they happen, so teams of police can be dispatched to prevent them.

But when the acting head of the department (Cruise) looks at his screen one day and sees a vision of himself murdering a total stranger in exactly 36 hours, he has to go underground and in pursuit of the only thing that might save him: a suppressed "minority report" by the psychics that proves there's a flaw in the system.

As this premise segues into a high-powered thriller of equal parts cliffhanger, murder mystery and heroic quest, critics might reasonably take swipes at some of the film's less impressive special effects, especially a freeway network for magnetic cars that looks like something from a bad Japanese manga.

It's also hard not to notice, and take some small offense from, the film's orgy of product placements -- Pepsi, Ben & Jerry's, Lexus, Burger King, USA Today, The Gap, CNN, Sony, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, you name it. (Fifty years from now, apparently, there are no new corporations in the world.)



	Precrime detective John Anderton (Tom Cruise) "conducts" an array of images that lead him to a murder that has not yet occurred.

On the other hand, this familiarity seems to be part of Spielberg's design: He obviously wants to present a vision of the future that's a fairly recognizable extension of our world today, with little of the awesome visual razzle-dazzle of "A.I.," or even the bleak future atmospherics of "Blade Runner."

It's Orwellian, but in a more benign, commercialized form. The loss of privacy it envisions is less to suppress freedom and individuality as to sell products, so that his hero walking through a mall is computer-recognized by a retina scan and greeted by a blitz of ads personalized to his buying patterns.

In a way, Spielberg is subordinating all his elements here -- Janusz Kaminski's grainy photography, Alex McDowell's imaginatively minimalist production design, John Williams' music that deliberately evokes Bernard Herrmann's suspenseful "Vertigo" score -- to his story in a way he never has before.

And that story is as intricate and challenging as anything he's ever attempted, expanding Dick's original premise to boldly explore the implications of preventive detention and otherwise play with the ironies of an advanced society trying to technologically protect itself while keeping its economy humming.

Though he claims the opposite ("I wanted to get away from Stanley"), his film is once again very Kubrick-influenced: There are strong echoes of "A Clockwork Orange" throughout, and -- like his late "A.I." collaborator -- his static compositions always tend to be more interesting than his action scenes.

As a star vehicle for Cruise, the film also echoes Kubrick. Cruise's traumatized character here is very close to his "Eyes Wide Shut" persona -- the killer smile gone, the charisma underplayed (the flashier role is Cruise's antagonist, played by Colin Farrell), oozing emotional vulnerability from every pore.

All told, "Minority Report" is a happy surprise: a timely antidote to the comic-book mindlessness of "Spider-Man" and repetitive space fantasy of "Star Wars," and an encouraging bid from the top of the A-list to once again reach very high and spit in the face of the gutless formula filmmaking that rules Hollywood.