Starring Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Max von Sydow, Samantha Morton, Neal McDonough, Peter Stormare, Kathryn Morris, Steve Harris, Tim Blake Nelson. Directed by Steven Spielberg. It is 2054 in Washington D.C., and murder has been eliminated. Captain John Anderton (Cruise) runs the special Precrime unit which arrests people about to commit a murder. Through the use of pre-cognitives, young people who were experimented with as children and who have special powers to see the future where murder is concerned, the Precrime unit is able to see murders before they occur. The detectives attempt to find the suspect from the clues the Pre-Cogs see, and then go and arrest the person before the murder is committed. Anderton joined the unit just after his son was abducted and murdered six years prior, and he still mourns the loss which he continues to blame himself for. The impact of this loss led to the breakup of his marriage to Lara (Morris). Lester Burgess (von Sydow) heads the precrime unit and wants to take the program national. A skeptical U.S. Attorney General has sent Danny Witwer (Farrell) to inspect the Precrime unit. He snoops around and finds that the still grieving Anderton is hooked on synthetic drugs to forget his pain when he's off-duty. But something worse happens for Anderton - the Pre-Cogs visualize a murder he is supposed to commit in a few days, the murder of a man Anderton does not know and has never met before. Anderton is forced to go on the run to discover who this man is, and whether the Pre-Cogs vision of the future turns out to be true. Spielberg has said he was offered, and passed up, both Spider-Man and the Harry Potter movie. And while both were good projects and are good movies, his decision was a sound one. Minority Report is his best work in a long time. It is ostensibly a thriller, but it offers much more. While Artificial Intelligence was supposed to be a Stanley Kubrick inspired story, this film is far more influenced by Kubrick's bent towards cold analytical stories and intellectual weight, as well as commercial appeal. Spielberg films futuristic Washington in a cold, sparse manner using grainy film and bleached light. There is a bit of an absence of human feeling and emotion like that of Kubrick, and that is wholly appropriate for a society that coldly and impersonally puts people away forever without even a trial. The story is interesting, moves along fairly briskly, despite its over two-and-a-half hour running time. One flaw is the end of the film, which feels a little too pat and requires the characters to suspend logic a bit. Much time is spent showing Spielberg's vision of the future. This includes magnetic cars that dock at ones apartment, and then scale down the wall to go to work on magnetized highways, and the use of metallic, artificial spiders to test suspects for their eye print. It also includes sophisticated kinds of monitors and gadgets used by the cops in interpreting the Pre-Cogs visions. I was able to guess who was behind the murder, but I didn't know why or guess for the right reasons. But the details of the thriller aren't as interesting as the brilliant creation of an interesting future world, and the idea of precrime itself - whether people should be locked up despite never having actually committed any crime at all, and whether ones fate is something that could be seen in advance, somehow predetermined, an individual somehow unable to change it. Tom Cruise, like Harrison Ford, is an action star who can actually act, and carries the movie on his muscular shoulders. He can handle both the physical elements of the role, as well as the emotional and acting demands. But it is the haunting performance of Samantha Morton, as the emotionally ravaged Pre-Cog who dominates the screen when she appears. With her ghostly appearance and haunting voice, she is the conscience of the film. She several times tells Anderton the choice is his - his future destiny is not carved in stone by her or anyone else's vision. Farrell and von Sydow, and a twisted Peter Stormare also provide solid support. Minority Report is a gritty, inventive, thoughtful and action-packed thriller, where the story and themes of the movie do not take a back seat to the considerably effective special effects. It adopts a consistently adult tone - there are no comic book characters, jokey dialogue or dinosaurs anywhere to be found. It should satisfy sci-fi, thriller, mystery and Steven Spielberg fans alike. If you would like to respond, please click the E-Mail Press Here To Go To The Review List Page