Minority Report. 2002. USA. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Screenplay by Scott Frank, Jon Cohen, based on the story by Philip K. Dick. With Tom Cruise, Samantha Morton, Colin Farrell, Max von Sydow. 35mm print courtesy of Warner Bros. 145 min.
Spielberg uses Philip K. Dick’s short story as a springboard for one of his most febrile and emotionally nuanced visions of technology and society. Already, in the 15 years since the film’s release, the noirish future state of Minority Report has become eerily like our own. The PreCrime bureau, led by Tom Cruise and a trio of psychic mutants (known as “precogs”), arrests and imprisons murderers before they’ve even committed the act. Yet under the oppressive gaze of Big Brother, where everything is known and everything preordained, the all-too-human craving for freedom inevitably mucks up the works.