[In the following review, O'Brien examines the function of technology in Minority Report and places the film within the context of other large-scale futurological melodramas.]

Philip K. Dick's short story “The Minority Report,” which was first published in the magazine Fantastic Universe in 1956, posits a future America in which crime has been virtually abolished through the employment of mentally retarded people—“gibbering, fumbling creatures, with … enlarged heads and wasted bodies”—who possess the wild talent of seeing crimes before they happen. Wired to a network of computers, the “pre-cogs” transmit visions of future events, on the basis of which future criminals are arrested and incarcerated in a vast detention camp.

The story's tricky but oddly perfunctory narrative hook—the director of the Precrime program is himself fingered by the pre-cogs as a future murderer—provides the occasion for a run-through of paradoxes associated with prediction, particularly the notion that knowledge of how things will turn out makes it possible to change the outcome. The “minority report” of the title refers to a dissenting pre-cog's variant vision of the future, proven wrong by the concurrence of two majority reports, a situation which is likened to the use of multiple computers to verify a solution. Of the story's relevance to actual problems of cybernetics or to the laws of probability I am not competent to speak; to a lay reader it has more the effect of a discussion of mathematical theory overheard in a dream.

With its background of postwar devastation and a murky, top-secret contention between military and civilian branches of government, its concern for the fate of thought criminals, and its troubling linkage (under federal auspices) of brain damage and computer science, “The Minority Report” is a dream—a bad dream—straight out of the 1950s. Written relatively early in Dick's prolific career, it offers only rudimentary traces of those virtual realities and industrially marketed simulacra characteristic of his remarkably influential later fiction. Also suggestive of the 1950s is its no-frills prose style, which evokes a perfectly dull future devoid of exoticism or poetic resonance: “Cold, light rain beat against the pavement, as the car moved through the dark streets of New York City toward the police building. … Helplessly, Anderton watched pedestrians hurrying along the rain-swept sidewalks. He felt no strong emotion.” We might have stumbled into the middle of The Pre-Cog in the Gray Flannel Suit.

The movie that Steven Spielberg has made from this by now somewhat distant source is couched in a style far removed from Dick's flatly functional prose. Its first reel is as bravura a display of style as Spielberg has ever offered, as we watch a movie-within-a-movie of adultery, jealousy, and homicidal rage being assembled from the visions of the pre-cogs by Tom Cruise and his team of Precrime techies who must race against time to find within these images clues to the location of a murder before it is committed. The rapid cutting between the “real” events, the stylized, fragmentary visions of the pre-cogs (a trio of semi-dormant prophets lying on their backs in a glassed-in pool), and the zooms and enlargements effected by Cruise with a mere wave of his hands to the tune of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, each image interlarded with billowing layers of reflections and superimpositions, is a relentless display of the futuristic technology on which it comments: even the smoke and mirrors have smoke and mirrors. Spielberg seems to want to make a catalog of his own devices, to lay bare the inventory of tricks available to him, in a mood compounded of exhilaration and dread.

If I can do this, he appears to suggest, then the future that the film is about has already arrived. Unlike the other Dick-derived films of recent decades—Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall—Minority Report is not so much a work of elegiac or satiric anticipation as it is an acknowledgment that it is already too late to turn back. Even if the screenplay raises moral issues about free will and advance knowledge, insisting somewhat stridently that one can always choose a better course of action, the dazzling and enveloping stylistic maneuvers imply that such independent renunciation is henceforth likely to occur only in the movies. The technology is just too powerful for the characters to assert an existence apart from it. The very notion of background and foreground is obliterated by a visual field in which the people are little more than swirls of information oscillating among other analogous swirls. If Spielberg's last film, the much-underrated A.I., culminated in a tragic apprehension of human limitation, Minority Report charts a more self-contradictory path. At its strongest it unleashes mythic forces that it then tries to contain with relatively flimsy last-reel fix-ups; it's as if the Cumaean Sibyl were uneasily cast in a remake of The Fugitive.

Dick's story plays with the idea of multiple future time-paths, something like Borges's garden of forking paths. In its early stages Minority Report—with its casual interaction of present-tense humans with three-dimensional talking archival holograms and live-action prophetic visions—suggests the idea of a movie in which past, present, and future can unfold simultaneously. Tom Cruise's Precrime “theater of operations” could be seen as the ultimate film studio, capable not merely of imitating but of intervening in reality, and getting its inspired script concepts not from a bunch of contract screenwriters but from a captive team of seers, throwbacks to the most ancient oracles, who soak endlessly in a high-tech aquarium (called, appropriately, the Temple) complete with an infatuated, half-mad scientist-companion. These early scenes of the lab at work have a charm that must be autobiographical, since they amount to a metaphorical description of Spielberg's daily routine making movies. In that light, it is easy to imagine that considerable personal anxiety underlies the notion (suggested by Cruise's fate after the pre-cogs identify him as a murderer-to-be) of the director shut out from his own studio—barred from using the equipment that he has so incomparably mastered, accused, as it were, by his own creation.

Prospero on the run: except that Prospero in this version is a damaged man in perpetual mourning for his mysteriously vanished six-year-old son, separated from his wife, and addicted to a drug that he buys from a drug dealer with empty eye sockets. The revelation of those dreadful holes is part of an elaborate pattern of eye-related motifs summed up in the female pre-cog's repetitive question: “Can you see?” In the world of Minority Report, public security is maintained by random eye-scans, and criminals have their eyes replaced in order to elude the scanners; crime is suppressed by the transmutation of the pre-cogs' inner visions into electronically reproducible form; the memories of past anticipations are downloaded electronically from the brains of the pre-cog seers. The symbolism looms portentously—was it to invoke the totemic presence of Ingmar Bergman that Max von Sydow was cast in the picture?—but with undeniable effectiveness.

By the time Tom Cruise is having his eyes surgically removed by a grotesque doctor-and-nurse pair holed up in a generically sleazy tenement apartment, the symbolism has veered into the realm of a horror-movie creepiness that Spielberg has never—or at least not since Jaws—explored with quite such enthusiasm. Like the best horror movies, this segment derives its effect more from what we don't see than from what we do, but the power of suggestion is sufficient to conjure up a mood of deep unpleasantness from which the rest of the film wants in some sense to escape, just as the spectator wants unquestionably to escape from the clamps that pin Cruise's eyes open in preparation for his operation. The film seems to gain a cumulative power—laced with grotesque humor—the deeper it drives its protagonist into darkness.

While the blindfolded hero (he must wait twelve hours for his replaced eyes to heal) submits to uncontrollable inward visions—like home-movie playbacks—of his son's disappearance, police investigators unleash small electronic eye-scanning spiders into the tenement where he's hiding out. We are given an aerial view as the spiders swarm through the building, “reading” the eyes of tenants as they quarrel, make love, or sit on the toilet, their activities scarcely interrupted by the incursion.

The whole episode is a kind of giddy parody of an early 1930s movie in the Street Scene or Dead End mode (complete with camera angles worthy of Busby Berkeley). The tenement itself is a retrograde reminder of a vanished pre-techno world of milk bottles and peeling wallpaper, while the electronic spiders—like all those symbolic eyes—evoke nothing so much as the made-for-Hollywood surrealism of Dali's designs for Hitchcock's Spellbound. (In a similar way the slimy and cynical eye doctor and his aging peroxide-blonde companion seem to have crawled out from an obscure Graham Greene novel adapted into a Bela Lugosi movie.) This ought to be indigestible but it's exuberantly sustained, as if to show just how many moods and cultural references and potential plot turns Spielberg can telegraph from one shot to the next. Like much of Minority Report, the sequence has an air of willful gaudiness seeking constantly to surpass itself.

Put the camera down,” a hologram of Cruise's estranged wife tells him only half-jokingly in an early scene, in a three-dimensional home movie retrieved from happier days, to be endlessly replayed in his moments of drugged, anguished leisure. The voyeuristic nastiness of, say, the camera-obsessed killer in Michael Powell's Peeping Tom is not so far away, and a good deal of the fascination of the movie's early scenes lies in wondering just how far the director is willing to push things. One so wants Cruise to live up to the seedy aura of these first scenes, to be less of a hero than he must finally become to satisfy the requirements of the chase thriller into which the movie gradually evolves.

The tone shifts with a needlessly protracted flight-and-pursuit sequence—all soaring and swooping and dragging through the mud, sliding through burning tunnels and crashing through floor-boards—that seems designed chiefly to wake up anyone who might be dozing over his popcorn. The computer-game wizardry continues with an elaborate but empty scene in a car factory, with Cruise and his pursuers fighting it out on the assembly line to the point where Cruise ends up built into the car and driving it off the line, a variation on an unrealized Alfred Hitchcock gag intended for North by Northwest, realized in the manner of a James Bond punchline. But then changes of emotional register seem almost the point here: each episode resembles a movie in itself—the suspense plot, the marriage plot, the technology and ethics plot, the mystical wonder plot—so that the cynicism of one scene is contradicted but not annulled by the hopefulness of another.

If film noir was the Jacobean drama of America in the 1940s, since the 1980s the large-scale futurological melodrama—Blade Runner, Total Recall, Strange Days, Twelve Monkeys, The Matrix—has taken its place as the genre where style for its own sake, carried off with a Renaissance swagger, is as a matter of course wedded to the most extreme psychological and political situations. (By contrast the Flash Gordon-derived space adventures in the Star Wars mold might be likened to the allegorical masques, more celebratory than sensational, favored for more ceremonial Jacobean occasions.)

To this genre Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) stands in somewhat the same relation as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy to its ever more baroque and bloody successors: the initiating statement that can be reworked, reversed, echoed, expanded, burlesqued. What the sensibility associated with Philip K. Dick added to the mix was the self-consciousness that makes every identity a possible mask or simulacrum, every parallel world potentially a drug-induced delusion or politically motivated fun park. The brute fact of technological power is undermined by the queasy, spiraling what-ifs of a self-doubt so severe that it ends by doubting the world. The more material it gets, the more subtly decorporealized the whole enterprise becomes: a world of smeared light and oddly weightless transportation, hovering on the brink of realizing that it has become a mirror image of something that wasn't there to begin with, a parody of its own advertising campaign. The hall of advertising holograms that Tom Cruise strolls through in Minority Report—each ad calling him by name as he comes near—is at once the triumph of product placement and a vision of a peculiarly painless hell.

The beauty of the form is precisely that it permits the contemplation of the direst possibilities under conditions of optimum lightheadedness. End of the world? Disappearance of the individual? Appropriation of memory itself by machines or by sinister corporate forces controlling the machines? The emptying out of whatever seemed real? All nothing more than the day-dream of a summer afternoon, the soothing delight of a session at the multiplex, no more troubling than a dead king's curse or a courtier's revenge, especially if broken up with wisecracks and flights of humorous invention. (The futuristic product design with which the movie teems is the contemporary form of quibbling wit.)

Comedy, rough stuff, ingenious puzzles, and the most tearful personal drama can be mixed together without a hint of inappropriateness: in fact such a contradictory mix is required to give the full flavor of a well-rounded future, neither too apocalyptic nor too transparently wish-fulfilling. A movie like Minority Report can fulfill many functions at once: mall-of-the-future consumer preview, brainteaser for the computer whizzes, action picture where in comic-book style absolutely anything can happen, forum for provocatively reframing big questions about sex roles or environmentalism or personal privacy, kaleidoscopic fun fair made of speed and glitter.

Spielberg being Spielberg, he adds to the mix his clearly unavoidable drama of familial devotion and familial loss, a drama hinging here on not one but two brutal crimes, one involving the loss of a child and one the murder of a parent, one forever unsolvable and the other the plot's Key to All Keys, the secret crime that (it turns out) made Precrime possible in the first place. In its latter reaches the narrative must race a little too breathlessly to ensure that by solving a crime the hero will also save himself from his own despair and be given a shot at reintegrating himself into domestic life. In that process, the screenplay must gesture a little too heavily to make sure that everybody still has some notion of what the movie is supposed to be about. (When Cruise has the chance to exact vengeance for the loss of his son, a pre-cog tells him, “You still have a choice!”) The multi-track possibilities begin to narrow into the considerably more well-worn grooves of a thriller seen many times before, all so we can get to the other side of what we've been caught up in.

The problems with which the plot concerns itself—of predicting the future, of preventing crime in advance, of guarding against the abuse of oracles—are in some sense false problems, since no such foolproof oracles exist or are likely to, although they make possible some fleeting what-if speculations on the nature of time and probability. Spielberg doesn't seem particularly interested in exploring the philosophical possibilities of the set-up, such as they are. His approach is fundamentally emotional, and he gets more juice out of the mysteriousness of the pre-cogs, the notion of cops as servants in the temple of the oracles, the architecture of a Precrime lab where the upper high-technology region is adjacent to—and entirely dependent upon—a chthonic lower region of mist-draped waters and vatic pre-cog utterances. The possibility of a high-tech archaism, a direct link of the most deeply buried human impulses to the most advanced and by now almost autonomous machinery, is the kind of magic to which Spielberg responds. That he responds with an increasingly evident ambivalence is what makes his last two movies so interesting.

When the female pre-cog Agatha announces that she's tired of the future, it's a plateau marking the movie's farthest limit of exploration. Unfortunately, when Agatha (for plot reasons too complicated to summarize) is taken out of her amniotic pool and brought into the outside world, she loses a good deal of her aura. The moment she begins to talk something like a regular, if somewhat spaced-out human, the mythic power of the persona dissipates rapidly; she could be a troubled teen coming to grips with her problems at a rehab center or a New Age channeler making a house call. A chase through a futuristic mall, to the tune of “Moon River,” has its diverting aspects, but by the time Tom Cruise has spirited Agatha away to his wife's tasteful country house the whole situation comes dangerously close to comedy—what do you offer an oracle for lunch?—just as the script wants it to approach tragedy. At that point, as it happens, the intrigue is already collapsing under its own weight.

In the pool-bound Agatha, Spielberg has found a mythic image for the unknowable sources of his inspiration; and he makes us believe in that inspiration because of the remarkable beauty of so much that he has realized here. In a recent interview in Wired, Spielberg has little of note to say about the future or about pre-cogs, but he becomes eloquent in talking about the beauty of film as opposed to the digital technology which will almost certainly replace it: “The screen is alive. The screen is always alive with chaos and excitement, and that will certainly be gone when we convert to a digital camera and a digital projector.” The densely imagined frames of Minority Report are indeed often “alive with chaos and excitement,” and the effect of that passionate formalism far outweighs any deficiencies of script or concept, and any disappointment with the way the film is forced to resolve itself.

To humanize Agatha is inevitably to trivialize her. She's a force that the film can't really contain, because its own narrative power comes from soaking, so to speak, in her pool. Enlist her as a sort of secret weapon that can be carted from place to place and the power of the image is lost. Spielberg is unable adequately to answer the question of what becomes of oracles after their services are no longer required, and this makes the film's last sequence profoundly unsatisfactory: the pre-cogs are more or less put out to pasture, sent to live out their days in a wilderness cabin well stocked with comfortable old furniture and ample reading material. The idea of a future built on a visionary gift is traded in for a future much like what we already have, and so the visionaries must be stashed away somewhere. It feels a bit like sending the oracle of Delphi to a retirement home, and it doesn't sit right. What was wanted—wanted above all because of the extraordinary suggestiveness of the world that Spielberg has set up from the beginning—was something more appropriate to such an uncanny being, a fate perhaps more like that of the sibyl in Petronius, suspended in a cage for children to gawk at, muttering, “I want to die.” In effect the movie works hard, in the end, to erase the future that it has so carefully, and brilliantly, built up. It wants to go home.