The time has come to talk of Steven Spielberg. Of the many celebrated directors to launch or hit stride in their careers during the 1970s, Spielberg has been the most consistent, enduring, and by far the most successful. He was never one of the cool kids—while friends with Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, et al, he was regarded with polite amusement for his Middle American mannerisms and gently mocked for preferring Claude Lelouch to Jean-Luc Godard—but as happens in high school, the nerds so frequently go on to bigger and better things, while the pretty and cool are all too often left to mourn their lost youth. Steven Spielberg is, with all due respect and reverence, a nerd. He is our George Washington.
Obviously, the whole Mt. Nerdmore thing is inexact, the chronology doesn't line up, the Rushmore face Spielberg's making a movie about is Lincoln, blah blah blah. But I'm determined to come up with four nerdy visages to carve into a fuckin mountain, and none of your common sense or logic is going to stop me. Seriously, of American nerd movie directors, who else is going to be George Washington than Spielberg? George Lucas is Alexander Hamilton, the guy who counts the money. Peter Jackson's a goddamn foreigner. We'll figure out Jefferson and Lincoln some other time. For now, back to Spielberg.
Since Jaws dropped in 1975, damn near every picture Spielberg has directed has made an assload of money, and nearly every single one of them has been really good. He's directed a couple lousy pictures, but his successes far outweigh his failures, both numerically and in aggregate fucking awesomeness. Behold:
DuelThat's all before he turned 35. Yeah. Badass. He kept on with it, and even though he'd occasionally make a bad picture, they were never boring. Spielberg is very much an American, in the sense of being uncomplicated, optimistic, and a touch sentimental, and given that perspective he's been ambitious in terms of tackling different subjects and genres. Despite that sentimentality leading to criticism from many, and an image as a big ol' softie, Spielberg's always had a bit of a dark side. The four above-mentioned pictures have quite a few genuinely dark and scary moments. E.T. is a hell of a lot darker than most people remember. His WWII movies (Empire of the Sun, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan) are hardly sunshine and flowers. Until the brainfart at the end when the velociraptors forgot to guard the helicopter pad, and about fifteen minutes too little of dinosaurs eating people, Jurassic Park was solid.
Jaws
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Because I can't let my retarded and irrelevant George Washington parallel go, dig this: the 70s were like Spielberg's French and Indian War, wherein he showed precocious talent but the establishment (Euro-worshipping film nerds/British army) wouldn't let him in. But the early 00s were his Revolution. Washington became the commander in chief of the rebel army against England, and Spielberg finally started directing movies that were set in the future. Sure, that analogy holds as much water as a paper colander, but Steven fuckin Spielberg directing movies set in the future. This is motherfucking win.
The first one, A.I., sat a little weird with me. The online game that started a couple months before the movie came out was massive cool, and I nerded out with my bird out for weeks on that joint. Going to all the fake websites, “decoding” them to get the clues, calling the fake voice-mails, getting the clues there, working out just who killed the fictional scientist, mmm mmm mmm, good times. Then the movie came out and I was like “Huh, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the game at all. This is an SF remake of Pinocchio; while Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law fucking rock, the picture never quite satisfies. The aftertaste, that this is a pale shadow of Kubrick, leaves one, while respectful of the clearly loving homage paid by Spielberg to his late friend, hoping that Stanley had lived to make the picture himself.” (Ed. Note: sigh . . .) When I saw A.I. again I realized it wasn't as bad as I'd originally thought, and that it's actually a pretty good SF movie. And Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law were both still ridiculously awesome. But it's Spielberg's second future picture, the main topic of the rest of this post, that makes me curl up and purr.
Minority Report is one of my very favorite pictures Steven Spielberg has ever done, for many reasons. It's based on a Philip K. Dick story, as are Blade Runner and Total Recall, two very special pictures for me. There's a lot of “there” there with Philip K. Dick; he poses questions that make for good movies, A Scanner Darkly also among them (the shitstorms that were Paycheck and Next were not Phil's fault). Minority Report is not content to merely be an SF story set in the future, it is about the meaning of the future, and whether such a thing even exists. Mmmm, delicious existential philosophical questions. Seconds, please.
For his table work, Steven Spielberg took advantage of being a billionaire and did what might be the coolest thing in the history of pre-production: he threw himself a conference on futurism, and brought in a whole bunch of scientists, architects, philosophers, SF writers, advertising dudes, and Douglas Coupland to shoot the shit about what they thought the year 2054 would look like while a staff nerd or two took notes. This would seem to fly in the face of the story's point about the inherently unknowable future, but bear with me here. Spielberg's nerds happily yakked away and came up with all kinds of cool shit like maglev expressways, jetpacks for cops, guns that fire soundwaves, newspapers that update in real time while you read them, ads that use retinal scanning to get you to greet you by name to convince you to buy shit, and computers that you wear a Nintendo Power Glove to operate by making hand movements that look like conducting a symphony. Now, it's tempting to giggle a bit about the fact that Tom Cruise's computer was taller than he was (Ed. Note: that is not a joke about Tom Cruise being short) and that everything both it and those newspapers (Ed. Note: no one except old people will remember what a newspaper is in 2054, sorry) can do was being done on a portable telephone five years after the movie came out, not fifty. This still misses the point. The future being inherently unknowable and always subject to change guarantees that everything in the movie was going to be bullshit, giving Spielberg the best excuse in the history of SF if something in his movie (like the hypertrophic computer and those anachronistic “newspaper” thingies) ended up being dated. But rather than not give a fuck, Steven Spielberg said, “Ya know what? Let's make shit look really cool.” Because he's Steven Spielberg, and that's one of the many things so awesome about him: his appreciation for cool-looking shit.
Among the cool-looking things in Minority Report is its lead actor, Tom Cruise. Before his 2005 mushroom cloud of batshit, Tom Cruise was a mighty (albeit secretive and strange) cinematic force. He got $25 mil a picture and a quarter of first dollar gross because he was fucking worth it. Sure, not everything he was in was good, but it all made pots and pots of money. Tom Cruise himself was mostly responsible for that success, too: while some of his acting choices were twitchy, gesture-y, and flat-out weird, 85% of his performance was guaranteed to be pure, focused intensity. Sure, Far and Away sucked but if you thought Ron Howard trying to direct a Western and being fucking stupid enough to cast Tom Cruise as an Irish guy was gonna work, you deserve to have wasted every dollar watching that fucktardery that you did. It's not Tom Cruise's fault. Opie paid him a lot of money to do that shit.
Eyes Wide Shut? I'm perfectly happy being the one guy in the world who liked Tom Cruise's performance in that movie. That scene in Sydney Pollack's billiards room, where Sydney Pollack casually rules ass (“Okay Bill, let's cut the bullshit, alright? You've been way out of your depth for the last 24 hours! You want the truth? You want to know what kind of charade? I'll tell you exactly what kind. That whole play-acted, "take me" sacrifice that you've been jerking off with had nothing to do with her real death. The truth is, nothing happened to her after you left that hadn't happened to her before. She got her brains fucked out. Period!”)? Tom Cruise holds it down pretty good in that scene. It's Nicole Kidman who sucks in Eyes Wide Shut, not Tom Cruise, and that was Stanley Kubrick's fault. And Magnolia, well, Magnolia was special.
In Minority Report, Tom Cruise doesn't play his usual focused, intense superhero, he plays a cop tortured by the disappearance—and all but certain death—of his young son. His wife has left him and now all he has are his holographic home movies of them, and his future space asthma inhaler kazoos full of drugs. Giving Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise—two guys who've never gotten high on anything stronger than Ovaltine their whole lives—the benefit of the doubt, it would appear that future drugs are pretty well-designed, because this “Clarity” shit gets Tom Cruise smacked out of his motherfucking mind for about five seconds, he nods off, and then he wakes up with no hangover or nothing, is never visibly jonesing, and later in the movie when he stops getting high you never see him going cold turkey or anything. I'm not going to say Spielberg should have invited Hunter Thompson to his futurist conclave or anything, but either those boys don't know shit about getting high or there really is no downside whatsoever to being a junkie in the future, if kicking is just a matter of getting distracted by cops chasing you. Having a cold turkey car chase in a movie would be kind of fucking rad actually: vision cutting in and out when you're not hallucinating, thus just making turns that avert certain death, ralphing out the window of the car and maybe even nailing a gun-toting bad guy with the spray with the speed and everything. Our junkie hero could nod out, crash the car, and then be woken up when the car flips, just in time to start driving again. (Ed. Note: when the author directs Minority Report 2: Smack Into Traffic, remember this post).
The title Minority Report refers to something that officially doesn't exist. Tom Cruise is the commanding officer of the “precrime” unit, which prevents murders from happening before they do, and safely ensconcing the “murderers” in the set of a Daft Punk video with Tim Blake Nelson riding around a wheelchair braying in a Boston accent (Ed. Note: punitive surrealism actually WILL be the law of the land in 2054, put that in the bank). Precrime is entirely dependent on three “precognitives,” or “precogs,” who can see the future, but only murders, for reasons that are never adequately explained, but which I'm perfectly willing to write off to cosmic perversity. The precogs, collectively, form a hivemind that projects all the details of the murder into Tom Cruise's computer, which etches the name of the victim(s) and perp(s) into a unique, can't-be-faked piece of wood. (Crimes of passion, in a fun subtle nod to IRL DC/Bawlmer po-lice, are etched into red wood and called “red balls”). They are, we are constantly told, “never wrong,” but as Lois Smith—who invented precrime—tells Tom Cruise after he sees something he shouldn't and gets framed for murdering someone he's never even met, the precogs “sometimes . . . do disagree.” The two males, Arthur and Dashiell, will see one thing, but Agatha, the dominant of the three, will see something else, making her take on shit the “minority report.”
Tom Cruise isn't aware of any of this at the outset. All he knows is, his boss (Max von Sydow) has a Swedish accent even though his name is Lamar Burgess, and there's this young slickster (Colin Farrell) from the Justice Department poking around implying that precrime might be something other than perfect; he's convinced that human error could fuck everything up (if that's the sound of you nodding sagely in response to his very wise insight, continue to do so). And since we know Tom Cruise does all that future space crack that he buys from an eyeless Peter Stormare in the middle of the ghetto at 1 in the morning, we suspect that Tom Cruise will be Colin Farrell's first target.
We see the precrime unit bust some limpdick whose wife is cheating on him, because the precogs insisted in their passive aggressive non-linear video footage fashion that limpdick was about to dispense absolute justice. He's hauled off yelling “But I didn't do anything!” Colin Farrell raises the same point to Tom Cruise, who makes an analogy with a rolling ball of wood that Colin Farrell catches as it falls off the table, saying the murder is like that ball of wood. Trademark snappy Spielberg visual explanation, if a tad simplistic. Colin Farrell is a sharp one in this picture (his accent and his suit are on pace with his mind; it's really a fucking good performance by the lad) and isn't buying that shit. He keeps digging, seemingly obsessed with Tom Cruise (which is supposed to make us think he's the bad guy, except Tom Cruise is a junkie working for a totalitarian police force, he fucking should be worried about Tom Cruise). Then the precogs start uploading footage from a premeditated murder, and it looks like Tom Cruise is the one lighting up a scruffy Mike Binder, sending him crashing through a high rise building. Tom Cruise shits a brick, and starts running.
Cue long, elaborate, amazing chase sequence. Some condescending jerkoff once called Steven Spielberg “the greatest second unit director in America,” and while that description omits so much of what's great about Spielberg, it's still factually accurate. The action sequences in his pictures are awe-inspiring. You can always see who's doing what to whom, who's going where, the choreography is inspired, the attention to detail exacting, and there are moments of dark humor made hilarious by the sheer tension established by Spielberg's nonpareil technical mastery.
What makes this chase sequence so interesting is that, like a later sequence where Tom Cruise is hiding from some of the coolest robots ever devised (they'll get their due in a minute), there are all these brief tableaus of people and groups of people in the apartment building through which either Tom Cruise, cops, or robots, are hauling ass. These sequences are a little puzzling, as these people are treated as extras and punchlines, yet they constitute a very important part of the environment created by the movie. They go a long way toward the future seeming less constructed of ideas to prove a point (like a lot of intellectual SF) than constructed of people, like an actual world. It's a nice subtle, very Spielberg touch; one of the things that makes him great is that people (even if a lot of the time they're just archetypes) matter to him, even if all that matters is the simple fact of their existence.
When Tom Cruise manages to elude the bad guys, he makes his way to eccentric genius Lois Smith's place, since she invented precrime and can presumably tell him how he's been set up, even if the why will have to wait. She fills him in on what a minority report is, which makes Tom Cruise think, hey, all I gotta do is kidnap the female precog and I'll clear my name. Good ol' Lois Smith totally gets to kiss Tom Cruise at the end of the scene too, which makes no sense, but if Lois Smith wants to kiss Tom Cruise, she gets to kiss Tom Cruise.
Tom Cruise then looks up Peter Stormare, who in a very creepy scene, removes Tom Cruise's eyeballs and gives him new ones under horribly unsanitary conditions. With Big Brother keeping track of people by retinal scanning—and the movie's running visual theme of “what is sight?” and lots of closeup shots of eyes—it's a necessary step if he's going to lay low. But for personal reasons, people having their eyes fucked with deeply bothers me (I was in the process of going blind before having Lasik surgery at 21, which has made me even more sensitive about my eyes) so this sequence always fucks with me. It's a mark of Spielberg's restraint and non-sensationalism, though, that I'm able to re-watch Minority Report and only cringe rather than having to turn the fuckin movie off.
So there's Tom Cruise alone with bandages over his eyes, Peter Stormare and his lovely assistant with the ball-bearing mole on her face having fucked off. And here come the pigs. Tom Cruise's colleagues, still annoyed with him for the first chase sequence, happen upon the rundown apartment complex where Tom's waiting for the time to elapse so he can un-bandage his eyes without going blind. The level of suspense in the sequence is already astronomical—as it always is when the protagonist is trapped and can't go anywhere—but the future fuzz ups the stakes . . . with spiders.
To say that the spiders are the coolest thing in Minority Report should not minimize how good the rest of the movie is. It's just holy fucking shit these things are cool. They're small, efficient, they shoot electricity, they display amazing teamwork . . . and they're fucking smart. The last thing I ever want looking for me when I'm hiding in a bathtub full of ice to mask my body temperature while holding my breath underwater are these damn things, meaning I wouldn't trade places with Tom Cruise in this scene for all the first-dollar gross points in Hollywood. Fortunately, they do catch him, they do lift up his bandage so they can scan his eye, but it comes up “Not Tom Cruise” and he doesn't go blind.
Once he can see properly with his new eyes, Tom Cruise breaks into precrime HQ and kidnaps precog Agatha. Once he does so, that disables the precognitive abilities of the hivemind trio, thus meaning people can kill each other again with no advance warning. Dum dum dum DUMMMM . . . After all that, when Tom Cruise brings Agatha to his hacker buddy to get the minority report that he assumes will clear him . . . there isn't one. He's gonna kill Mike Binder.
The cops show up again, and another chase sequence ensues, this one notable for Agatha being around to see the future (and she can, conveniently, now see things other than murder, apparently) and directing Tom Cruise through a shopping mall, starting with a non sequitur instruction to grab an umbrella, which, in a great moment, becomes necessary when they get outside and it's raining and everyone has umbrellas, so the cops can't tell which one is Tom Cruise plus precog.
It's a half hour til murder time, and Tom Cruise has conveniently ended up right by the scene of the “crime.” He does a bit of fairly schmancy detective work and ends up in Mike Binder's room, where there are photographs of kids all over the place, including Tom Cruise's missing son. Deciding that Mike Binder is the murderer of his son, Tom Cruise beats the shit out of Mike Binder when he gets back, causing Agatha to beg him, in tears, not to kill him, that he has a choice because he's seen his future, it's not set anymore. Tom Cruise, in a moment of heavy drama and Serious Acting, declines to kill Mike Binder, placing him under whispered, intense arrest.
At this point Mike Binder reveals that he's a desperate convict who agreed to pretend he killed Cruise fils in order that his family would be looked after by some shadowy benefactor. Tom Cruise is confused—he has been set up after all—and Mike Binder grabs his gun and offs himself for the sake of his family, leaving Agatha sobbing.
Colin Farrell, arriving on the scene, immediately sees something fishy, because he's really fucking smart in this movie, and, in a surprise twist revealed in this scene, is one of the good guys. Now that he realizes Tom Cruise has been set up, he goes back and looks at this mysterious bit of precog footage—seized from the hacker's place earlier—that Agatha has been trying to get Tom Cruise to pay attention to for the whole movie, of a woman being drowned. Comparing Agatha's footage with Arthur and Dashiell's footage, Colin Farrell sees that it's of two different murders of the same victim, one fake, one real. The real footage was discarded, as it looks virtually identical to the faked.
Armed with this new mystery, Colin Farrell brings his evidence to Max von Sydow . . . who shoots Colin Farrell in the chest and then, as Colin Farrell gives him this “I never trusted you motherfucker, you got to keep your real accent in this movie, I shoulda known you were the bad guy” look, discreetly follows it up with a headshot.
Tom Cruise then does something really dumb. With all the future cops in the goddamn galaxy hot on his trail, he brings Agatha to his ex-wife's house in the country, which is dumb in and of itself, but then they have this big weepy emotional scene about the missing/dead son, which of course results in the future cops showing up and busting Tom Cruise.
Without Colin Farrell around to be smart—and boy are we talking about a singular achievement in cinema if Colin Farrell is the alpha intellect up in this piece—everyone starts going full retard, as master villain Max von Sydow makes a really stupid slip of the tongue that confesses his villainy to Tom Cruise's ex-wife (the lady from Cold Case). Armed with this knowledge that her (once-again) beloved hubby is innocent, she goes to the Tim Blake Nelson prison and pulls heat on Tim Blake Nelson, politely asking that he free Tom Cruise.
The conclusion is a big dramatic showdown wherein a newly head-shaven Tom Cruise lays out Max von Sydow's paradox to him over Bluetooth. Max von Sydow had the woman in Agatha's footage killed because she was Agatha's mother and wanted to take Agatha away from the precrime program and raise her as an ordinary kid. So now, with Max von Sydow having decided to red ball Tom Cruise for being a smartass, he has the quandary: kill Tom Cruise and prove that precrime works, but go to jail forever for murder, or spare Tom Cruise and prove that precrime doesn't work. Max von Sydow, to whom precrime means so much he's compromised his own soul and killed for its sake, looks behind door number 3 and puts a bullet through his own heart.
In light of this fiasco, the powers that be decide to scrap precrime and send the precogs out to an idyllic cabin in the woods where they can read peacefully. The fact that it's now safe to murder people without being pre-emptively ratted out by the precogs is a broken egg in the service of the omelette that is not employing a flawed system to imprison people who are guilty only in thought.
Spielberg caught a little shit for playing up the “oh, isn't it nice that the precogs are now free” angle rather than “crime has returned to mid-21st century DC.” But it's not like it's not the fucking future and they don't have other future shit to catch criminals with. Shit's not going to go Mogadishu just cuz the space triplets aren't uploading grainy black and white pre-visualizations to the police computers anymore. So let Spielberg have his happy ending. The same people bitching at him for ending this picture too sappily would be on his dick if he ended it on a darker, more ambiguous note, too: “Well, Steven Spielberg is obviously trying to be a Real Filmmaker by giving his picture an unhappy ending, but he just as obviously doesn't have the feel for such Artistry.” Such is life, and fortunately for him, with his net worth of $3 billion, if you bust Steven Spielberg's balls, he can hit you with his wallet and that's you done for.
While it's true that the movie takes a slight dip after Colin Farrell gets killed, that's primarily due to how great his performance is, as well as the fact that all the action happens before then, and we're left with a simplified, heavily altered version of Philip K. Dick's original story with nothing to distract from it. However, the fact that it's imperfect doesn't mean it isn't pretty good SF, and there's still that amazing, noir-inflected cinematography by Janusz Kaminski, with almost all the color taken out of the image except for that one, random thing that still has color, that your eyes are immediately drawn to (a subtler version of the girl in the red coat in Schindler's List).
In the end, Minority Report lives up to every bit of promise the description “Steven Spielberg directing an SF noir picture” holds. It may not be perfect, but it manages to ask some Big Questions while simultaneously providing a visual feast, and Tom Cruise does some fairly decent thesping. He'd go on to be pretty damn good in War of the Worlds, too, even though that picture had massive problems. That's a post for another day, though, and it doesn't change the fact that the leftmost, prominent face on Mt. Nerdmore is, indisputably, Steven Spielberg's.
