Rating: 
Summary: Net effect: Minority Report ends up mostly minor.
Review: Read the short story first. It won't give anything away in the movie as they diverge after the starting premise. It is only 30 pages and it does explain the concept of a minority report. Basically, it's a longstanding computer principle that to check data processed by a computer is accurate, run it through 3 identical machines. Two computers are unlikely to be identically incorrect as based on statistical analysis; concurrence of 2 out of 3 is accurate, forming a majority report. The minority report tends to be a minor variant on the majority. This fact turns out to not be so significant in the movie as the short story but at least I hope that the term makes more sense now. Where the film really shines is how they expand on the book. The film starts with a dramatic demonstration of how the future visions of murder are combined with regular computer databases, clues from the visions such as names, faces and surroundings are used to intercept the crime. The visual representation of how the recordings of future are used to find clues to prevent the crime is brilliant. The following race against time is action packed and very dramatic. The next major act is the scene of Cruise's mounting horror as the next future murder scene he examines shows that he commits it is visually presented and musically scored to perfection. The following run from Pre-Crime headquarters and fighting his way through his former teammates and federal agents is great action. The next hour is very good. Less action but more cerebral. The spiders were fantastic, I wish there was more seen of them. A classic theme of the author (Philip K. Dick), the spiders are technology that is methodical, determined and ultimately fundamentally stupid where it counts. Technology rarely makes the world a better place in PKD's universe. Often it makes it worse. Unfortunately it's long been obvious by now who is meant to decoy our attention and who is really behind the conspiracy. Also, the reason Cruise will want to murder his future victim is obvious from the moment we see him unlike in the original story. None of this is fatal to the film but it would have been much nicer if this wasn't the case. Still, so far so good. There are some good humourous moments as well but not the sort which overshadow the fact that this is an essentially serious film. For a man who made Ray-Bans famous in Top Gun, there is a very funny scene involving a corridor and some items also involving vision. The last 22 minutes are just awful. It is so bad that all the good work of the film that went beforehand is completely ruined. After a grotesquely sentimental soliloquy by Agatha about Cruise's son that is just hideous, the run that Cruise has been so dynamically been on is brought to a totally anticlimactic halt. Having needlessly boxed themselves into a corner, they have to use a slip by the villain that is really stupid to kickstart things again. The villain has been revealed in a scene a little earlier (though if you hadn't worked it out by now, you'd have to really have not been paying attention) in a scene stolen shot for shot from L.A Confidential. They then end the film where the villain is literally unmasked with a scene you wish had been stolen shot for shot from The Fugitive as at least it would have been better than the third rate copy of the end of the Fugitive it actually was. Then, to kick over whatever rubble is left standing, instead of ending it at that point, they add an epilogue that kills off what's left. Having danced around the point of the original story and implying that they understood what the original was about, which is "does an individual sacrifice himself for the greater good, for a system proven to prevent murder in its entirety" the epilogue shows the film makers actually missed it entirely.
Also, the movie was riddled with errors. Retinal scanners use the unique positions of blood vessels in people's eyes. Without circulation, they are invisible. Also, within a couple of hours, the corneas would go opaque, also making the retina not viewable. A point clearly lost in the script. How to make this a better film simply by cutting footage. First 55 minutes:
Cut the scene where Cruise watches his home movies. We get the point from conversations and scenes before and after, as well as the flashback. Slows things down, needlessly labours the point. Next 60 minutes:
Cut the scene where Farrell talks to Cruise's wife. Slows pace, doesn't add anything. Last 22 minutes:
Cut the phone call Cruise's wife makes to Max von Sydow (for continuity).
Cut absolutely everything from when it suddenly dawns on Cruise why he's been set up and he walks back to the house to the start of the scene which has the speaker at the podium talking about the history of the civil war pistol. This eliminates the really anticlimactic end to Cruise's run, the corner they've boxed themselves into as a result and the really stupid way that they get out of it. Also, the really horrible dialogue by Agatha in there will be gone! It will seem to jump a bit but believe me, it's better. Then chop off the entire epilogue, ending the movie with the aerial receding shot on the roof. This 'version' of mine with no new scenes added and a lot of stuff jettisoned would be a lot better paced and worth 3/5 to me. Cameos: Cameron Crowe reading newspaper, Cameron Diaz behind him and to viewer's right. Hotel clerk Cruise's cousin. In summary, I would actually recommend seeing this film. When it's good, it's very good and that's most of the first 2 hours. Unfortunately when it's bad, it's just awful. Use the edits I suggested in your head when watching it.
Rating: 
Summary: Too Much!!!
Review: BIG BROTHER scares all of us. What privacy do we have when almost anyone can tap into our computers, phones, or homes without us even knowing it. The next move will be to probe personal thoughts without our permission. Then deciding to prevent those thoughts from becoming reality. This is what "Minority Report" will make you wonder about. Except for one thing...you have to read between the lines. Interesting concept that fails by becoming an action movie instead of going for the brain. It takes reading between a painful number of lines to find the intelligence this film decided to leave out for the sake of being visually great. About forty minutes too long with a contrived ending and a villain that can be predicted thirty minutes into the film because it follows the typical Hollywood pattern of...okay someone might enjoy this movie more than I did, so I won't destroy it by revealing the formula. Some bonus points for being scientifically accurate...good acting, and some unexpected humor. When is Hollywood going to see making a 30-page story into nearly 150 minutes of film is just too much. Ninety to 100 minutes would have been enough for "Minority Report". I'll pleasantly give a few extra points for not being as bad as Steven Spielberg's last short story to long movie--"A.I."! Maybe next time, Spielberg will pull it off. He has talent unlike any other, but he is ruining it by doing too much.
Rating: 
Summary: The Sniffer
Review: Steven Spielberg has fashioned a sleek, physically beautiful, most of the time engrossing film set in Washington DC, in the future 50 years hence.
John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is an elite "pre-crime" cop whose department uses pre-cognizants (fortune tellers, really) to fortell where and when murders will occur. Anderton's crew then responds by stopping the crime before it happens.
Anderton is a troubled soul having lost his 6 yr old son under mysterious circumstances as well as his wife in divorce. Through the use of up to date technology he is able to view his son and wife by way of magical, life-like 3-D images; which he does nightly in scenes brought about by remorse as well as the inhalation of drugs he buys off the street.
Tom Cruise, having finally lived through his boyish good looks, gives an extremely resonant, muti-faceted performance: he is asked to be emotionally aware as well as physically polished and he is much more effective and emphathetic here than he was in "Vanilla Sky."
Colin Farrel, a part of the new guard of young actors; excellent in "Tigerland", does a remarkable job of playing off and with both Cruise and Max Von Sydow. In this he plays a District Attorney lackey out to confiscate the "pre-crime" technology for the Government and uses any means possible to do so.
Spielberg uses Hitchcock as his guiding force for the last third of the film as it turns into a chase film/thriller with Anderton on the run from the people he once supervised. There are big chunks of film comparable to the very best of "Rear Window"and "Vertigo." I think that the film runs on too long by about 10 minutes but this a a minor quibble.
Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report"is an interesting, heart-felt, emotionally true and physically beautiful film with sympathetic portrayals by Cruise, Farrell, Von Sydow and Samantha Morton as one of the pre-cognizants. All concerned should be proud of their accomplisment.
Rating: 
Summary: ENTERTAINING AND AMAZING!
Review: MINORITY REPORT has an original plot. It is extremely entertaining and amazing! If you're not a Speilberg fan, this film will change your mind. I saw this film from the late night to the early morning and I was still on the edge of my seat from beginning to end. This film is thrilling and what I think is Speilberg's best. The story contains mind-bending cutting-edge special effects. This is honestly one of my favorite films. Even better than all three INDIANA JONES films. I didn't think it was too long at all. The time went by quickly for me. It is just too bad that it will be a bit complicated to make a sequel. Tom Cruise also did a great job of portraying his character. I give MINORITY REPORT 5 stars and hope you will too.
Rating:
Summary: Visually Inventive But Repulsive
Review: Has anyone mentioned yet how unnecessarily repulsive this movie is? I say "unnecessarily," because while I can put up with a certain amount of carnage in the name of realism in a war movie ("Braveheart" did this beautifully), "Minority Report" seemed to revel in being gross merely to pander to some kids in the audience that might enjoy watching vomit or snot spew from various characters. I also imagine I am not alone in flinching at the sight of eyeballs being plucked out, surgically or otherwise. And why is the future seen shot through a white haze? For a so-called "intelligent" film (meaning normally literate?), there were many gaping plot holes, the most obvious being that if there were only three "pre-cogs" in existence, and these a genetic fluke, how was the system supposed to go nation-wide, never mind the question what was to happen when any one of these three died a natural death? And never mind, also, the horror of their use in the first place. As I go along here, I think I am talking myself down from three stars to two: the two being for the inventiveness (though non-user friendliness, and in the case of the infrastructure required for the highways, the insane overkill) of future technology. This is a future in which one would go rapidly blind (even without eyeball-plucking) and insane. A few decades back, in the days of "2001," visual inventiveness in a film might have been enough, but I no longer want to see a plot in service to the special effects. The best effects are those you don't notice or take for granted; the best futuristic technology is something you can imagine real humans living with. (Are blurry, grainy holograms to capture family memories a real improvement over crystal-clear DVDs, for example? Or only an opportunity for the filmmaker to show off?) Nor was there one fully-dimensional character, as distinguished from off-the-wall Characters whose non-stop babble took the place of real personalities. Tom Cruise had no personality at all, beyon the Tom Cruise action personna. The scene at the mall was perhaps my favorite, except that the whole thing was invalidated from the beginning, when we were told the pre-cogs could only foresee murder - and, if not lesser crimes, then certainly being able to calculate perspective and weather would be out of the question. And I down to one star yet? All right, then, I'll be generous and leave it with two, for sheer misplaced effort.
Rating:
Summary: an attractive mess
Review: The first 45 minutes of this film sets up an intriguing premise, a thoughtful tone, and raises interesting questions about free will and predestination, intention and culpability, justice and individual rights. It then proceeds to banish all of the above in favor of: - a long action set piece (wrapping up with an automated-factory scene at least as ridiculous at the one in 'Attack of the Clones')
- a lot of grossout slapstick with two 'quirky' characters on loan from a David Lynch movie
- a visit to 'Dr. Exposition'
- an unnecessary plot twist that derails the titular premise
- a tidy, treacly ending In the movie's defense, the production design is brilliant. The visuals have the just the right balance of the familiar and the shockingly new to make this a believable future. The best (and funniest, and grimmest) detail was the ubiquitous, individually-targeted advertising. But a good look and some fine performances can't cover over the numerous problems with the script (my living room has better security than Precrime's HQ, some character motivations are left completely blank, others are explained to death), nor can they compensate for the fact that the story does everything - absolutely EVERYTHING - but address the moral and philosophical questions at its center. There's enough going on in Spielberg's kitchen-sink style to keep you distracted for the film's running time, but by the time I got out of the theater I felt like I'd been swindled. It made me sad, because all the ingredients of a great movie were here - they're just abruptly pushed aside for chases and shootouts.
Rating:
Summary: Intelligent noir-thriller.
Review: "Spielberg and Cruise participate in a film that I enjoyed watching? You gotta be kiddin' me..." These are the words that were running through my mind as I left the theater. Just when I had dismissed Spielberg as a schleppy fuddy-duddy making movies that only a 13 year-old could love, he comes along and spins a fairly dark and intelligent version of a Philip K. Dick story. I say "fairly" because Spielberg does stoop to some of his old sentimentality, but what the hell, I guess he's entitled to a little authorship (after all, it IS his movie). I just wish I could consider his changes as improvements. This movie throws a few heavy-duty questions out for the audience: - Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedoms for a society to be rid of murder? - What if being rid of murder also meant that 3 individuals (unkown to you) had to live a constant nightmare to make your safety a reality? - Is knowing the future enough to change it? - Does attacking a symptom, even pre-emptively, truly solve a problem? How do you get to the root of social ills? You can tell that Spielberg did is homework on this one. Much of the future looks plausible, if not downright likely. Identification devices scan your eyes, not just for security, but to serve you personalized advertising and interact with you so that other humans don't have to. Centralized processing in cars keeps them from crashing into each other, no matter which direction they move. In spite of these improvements, and many more in the same vein, humans still have many of the old vices that they've always had; people still murder, they still kidnap, they still plot for power, and they still utilize drugs for temporary relief from the pains of living. It is this world - just outside of the improvements - that "Minority Report" focuses on. We find out that the perfect pre-crime unit has some little-known flaws with some very real potential implications, especially for the Precrime police chief, doggedly played by Tom Cruise. When we first see Cruise in the film, his character is completely occupied with the the ruthless application of pre-justice. Once he himself is implicated as a future criminal, he goes on the run to try and prove his innocence and expose the the system for what it is - a false sense of security for most of the folks in Washington, DC. I heartily recommend this film to all fans of science fiction or good old-fashioned conspiracy flicks. It's a real visual and auditory treat seeing this on a big screen.
Rating:
Summary: A little something for everyone
Review: In a genre of movies whose prototypical action hero limits his charachter's depth to guttural responses and banal topic sentences, Tom Cruise takes John Anderton, the director of Precrime police work in D.C. circa 2054, to another level. Ergo, the movie is taken to another level. Precrime was developed to predict crimes before they happen in D.C., and six years into the program, it has come under scrutiny from the Justice department as it studies the possible use on a national level. Enter the antagonist Wittier, a Justice agent who has his suspicions about Anderton and precrime. Enter the savior Burgess, the co-founder of Precrime who will come to the aide of his top cop, Anderton, as he is probed for weakness, fallibility by Wittier. And then, enter the problem. The prescience which Anderton champions and rests his ethics in predicts that he will committ a murder. He is given two minutes before the guard will push the alarm. So, he runs.
Under the vision of Spielberg, the movie is ladden with action, drama, surprise twists (the whole gammette) and is surprisingly stocked full of laughs from all directions. Spielberg's setting is astounding, with a mix of classic Victorian and astonishing sidewinding skyscrapers, and Cruise moves through it with panache unheard of in action films. Don't be surprised if you fall for this movie in more ways than one. Spielberg will enchant you with sympathy for the precognative beigns who wail away their lives in a vat of mysterious liquid, their heads incessantly bombinated by visions of future murder. He will whisk you with feeling of vengance for Anderton's supposed enemies. He will envince in you a sorrow for Anderton's flight and the loss of his son, which led to his passion for Precrime. Then he will pull the hook and get you with the surprises. Minority Report is a great dive into the possibilities of a multi-faceted action film, and it doesn't lose its touch with the human dilemma that must be the epicenter of all action.
Rating:
Summary: A great ride
Review: I just saw the best movie this weekend. Minority Report. It's a shame it will most likely be forgotten by Oscar time. This one could win on any number of counts. As an adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story it really hits the mark. I was impressed with the story line. I thought at first it might be a shallow film but when Tom Cruise's character gets nailed for a future crime is when the old fashioned murder mystery comes out. I was totally hooked and couldn't wait for each new development to unfold. The music as usual was brilliant and Spielberg has given us a plausible future not too far away. But the story really excels as a guy framed for something he has no intention of doing and runs to prove his innocence. Precrime on the surface is workable but there were too many flaws for it to work on a large scale. Hence the development of the murder mystery. This was an excellent film, one I will most definitely see again.
Rating:
Summary: Spider-Man and Skywalker have nothing on Spielberg!
Review: Spielberg has created the thinking man's summer blockbuster. Through all of the special effects and excitement, he has created a movie that questions man's blindness through technology and ambition. Much like "Memento," I was speechless for a good hour after the movie (an oddity, which many of my friends can attest to). I highly recommend this film -- especially to all those who think that there can't be good summer science fiction.
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