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Minority Report (Single Disc Edition)

Minority Report (Single Disc Edition)

List Price: $14.99
Your Price: $13.49
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Overrated Blockbuster
Review: This movie starts out with a bang. This first hour is very good. The plot holes and inconsistencies come to a head in the final 45 minutes, tainting the whole movie, and leaving me perplexed by the critical success this film has enjoyed.

Plot holes:
-The story is set in an uber-police state, where retinal scans grant you access to buildings, restricted areas, etc. If the chief of police was found guilty of a precrime, wouldn't you shut off his access to the building? The fact he can sneak back into "The Temple" a day later with his own eyes is a huge plot blunder, given the tight ship Precrime runs.

-Anderton's "crime" is more of the red ball variety. This flaw is documented in other Amazon user reviews of this movie.

-If the organ player really had anything to worry about when he was held at gunpoint, the Precrime police would have arrested ("halo-ed") Anderton's wife before she pulled the trigger, right?

This movie sets up too many rules that it's not prepared to break. And boy, that eyeball sure keeps real well in that little plastic bag.

Another criticism of the movie is the characterization. Colin Farrell's character is way over-the-top, then does a complete 180. A lot of the peripheral characters (the woman in the greenhouse, the guy in the video-fantasy parlor) feel tacked on, their only role being plot exposition.

The end of the movie (the showdown with Max Von Sydow's character) is extremely anti-climatic, and, of course, Spielberg leaves us with a voice-over that tells us what else happened, and, of course, how to feel about it as an audience. Thanks Steven...thanks for pushing our imagination away from your film.

As far as Spielberg movies go, the look and action of the movie is great. When it's at it's best, Minority Report almost feels like Blade Runner or a Terry Gilliam movie (the transplant scene). So, this leads me to the obvious: see Blade Runner, 12 Monkeys, or Brazil instead. Minority Report is good. It's not great. And there are better, more entertaining films out there.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Master Steven Spielberg goes Sci-Fi Cyberpunk !!
Review: Awesome ! Beautifull graphics-photography,
Dark utopic history and a superb action movie
by Tom Cruise

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Wow!
Review: This is now one of my most favorite movies. I think this is one of Spielberg's best. It's not focused on action, science fiction, or drama. It is a freaky look into the future that has many twists and interesting dialogue. This movie will, or should, make you think. If you like movies that you can't guess what will happen next and where the main character is not perfect; all with an awesome sci-fi twist, than you will love Minority Report.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A fantastic thriller...Not to mention CREATIVE and WEIRD!
Review: This movie has it all...special effects, action, drama, thriller, who done it, suspense and futuristic scenery and ideas. There's probably more, but I just couldn't think of 'em all right now. GREAT MOVIE!

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Not too great....
Review: I personally was VERY excited to hear this film was coming out, and when I found out it was based on a "Philip K. Dick" story, I became obsessed! however unlike "Blade Runner", "Total Recall" and "Imposter" this film failed to deliver for me...It was too Lackluster compared to the above mentioned. I mean it wasn't a terrible movie, however I think it could have been quite a bit more interesting, and the action in the film seemed to dry.

If you are a HUGE fan of "Philip K. Dick" or just cyberpunk movies in general this might appeal to you, however I was expecting alot more with this film.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Exciting
Review: This DVD is good enough to see, especially if you like Tom Cruise flicks. Set in futuristic looking Washington, DC, Minority Report takes you on a wild ride of pre-knowledge crime solving. Police, in the future, have developed a way to know how and when crimes are going to take place, so they arrest people before the crimes are committed. This leads to a 0 murder rate in DC, and seemingly the world the way we want it. Tom Cruise is the chief officer in charge of this program and he is a borderline burnout who struggles with drugs. That alone, the fact that Tom Cruise plays a burnout, should make it worth seeing this film. With that said, this movie plays like cops and robbers and the action is intense. Cruise is a great main character and the end will leave you guessing. Overall Grade B+
Joseph Dworak

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not terribly thrilling but still fun
Review: Tom Cruise is a futuristic detective (literally - he solves crimes that haven't occurred yet) in "Minority Report". It's 2054, and Cruise is Anderton, an emotionally scarred (and substance abusing) detective assigned to an elite detail called "Pre-Crime". Using human oracles called "Pre-cogs", Anderton receives visual clues to murders that haven't occurred yet - clues of the crime come in disconnected, dreamlike scenes. The "pre-cogs"- two men and a woman, each ironically named for a famous mystery author - are accidents of nature and the addictions of their mothers. (Their power is something of a curse: the pre-cogs' life boils down to floating in some sensory deprivation tank while involuntarily channeling repeated episodes of grisly murders). The pre-cogs are themselves victims of a sort and, being the crucial elements of Pre-Crime, can't expect help from the cops. It's not clear how the pre-cogs work, but the fact that there are only three of them - and the female "Agatha" is linchpin - implies that Pre-Crime is on shaky ground (aside from the dubious morality of arresting and imprisoning people for crimes they haven't actually committed). Pre-Crime effectively deters premeditated murder (which can be detected up to 4 days ahead of time), leaving Anderton and his crew with crimes of passion which, being spontaneous, are only detected hours (at best) ahead of the fact. "Pre-Criminals" are given "Halos" - headsets that put them to sleep until they can be placed in a more permanent form of suspended animation (due process, like law enforcement, works ahead of the crime, so that "punishment" is immediate).

Anderton is already in trouble when the story starts - though professionally respected, he's scarred by his son's disappearance years before, an event that wrecked his marriage and turned him into a career hog who jogs through the worst parts of old D.C. and buys his illegal drugs from the homeless and hopeless that stubbornly inhabit the future. Nevertheless, the Pre-Cogs keep Anderton too preoccupied to dwell on his horrible past. When Agatha mysteriously beams visions of a long past (and "Pre-Solved" crime) Anderton unwisely digs deeper. Before he can dig deep enough, the Pre-Cogs get another vision - one of a man nobody has ever heard of losing his life to man nobody in Pre-Crime can forget: Anderton himself. Now Anderton must run, knowing full well that nobody - once tagged by Pre-Crime - can ever run far or fast enough. Instead, he tries to stay out long enough to learn how Pre-Cogs work. Tracking down their mysterious "engineer", Anderton will learn a shocking truth: Pre-Cogs, while never wrong, will, on occasion, disagree. Because this happens so rarely (tell that to the poor sap who gets haloed anyway) instances of "pre-cog cognitive dissonance" (okay, I made that up) are called "Minority Reports". Convinced he was set up and that a minority report exists that will clear him, Anderton uses every trick he knows to elude capture and also sneak back into Pre-Crime, the only place he can conceivably find his own minority report.

Though visually cool and perfectly starpowered (I don't hate Tom Cruise movies), you can't get past "Minority Report"'s biggest flaw - it's a thriller that doesn't thrill. The film tries to work like a mystery (the Pre-Cogs don't solve the crimes, only present cryptic clues to those that haven't occurred - old fashioned detective work is still crucial) but frustrates itself. Nevertheless, the script is stubbornly un-thrilling - piecing together clues before it gives itself a chance to appreciate what the clues are. Rather than give our hero the tools to solve the crime, the film just tosses the clues together. The mystery is thus solved less by the intelligence of its characters than its compulsion to fill in its own gaps. By the time Anderton has confronted his purported victim-to-be, you're more likely to have "pre-cogged" the twist ending yourself. What's left is too reminiscent of "No Way Out" (man who can implicate those in power is himself implicated in a crime) and, even more unfortunately, the first "Mission Impossible" (Cruise must sneak back to his own headquarters) suffering by comparison to each. Showing that there's still some Kurbick left over after "A.I." Spielberg liberally sprinkles his story with all sorts of weirdoes meant to herald the end of human civilization: to elude the cops, Anderton has his eyes replaced by a seedy underworld doctor played by Peter Stormare (Hollywood's hardest working character actor); Pre-Crime prisoners are kept in upright coffins and stored in a cross between a prison and a morgue, presided over by a certifiable weirdo who plays a church organ and refers to his inmates as "his flock"; the Pre-Cogs' caretaker evinces an apparently unprofessional interest in Agatha; the Pre-Cogs themselves are the result of their parents' drug addiction. But these characters do less to advance or detail the plot than merely confirm a dark opinion of humanity (like the guys who ran the "Flesh Fair" in "A.I." or the lawyer who gets chomped in "Jurassic" - they exist only to remind us how much humanity has it coming to them). If "Minority" doesn't excel as a thriller or sci-fi epic, it's nevertheless immensely satisfying as both.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Best Film of 2002
Review: There are very few movies out there that can make you smile. I'm not just talking about happy go lucky movies, but movies that rivet you with something magical that no other movie contains. The Star Wars trilogy did this, The Matrix did this...Minority Report does this.

John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is a police officer that works for a futuristic unit called Precrime. This division uses three individuals called the Precogs that can see the future to stop murders before they happen. Cruise firmly believes in the ability of the Precogs, as well as their accuracy, yet is fed a taste of his own medicine when the Precogs predict a murder that he, himself, will commit. As a morality tale and as far as the message behind the whole movie was concerned, I was unimpressed, but this was taken away from the sheer magic of the movie's visual effects and the rich individual stories of the characters.

Every element of this movie is spectacular. There are fine performances from Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell, the special effects are some of the best since The Matrix, the story is spectacular and it holds your attention for the duration. You feel caught up in the story, a part of it, which is why you can't turn away, wanting to see what will happen next.

I predict you are running out the door right now to buy this...make me right.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: This movie was something else
Review: I don't even know how to explain this film. After all these years tom is still a good actor. The movie is about a world where people get arrested for crimes that they are about to commit. I have seen a lot of films, but this was really good.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Violates its own premises
Review: Minority Report got a whole bunch of positive press, and it's the sort of movie that, in production values alone, basically couldn't fail to get at least a "thumb's up" from the average reviewer. But as the sort of cerebral science fiction it intends to be, it's a mess, mostly because it violates its own setup so much that by the end it seems like little more than a chase movie set in a high-budget future world.

To give you one example: the "pre-cogs" in the movie can, as a team, see the future -- but the movie goes to lengths to establish some limits to that precognition. They can only "see" events that are exceptionally wrenching or emotional -- the murders they're meant to prevent being one example. Okay, so why, once Anderton is on the run, can the pre-cog he has with him predict every little subtle movement of all the people in a mall, right down to the line of sight of the cops chasing them? Hmm? And let's get to that central murder set-up: how could the real killer possibly rely on someone with psychic abilities not to be able to see through -- ta dum -- a mask and a trenchcoat? What, does he know where the "camera" will be?

That sort of problem vitiates this movie's every plot twist, and there are lots of them. It makes the whole thing fall flat. Another simple example that I'll bet occurred to every single viewer: Anderton is running to avoid a murder charge, but in the process he risks killing, oh, fifty-odd people at least. Did anyone fail to see that irony? Anyone at all?

So, what's the end result? A chase movie with lots of flashy action. We get a "fight in a factory" sequence in which the good guy leaps in and out of the machinery. Does this sound like any Warner Brother's cartoons? I thought of that theme music, even, during the movie. Naturally, during the factory chase our hero winds up in a fist fight with the administrator who's chasing him. A fist fight. With a lawyer. The lawyer came to the factory with a sort of SWAT team of cops, but he ends up punching Anderton. Yep.

Did I mention that the veteran character actor who always plays a shady, malevolent character plays a shady, malevolent character?

So, why would you watch this? For the same reason lots of people really, really love Blade Runner. (There's even an elaborate scene involving eye surgery that can't be anything but an homage to that movie.) The world Spielberg created in this movie is lavishly done. It sometimes doesn't make a lot of sense -- the chaos of individually-tailored sound "ads" playing for every customer at the Gap seem to make the store almost unbearable to shop in, and the Pre-Crime computer interface is nice but appears to be unusable (or at least ridiculously hard to document). Oh, and just why are all future settings depressingly bleak and gritty? Just wondering... But the movie's worth watching, if you happen to have a chance, because the world is interesting to poke around in.

But does it pass Gene Siskel's criterion? Is the movie more interesting than, say, a dinner conversation between all the futurists who made that imaginary world up? Probably not.


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