Minority Report (film)
| Minority Report | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Steven Spielberg |
| Screenplay by | |
| Based on | "The Minority Report" by Philip K. Dick |
| Produced by | |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Janusz Kamiński |
| Edited by | Michael Kahn |
| Music by | John Williams |
Production companies |
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| Distributed by | DreamWorks Pictures[a] |
Release dates |
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Running time | 145 minutes[4] |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $102 million[5] |
| Box office | $358.4 million[5] |
Minority Report is a 2002 American science fiction action film[6] directed by Steven Spielberg, loosely based on Philip K. Dick's 1956 novella "The Minority Report". The film takes place in the Washington metropolitan area in the year 2054, in which a specialized police department—Precrime—apprehends criminals by use of foreknowledge provided by three psychics called "precogs". The cast stars Tom Cruise as Precrime chief John Anderton, Colin Farrell as Department of Justice agent Danny Witwer, Samantha Morton as precog Agatha Lively, and Max von Sydow as Precrime director Lamar Burgess. The film combines elements of tech noir, whodunit, thriller, and science fiction genres, as well as a traditional chase film, as the main protagonist is accused of a crime he has not committed and becomes a fugitive.[7] Spielberg characterized the story as "fifty percent character and fifty percent very complicated storytelling with layers and layers of murder mystery and plot".[8]
The film was first optioned in 1992 as a sequel to another Dick adaptation, Total Recall (1990), with Arnold Schwarzenegger set to reprise his leading role. When the production company, Carolco Pictures, filed for bankruptcy, the project was reworked into a standalone project. Its development started in 1997 after Jon Cohen's script reached Spielberg and Cruise. Production suffered many delays due to Cruise's Mission: Impossible 2 and Spielberg's A.I. running over schedule, eventually starting in March 2001. During pre-production, Spielberg consulted numerous scientists in an attempt to present a more plausible future world than that seen in other science fiction films. Some of the film's portrayed technology has proven prescient.
Cruise and Spielberg's high-profile collaboration made Minority Report one of 2002's most anticipated films. It received positive reviews from critics and was a commercial success as 2002's tenth most-successful film worldwide, grossing over $358 million against a production budget of $102 million. It was nominated for several awards including an Academy Award nomination for Best Sound Editing. Of eleven Saturn Award nominations, the film won Best Science Fiction Film, Best Direction, Best Writing, and Best Supporting Actress. It has since been included in lists of the best science fiction films.[9][10][11] A Minority Report tie-in video game and single-season television series followed its release.
Plot[edit]
In 2054, the federal government plans to nationally implement the Washington, D.C., prototype "Precrime" police program, which has been operating for six years. Three clairvoyant humans ("precogs") receive psychic impressions of an impending homicide, and officers analyze their visions to determine the location and apprehend the perpetrator before the crime can occur. Would-be killers are placed in an electrically induced coma and held in a panopticon-like prison facility. Although Precrime has eliminated nearly all premeditated murders during its six-year existence, spontaneous crimes of passion called "red ball" killings still occur, giving the police only a short time to act.
Precrime chief John Anderton joined the program after his six-year-old son Sean was abducted and never found. He suffers from depression and addiction to the drug "neuroin", and his wife Lara has left him. Department of Justice agent Danny Witwer audits the Precrime operation, intent on uncovering any flaws. Agatha, one of the precogs, experiences a flashback to a woman's drowning as Anderton watches. Curious, he learns from the prison warden that the intended victim, Anne Lively, went missing shortly after her murder was prevented; however, he also discovers that Agatha's vision of the crime is not on file. Soon afterward, the precogs predict that Anderton will kill a man named Leo Crow, whom he has never met. Anderton flees, prompting Witwer to begin a manhunt.
Anderton visits Dr. Iris Hineman, a geneticist whose research led to the creation of Precrime, and learns that the precogs' abilities are the result of brain damage caused by their parents' addiction to early, impure forms of neuroin. Hineman explains that one precog occasionally sees a different future vision from the others, known as a "minority report". These discrepancies are purged from the official record in order to maintain the precogs' reputation of infallibility, but the precogs retain their memories. If Anderton does have a minority report, Hineman says, it will most likely have been generated by Agatha since she is the strongest of the three.
After undergoing eye transplant surgery to evade the retinal scanners installed all over the city, Anderton returns to Precrime. Using his removed old eyes, which he kept after the transplant surgery, he enters the Temple where the precogs are kept and kidnaps Agatha, shutting down the group-mind on which Precrime depends. With the assistance of a cybercriminal, Anderton searches Agatha's memories but fails to find a minority report for Crow's murder. However, he finds and downloads her memories of Anne's death. The two track Crow to a hotel room and find photos of many children, including Sean; Anderton accuses Crow of killing Sean and nearly kills him, but relents at the last moment. Crow then claims he was hired to plant the photos and begs Anderton to kill him, saying that his family will only be paid if he dies. When Anderton still refuses, Crow kills himself in a manner similar to the precogs' vision of Anderton killing him.
Tipped off by Anderton, Witwer investigates Anne's case and finds discrepancies to suggest that she had indeed been murdered. He reports his findings to Lamar Burgess, director of Precrime, who kills him with Anderton's gun. Anderton is arrested and imprisoned for the murders of Crow and Witwer, and Agatha is returned to the other precogs. After Anderton's imprisonment Lara discusses Anderton's concerns about Anne Lively with Burgess. Initially Burgess denies any recollection of Anne Lively but later in the same conversation says he will look into her drowning—a detail Lara had never mentioned. She becomes suspicious and breaks Anderton out of prison, allowing him to confront Burgess at a banquet celebrating the national launch of Precrime. Anne, a neuroin addict and Agatha's mother, had given up custody of Agatha; some time later, she broke her habit and tried to reclaim her daughter. Burgess hired a man to kill Anne, knowing that Precrime would intervene, then killed her himself in the predicted manner afterward. The Precrime technicians disregarded the second murder vision as an echo of the first one. Once Anderton began to investigate, Burgess arranged for Crow to pose as Sean's abductor in order to provoke Anderton to murder.
A "red ball" report comes in, indicating that Burgess will kill Anderton. As the two men face each other down, Anderton points out the dilemma facing Burgess: he can spare Anderton and watch Precrime be discredited and shut down, or validate the program by killing him and going to prison. Burgess asks Anderton's forgiveness before killing himself.
Anderton and Lara reconcile, with Lara becoming pregnant with another child. Precrime is abandoned and the prisoners are pardoned and released, though many remain under police surveillance. The precogs are moved to an undisclosed location to live in peace.
Cast[edit]
- Tom Cruise as Chief John Anderton, Precrime program commanding officer.
- Max von Sydow as Lamar Burgess, Director of Precrime.
- Colin Farrell as Danny Witwer, agent from Department of Justice.
- Samantha Morton as Agatha Lively, described as the most "talented" of the three precogs.
- Neal McDonough as Gordon "Fletch" Fletcher, a Precrime officer.
- Patrick Kilpatrick as Geoffrey Knott, a Precrime officer.
- Michael and Matthew Dickman as Arthur and Dashiell "Dash" Arkadin, the precog twins.
- Lois Smith as Dr. Iris Hineman, creator of precrime.
- Kathryn Morris as Lara Anderton, estranged wife of Anderton.
- Mike Binder as Leo Crow, the Precrime victim who is supposed to be killed by Anderton.
- Steve Harris as Jad Watson, agent who assists Anderton in temple.
- Jessica Harper as Anne Lively, Agatha's mother.
- Tim Blake Nelson as Gideon, a guard of the Precrime prison.
- Daniel London as Norbert "Wally" Wallace, the caretaker of the Precogs.
- Peter Stormare as Dr. Solomon P. Eddie, an underground surgeon Anderton previously arrested who replaces his eyes.
The cast also features Jessica Capshaw as Evanna, Precrime's transport pilot, Tyler Patrick Jones as Sean Anderton, John and Lara's son supposedly murdered by Crow, Jason Antoon as Rufus T. Riley, cyber parlor proprietor; Nancy Linehan Charles as Celeste Burgess, Lamar's wife; Victor Raider-Wexler as Attorney General Arthur Nash, Arye Gross as Howard Marks, Ashley Crow as Sarah Marks, David Stifel as Lycon, Anna Maria Horsford as Casey, Joel Gretsch as Donald Dubin, Tom Choi as Nick Paymen, Caroline Lagerfelt as Greta van Eyck and William Mapother (Tom Cruise's cousin) as a hotel clerk, Frank Grillo as Precrime Cop, Jim Rash as Technician.
Cameron Diaz, Cameron Crowe, and Paul Thomas Anderson make uncredited cameo appearances as subway passengers.
Production[edit]
Development[edit]
Dick's story was first optioned by producer and writer Gary Goldman in 1992.[12] He created the initial script for the film with Ron Shusett and Robert Goethals (uncredited).[13] It was supposed to be a sequel to the 1990 Dick adaptation Total Recall, which starred Arnold Schwarzenegger.[14] However, Carolco Pictures, the production company that produced the film, struggled to secure either funding or Schwarzenegger's interest to progress the project before its bankruptcy in 1995.[15][16] While the remake rights were purchased by Miramax Films in 1997, Shusett and Goldman had removed the Total Recall elements from their script to develop it as a standalone film, Minority Report.
Novelist Jon Cohen was hired in 1997 to adapt the story for a potential film version that would have been directed by Dutch filmmaker Jan de Bont.[17][18] Meanwhile, Cruise and Spielberg, who met and became friends on the set of Cruise's film Risky Business in 1983,[19] had been looking to collaborate for ten years.[20][21] Spielberg was set to direct Cruise in Rain Man, but left to make Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.[19] Cruise read Cohen's script, and passed it onto Spielberg, who felt it needed some work. Spielberg was not directly involved in the writing of the script, though he was allowed to decide whether the picture's screenplay was ready to be filmed. When Cohen submitted an acceptable revision, he called Cruise and said, "Yeah, I'll do this version of the script."[18][22] In that version, Witwer creates a false disk which shows Anderton killing him. When Anderton sees the clip, his belief in the infallibility of the precogs' visions convinces him it is true, therefore the precogs have a vision of him killing Witwer. At the end, Anderton shoots Witwer and one of the brother precogs finishes him off, because Witwer had slain his twin.[23] Spielberg was attracted to the story because as both a mystery and a film set 50 years in the future, it allowed him to do "a blending of genres" which intrigued him.[24]
In 1998, the pair joined Minority Report and announced the production as a joint venture of Spielberg's DreamWorks and Amblin Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Cruise's Cruise/Wagner Productions, and De Bont's production company, Blue Tulip, the latter of which had previously worked on Speed 2: Cruise Control.[2] In exchange for directing The Haunting, Spielberg offered to take over directing duties on Minority Report while De Bont was busy with post-production for Twister.[25] Spielberg however stated that despite being credited, De Bont never became involved with the film.[26] Cruise and Spielberg, at the latter's insistence,[27] reportedly agreed to each take 15% of the gross instead of any money up front to try to keep the film's budget under $100 million.[28] Spielberg said he had done the same with name actors in the past to great success: "Tom Hanks took no cash for Saving Private Ryan but he made a lot of money on his profit participation."[27] He made this agreement a prerequisite:[27]
Production was delayed for several years. The original plan was to begin filming after Cruise's Mission: Impossible 2 was finished, but that film ran over schedule, which also allowed Spielberg time to bring in screenwriter Scott Frank to rework Cohen's screenplay.[2][17][29] John August did an uncredited draft to polish the script,[30] and Frank Darabont was also invited to rewrite, but was by then busy with The Majestic.[31] The film closely follows Scott Frank's final script (completed May 16, 2001), and contains much of Cohen's third draft (May 24, 1997).[18] Frank removed the character of Senator Malcolm from Cohen's screenplay, and inserted Burgess, who became the "bad guy". He also rewrote Witwer from a villain to a "good guy", as he was in the short story.[23] In contrast to Spielberg's next science fiction picture, War of the Worlds, which he called "100 percent character" driven, Spielberg said the story for Minority Report became "50 percent character and 50 percent very complicated storytelling with layers and layers of murder mystery and plot."[8] According to film scholar Warren Buckland, Cohen and Frank apparently did not see the Goldman and Schusett screenplay, but instead worked on their own adaptation.[14] Goldman and Schusett, however, claimed the pair used a lot of material from their script, so the issue went through the Writer's Guild arbitration process. They won a partial victory; they were not given writing credits, but were listed as executive producers.[14] The film was delayed again so Spielberg could finish A.I. after the death of his friend Stanley Kubrick.[32] When Spielberg originally signed on to direct, he planned to have an entirely different supporting cast. He offered the role of Witwer to Matt Damon, Iris Hineman to Meryl Streep, Burgess to Ian McKellen, Agatha to Cate Blanchett, and Lara to Jenna Elfman.[33] Streep declined the role,[33] Damon opted out due to scheduling conflicts with Ocean's Eleven,[33][34] and the other roles were recast due to the delays. Spielberg also offered the role of Witwer to Javier Bardem, who turned it down.[35]
Technology[edit]
After E.T., Spielberg started to consult experts, and put more scientific research into his science fiction films.[36] In 1999, he invited fifteen experts convened by Peter Schwartz and Stewart Brand to a hotel in Santa Monica for a three-day "think tank". He wanted to consult with the group to create a plausible "future reality" for the year 2054 as opposed to a more traditional "science fiction" setting.[37] Dubbed the "think tank summit",[38] the experts included architect Peter Calthorpe, author Douglas Coupland, urbanist and journalist Joel Garreau, computer scientist Neil Gershenfeld, biomedical researcher Shaun Jones, computer scientist Jaron Lanier, and former Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) architecture dean William J. Mitchell.[37][39] Production designer Alex McDowell kept what was nicknamed the "2054 bible", an 80-page guide created in preproduction which listed all the aspects of the future world: architectural, socio-economic, political, and technological.[38] While the discussions did not change key elements in the film, they were influential in the creation of some of the more utopian aspects, though John Underkoffler, the science and technology advisor for the film, described it as "much grayer and more ambiguous" than what was envisioned in 1999.[40] Underkoffler, who designed most of Anderton's interface after Spielberg told him to make it "like conducting an orchestra", said "it would be hard to identify anything [in the movie] that had no grounding in reality."[38] McDowell teamed up with architect Greg Lynn to work on some of the technical aspects of the production design. Lynn praised his work, saying that a "lot of those things Alex cooked up for Minority Report, like the 3-D screens, have become real."[41]
Spielberg described his ideas for the film's technology to Roger Ebert before its release:
Filming[edit]
Minority Report was the first film to have an entirely digital production design.[41] Termed "previz", as an abbreviation of previsualization (a term borrowed from the film's narrative), production designer Alex McDowell said the system allowed them to use Photoshop in place of painters, and employ 3D animation programs (Maya and XSI) to create a simulated set, which could be filled with digital actors then used to block out shots in advance. The technology also allowed the tie-in video game and special effects companies to cull data from the previous system before the film was finished, which they used to establish parameters for their visuals. When Spielberg quickly became a fan, McDowell said "It became pretty clear that [he] wouldn't read an illustration as a finished piece, but if you did it in Photoshop and created a photorealistic environment he focused differently on it."[41]
Filming took place from March 22 to July 18, 2001,[33] in Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Los Angeles.[43] Film locations included the Ronald Reagan Building (as PreCrime headquarters) and Georgetown.[43] The skyline of Rosslyn, Virginia is visible when Anderton flies across the Potomac River. A quick shot of Indian Field Creek, which crosses the Colonial Parkway in Yorktown, Virginia, is seen as John takes Agatha to his wife's house.[44][42] During production, Spielberg made regular appearances on a video-only webcam based in the craft services truck, both alone[45] and with Tom Cruise; together they conferred publicly with Ron Howard and Russell Crowe via a similar webcam on the set of A Beautiful Mind in New York.[46]
The location of the small, uncharted island in the last shot of the film is Butter Island off North Haven, Maine in the Penobscot Bay.[47]
Although it takes place in an imagined future world of advanced technology, Minority Report attempts to embody a more "realistic" depiction of the future.[48] Spielberg decided that to be more credible, the setting had to keep both elements of the present and ones which specialists expected would be forthcoming. Thus Washington, D.C., as depicted in the movie keeps well-known buildings such as the Capitol and the Washington Monument, as well as a section of modern buildings on the other side of the Potomac River. Production designer Alex McDowell was hired based on his work in Fight Club and his storyboards for a film version of Fahrenheit 451 which would have starred Mel Gibson. McDowell studied modern architecture, and his sets contain many curves, circular shapes, and reflective materials. Costume designer Deborah L. Scott decided to make the clothes worn by the characters as simple as possible, so as not to make the depiction of the future seem dated.[49]
The stunt crew was the same one used in Cruise's Mission: Impossible 2, and was responsible for complex action scenes. These included the auto factory chase scene, filmed in a real facility using props such as a welding robot, and the fight between Anderton and the jetpack-clad officers, filmed in an alley set built on the Warner Bros. studio lot.[50] Industrial Light & Magic did most of the special effects, while PDI/DreamWorks was responsible for the Spyder robots,[51] making it their final live-action visual effects job before solely working with DreamWorks Animation shortly afterwards. PDI visual effects supervisor Henry LaBounta took inspiration from deep sea jellyfish while creating the Spyder robots: "Their tentacles have these bioluminescent little lights that kind of run through their tentacles and that just looks so cool. So I got back to the studio and talked to the artists and I said, ‘We’re gonna do some radiating jellyfish bioluminescent lights on the bottom of this spider, and try that.’"[52] Pixel Liberation Front handled previsualization animatics. The holographic projections and the prison facility were filmed by several roving cameras which surrounded the actors, and the scene where Anderton gets off his car and runs along the Maglev vehicles was filmed on stationary props, which were later replaced by computer-generated vehicles.[53]
Storyline differences[edit]
Like most film adaptations of Dick's works,[12] many aspects of his story were changed in their transition to film, such as the addition of Lamar Burgess and the change in setting from New York City to Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Northern Virginia. The character of John Anderton was changed from a balding and out-of-shape old man to an athletic officer in his 40s to fit its portrayer and the film's action scenes.[54] The film adds two stories of tragic families; Anderton's, and that of the three pre-cogs.[55] In the short story, Anderton is married with no children, while in the film, he is the divorced father of a kidnapped son, who is most likely deceased.[56]
Although it is implied, but unclear in the film whether Agatha is related to the twin pre-cogs, her family was shattered when Burgess murdered her mother, Anne Lively.[57] The precogs were intellectually disabled and deformed individuals in the story, but in the film, they are the genetically mutated offspring of drug addicts.[58][59]
Anderton's future murder and the reasons for the conspiracy were changed from a general who wants to discredit PreCrime to regain some military funding, to a man who murdered a precog's mother to preserve PreCrime. The subsequent murders and plot developed from this change. The film's ending also differs from the short story's. In Dick's story, Anderton prevents the closure of the PreCrime division, however, in the movie Anderton successfully brings about the end of the organization.[60] Other aspects were updated to include current technology. For instance in the story, Anderton uses a punch card machine to interpret the precogs' visions; in the movie, he uses a virtual reality interface.[61]
Themes[edit]
The main theme of Minority Report is the classic philosophical debate of free will versus determinism.[62][63] Other themes explored by the film include involuntary commitment, the nature of political and legal systems in a high technology-advanced society,[64] the rights of privacy in a media-dominated world,[38] and the nature of self-perception.[65] The film also continues to follow Spielberg's tradition of depicting broken families,[66][67] which he has said is motivated by his parents' divorce when he was a child.[27