Minority Report

In a near future, crime fighting agencies have a major asset, they have a means to know about and prevent a crime before it even happens, this is the mission of a Precrime a government agency led by John Anderton (Tom Cruise) who has achieved remarkable results in the district of Columbia, which is supposed to encourage the whole country to endorse this method which combines police efficiency, high technology and parapsychologic powers focused around the powers of three oracles, the twins and Agatha (Samantha Morton).

Precrime being the center of a major media attention, the department of justice dispatches Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) an ambitious suit with enough authority and insolence to irritates the established order, Anderton is not happy because he has skeletons in his closet caused by a close family member of his involved in a tragic happening, which jeopardized his stability, and made him prone to dishonourable behaviors.

To make everything worse, John is the next target of his team, since He is about to be part of a crime, now this can be either a ploy to take over his service, or that he has good reasons to go on the other side of the law, this is the central conflict of «Minority Report»

Anything Spielberg does has the potential to attract movie audiences and movie lovers alike, because the man has the hidden talent to make movies that attract both, in his first collaboration with Tom Cruise, and over a script based on a short story by the legendary Philip.K Dick it even has the potential to become a cultural event, something that would be in the same drawer with «Blade Runner» as one of the Sci-Fi classics, this movie doesn't manage to do so, but It fails honorably, because it doesn't laugh at iteslf, and it respects the audience's brains.

Anderton quest to discharge himself from this criminal involvment that did not occur leads him to realise that this whole mess is political and involving very influencial people, as he learns from his mentor Max Von Sydow (Director Lamar Burgess), who was the mastermind behind Precrime, and as we follow him through a futuristic Washington D.C, we have a glimpse of the future without the cheap tricks that we became tired of, but in it's essence it's a thriller, it doesn't really dig deep in the soil of big brother issues, and private life, , Anderton wants to know the truth, to do so he crosses the middle line between good and evil back and fourth, and visits the underworld and it's identity concealing technologies to do so.

When I say «fails honourably» it still means that it is head and shoulders above stuff like «I.Robot» or even «A.I» by the same director, the way Anderton uses the interface of Precrime was as overused as the Matrix's bullet time effect, We wish it would dig deeper into the territory of the conflicting man-machine relationship, and how new technologies are altering our free will, but this movie is here to entertain, and it does it brilliantly, it is not the best Spielberg but it's quite good, and it gives him another success to add to the many he had in his rich creative life, casting choices are good, the cinematography splendid, we just hope that summer blockbusters with A-List stars had this quality controls, but when you see «Transformers 2» being so popular while being so bad, you wonder if American movies have went again through the downward spiral of lucrative mediocrity, and even if it does, we'd still have the underground Sci-Fi movies.