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MINORITY
REPORT
First published in 1955, Philip K Dick’s 38-page story ‘The Minority
Report’ has, as its leading character, the fiftyish pipesmoker John
Anderton - a man who, we’re told in the first line, fears he’s getting
‘bald, old and fat.’ So it’s something of a surprise to see the decidedly
un-bald, relatively youthful, decidedly slimline Tom Cruise cast as Anderton
in Steven Spielberg’s film version, Minority Report. Then again,
perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised, given the way the Woody Allenish
main character from Dick’s ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’ suddenly
became Arnold Schwarzenegger when the story was filmed as Total Recall
in 1990.
‘The Minority Report’ isn’t among the strongest, nor the most obviously cinematic,
of Dick’s early stories. ‘The Variable Man’, with which it’s often anthologised,
would seem to have much more potential. So it’s likely that Scott (Out
of Sight) Frank’s adaptation, while slightly abbreviating the story’s
title, will massively expand its themes to fill a slightly daunting 148-minute
running time – daunting, as it’s very difficult to make this kind of propulsive
sci-fi stretch much beyond 90 minutes.
And it’s worth remembering that Spielberg’s bloated, uneven A I was itself
based on a short story barely three pages long. Early glimpses of Minority
Report suggest Spielberg has once again deployed that movie’s cool,
neon-lit futurism, blending it with the paranoiac race-against-unknown-enemy
aspects of Cruise’s last vehicle, Vanilla Sky.
But the casting offers more hope: Colin Farrell, though direly in need of a
hit, remains one of the more promising young actors in Hollywood, and
Max Von Sydow lends class to even the shoddiest production. Samantha Morton,
meanwhile, is an intriguingly unorthodox choice as leading lady – let’s
just hope she has rather more to do than Frances O’Connor in AI and
Cameron Diaz in Vanilla Sky.
12th
June, 2002
a full (post
cog) review of MINORITY REPORT can be viewed
here
by Neil
Young
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