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So finally a film that does the legend that is Philip K. Dick justice. It's been a long wait since
Blade Runner. Total Recall was a tidy enough contender extinguished of all sensibility by Arnie's
presence (despite Michael Ironside) & any other small fry future-visions based on Dick have done little
to placate our thirst. But this is the problem, Dick was sooo prophetic & sooo genius & sooo (rightly)
deified you'd have to be very brave (or stupid) to take on one of his tales.
Spielberg & Cruise are such a dream team. A clash of ego, intelligence & mainstream clout that guarantees
something worthwhile. An odd statement considering both men's recently blotted copy books by
association with one of cinema's own legends: Stanley Kubrick. Cruise bombed in the truly misdiagnosed
Eyes Wide Shit (as popularly known) & Spielberg's favour to an old friend, AI - a long time Brechtian
plaything for Kubrick - did not mix well with the former's rose-tinted, emotive vision of the world.
That the two decided to team up after these recent career setbacks is no surprise, if nothing else
the pairing was guaranteed to fill seats & recoup budgets whether the outcome was any good or not.
Minority Report is & will be a success. It looks great, Cruise glides effortlessly through the action
with his undeniable charm & Spielberg strings the whole production together as you'd expect from the man
responsible for virtually every Top 10 box office hit of all time & some of the best movies ever made (Jaws,
Raiders of the Lost Ark). It's also nice to see Cruise dirty his image a little with a drug dependency
& having his eyeballs surgically swapped. Spielberg flirts with his darker side too right up until the
conclusion & you're actually left questioning at one point whether the film is gonna end on a downbeat
note... Nah, surely not...this is Spielberg & Cruise after all... We are literally seconds away from
the biggest bubble bursting ending since...well, I can't think of the last one on this kind of stage
(Unbreakable maybe).
Do they have the balls to carry it off? Of course not. This IS Spielberg & Cruise. And also two of
HW's biggest players desperately in need of a hit so cue incredibly cumbersome, overlong, feel good,
tacked-on ending so we can all leave the cinema feeling good about ourselves & tip our hats to Steve
& Tom for serving up exactly what we want. This is the only element I can fault about the film. Not
that we don't want to see Tom save the day but the way he does causes a massive adjunct in the flow
of story. You can just imagine a bunch of dumb-ass preview audiences whining & moaning: "it was too
downbeat"..."why didn't he save the world?"..."I hated the ending..."
Now, I have no idea whether it was the producers intention to end the film on this macabre note
(one closer to Dick's original ending), all I will say is that only a fool would fail to spot the
extraneous, erroneous conclusion which leads me to the question: when will film be given back to the
filmmakers?
How many scathing reviews will it take to give the power back to the people most qualified to make
such decisions.
Film is at base art & art cannot be produced by committee. Look at cinema's most recent heyday, the 80's new
wave that gave us Scorsese, Coppola, David Lynch, Oliver Stone, David Cronenbourg, Alex Cox, Michael Mann & the films they
turned out: Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Apocalypse Now, Blue Velvet, JFK, Videodrome,
Repo Man, Manhunter. Mavericks like these
& the quality of movie they produced are virtually non-existent in HW today, the new breed like David Fincher,
the Wachowski Brothers, John Dahl, Atom Egoyan, Sam Raimi are either compromised by money-men or
forced into underground low budget obscurity. When art becomes big business art is no longer.
I'll leave you with a thought: when did you last see a film that truly rivalled any of the
above or could be considered such a classic?
The Matrix remains the exception - and our only hope at present.
RATING: (c)Limer 2002
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Re: "We are literally seconds away from the biggest bubble bursting ending since...well, I can't
think of the last one on this kind of stage (Unbreakable maybe)."
What about the lovely downbeat ending of The Empire Strikes Back? Or would that be considered
involking the Holy Trinity? Han Solo's been frozen and nicked by the bad guys, Luke's had his mitt
chopped off and found out that the evilest mother in the galaxy is actually more of a father! Or
failing that, the ending to Jaws 3, where let's face it we were all rooting for the shark to eat all
those annoying St Elmo's extras, and they went and blew him up. Damn.
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Minority Report (Cinema: July 2002)
Lovely Big Downers; Fogster: 08/08/02