Minority Report
Dir. Steven Spielberg, 2002. Starring Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton
Minority Report is a movie that takes place in the future and, like all extant movies, it was made in the past. It’s 2054 as imagined from 2002, and now, in 2018, we’re a third of the way there. I always like — when seeing outdated visions of the future — to compare predictions of the future to our present. Universally, no one predicted that our god damn phones would become so important. In Minority Report, people still carry newspapers and magazines, but they’re all e-paper. Presumably you have one USA Today that changes every day, and one Newsweek that changes once a week, and at home you have one copy of the Farmer’s Almanac and the Poet’s Market that change once a year. The ads that track your purchases and address you by name feel very prescient — Tom Cruise walks into the Gap and a hologram asks him how he likes the t-shirts he bought last week. That’s the experience of online shopping, except it’s not at stores, of course. In Minority Report’s vision of 2054, there are still malls (and the mall is still crowded!).
In the summer of 2002, I was between my sophomore and junior years of university. I was living at my parents’ house in Valparaiso, Indiana, working an early weekday shift at McDonald’s. I had a lot of free time. I read books, I watched TV, I did wholesome things like go to parks and go camping. I was 19 years old and I had never drank alcohol, smoked a cigarette, or even seen a drug. These facts feel relevant, somehow, to give you the picture of the child I was. I’ve still never smoked a cigarette.
Minority Report is based on a Philip K. Dick story I’ve never read. Years ago, someone accidentally discovered three weird children who can predict murders, and now these young people live in a tub of goo, hooked up to dream-recording machines, and because of their gift of precognition, no one has done any murders in Washington D.C. in years. They see the murder before it happens, and the dream is projected onto the ceiling above their tank, and then (somehow), two perfect wooden spheres are created, one with the name of the victim and one with the name of the perpetrator. Boy, these precogs will be steamed when Person of Interest comes out. “Of course!” they’ll say. “We should have used Social Security Numbers to disambiguate the people involved!” The carved wooden spheres travel down a hamster chute and into the office of Tom Cruise’s John Anderton, the guy who’s the chief or something of the Pre-Crime department. He pulls up the precogs’ dream on his giant, curved, transparent computer screen. He dons two Power Gloves. He moves the files around on the screen like he’s conducting an orchestra. He and his team find out where the murder will happen (“Why didn’t we carve the balls to include GPS data!”) and burst in to stop it before it happens.
Another thing Minority Report failed to imagine: that data would be able to transfer in invisible, non-cinematic ways. Tom Cruise has to shout BRING ME THAT FILE and someone has to eject a (transparent) disk from their own (transparent) computer and insert it into Cruise’s transparent computer. He watches videos of his dead son so you know about his sad past, and each video is on its own little labeled transparent disk.
Of course I don’t mean to flex on filmmakers for being unable to forecast technological futures. The future is hard to predict even when you think you have good intel; that’s kind of the thesis of the movie (spoiler, sorry!). In a way, I think our distance from the time of the film’s creation allows us to ignore the technology more easily. In 2002, I thought “are computers going to look like that in the future?” In 2018, I know they’re not. The future-tech is just another vestige of 2002, like Tom Cruise’s unflattering haircut or the wide-leg striped trousers he buys for Agatha. Those things all give texture to the movie, but the main points are timeless: if a power exists, people will seek to abuse it, and innocent people will suffer.
In June 2002, my friend B — — — and I took a weekend trip to West Lafayette, Indiana, to visit two of our guy friends at Purdue, T — — — and X — — -. I had recently come to realize that I was, in fact, in love with T — — -. We had gotten to know each other via livejournal posts and late-night AIM conversations (hello, 2002!) and started hanging out in real life more, and then, suddenly, whoops: I wanted to smooch him. I didn’t know how to bring it up, though: how do you tell someone you’re enjoying the terms of the friendship you have both agreed to but also actually you want a completely different relationship now? The inside of my head was an evidence dungeon of newspaper clippings, red yarn, index cards that said “BUT HOW?!”
That weekend, we decided to go to the movies. I said, as if I had just come up with the idea, “I think we should get dressed up to go!” I had packed An Outfit and I wanted T — — — to see me in it. B — — — went along with the plan, because like most of my friends she was hoping I’d be less insufferable if I were getting laid. T — — — rolled his eyes, but put on khakis and a collared shirt, and we went to see Minority Report.
Here’s what I remember about watching Minority Report in 2002: I thought Samantha Morton looked so cute with her pre-cog haircut that it made me want a pixie cut, too. I thought parts of the movie were very cool and exciting, and parts were unbearably cheesy. I had very little critical apparatus to speak of in 2002.
The flaws in the precog system come to light when someone sets up Tom Cruise for a murder. He picks up the ball with his own name on it; the victim is someone he’s never heard of. Suddenly he’s on the run from his own agency, trying to figure out who set him up and why while also solving a mystery and hiding from the investigators who want to put him in 2054’s version of prison: a room full of holes where criminals are put in something like cryostasis and left to just… molder away, I guess? No trial. No one seems to think of this as a massive human rights violation until the end of the movie (spoiler again), or if they do, they got over it years ago.
Later that night, I was unable to fall asleep on the pull-out bed in the living room. I’m always the last one awake at slumber parties; I remember lying awake in friends’ basements watching 12:00 flash on a VCR and waiting for the sun to come up. I wondered if T — — — was still awake, so I tipetoed over to his room. I was wearing cute pajamas, including little short shorts. Today, in 2018, I cannot fathom the body-confidence involved in wearing short shorts to attract someone instead of repel them, but in 2002 I was a size 4 and I was 19 and I was in love. So I tiptoed into his room and he was awake and I got in his bed and we stayed up for a few hours talking. We talked about the scene were Tom Cruise kisses his son right before the son gets taken, how over the top it is. We talked about the sunglasses fist fight in They Live. He fell asleep around dawn and I sneaked back out to the living room. When we all got up later that morning, he said “I woke up and you were gone!” I felt proud that my absence had been noticed. I was creating my own future.
Minority Report has a controversial happy ending. Some theorize that it’s a hallucination Tom Cruise is having down in his prison hole. But I think it’s the kind of happy ending one gets at the end of a tragedy: the child is still dead, a lot of lives were shattered, everyone involved is much, much older. Every life has points that would look like a happy ending if you stopped telling the story there.
Things I correctly predicted about the future in 2002: that I would go to grad school, that T — — — and I would fall in love and get married (spoiler!! Did you guess?), that I would not have babies. Things I did predicted incorrectly: that I would use my degree to have a job in academia, that I would still be the kind of person to want a job in academia. That we’d have a dog and a yard. Things it never occured to me to ask: if the internet would continue to shape my life more with each passing year, if I’d have friends around the world that I’d never met, if I’d ever live in a world where a bad website determined presidential elections.
In 2018, I saw Minority Report for the second time. The Music Box Theatre showed it in a “Sci-Fi Spielberg” festival ramping up to Ready Player One. I met Tom for empanadas before the movie, and I was running late, and as I walked I pulled my tiny opaque phone/computer out of my coat pocket to apologize. He used his identical machine to respond. We talked about the movie the whole walk home to our apartment and cats.
‘’Minority Report’’ is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) for violence, brief language, some sexuality and drug content. Running time: 140 minutes. With: Max von Sydow, Kathryn Morris, Tim Blake Nelson, Peter Stormare.
This essay originally appeared in Hard to Love #7. You can buy the full issue, physically or digitally, here. Or here. Want to receive issues as they come out? Sign up on Patreon.
