Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002)

How did I miss what a dense and knotty picture this is? So I have the good people over at Reverse Shot (seriously why aren’t you reading their amazing Spielberg series) to thank for that. The film in its repeating motifs: eyes, mirrors, shifting perspectives, images doubling and overlaying each other call to mind DePalma making a futuristic Hitchcock wrong man picture. On repeated viewings the film’s metatextual concerns surface as Spielberg’s usual concerns (the reunification of the family) fade into the background.  So if A.I. is Spielberg’s most thematically audacious film, Minority Report is his most formally audacious. With A.I. Spielberg was interrogating his themes, whereas here he interrogates his method.

Filled with elaborate sequences, from a director who knows his way around elaborate, Report transcends the merely byzantine by crafting these sequences with a wit and playfulness that belies the film’s essential darkness, while simultaneously expressing a complex understanding of the nature of film, and moreover an understanding of how we construct reality through vision.  Moreover how images within cinema are constructed to create understanding. So while it the connection between the way John Anderton analyses, chooses, and discards images generated from the pre-cogs is represents how a film is edited, the entire films is constantly addressing seeing and crafting images. Most especially in the films greatest sequence, wherein Anderton and Agatha escape through the mall by directing their movements based on where the police are going to be. The scene perfectly encapsulates the way in which editing and camera placement determine the interplay of the objective and subjective views. Yet the camera is always subjective, even though it is essentially an objective recording device. It is through the editing of images that meaning is derived. What one is left with is the picture’s profound ambivalence about the nature of this process. So that while Spielberg in the opening of the film demonstrates how this process can illuminate truth, he spends the remainder of the film, undermining his initial hypothesis. Nowhere is this more readily apparent than in Agatha’s desperate inquiry “Is this now?”