RogerBW's Blog

2002 science fiction, dir. Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, Max von Sydow: IMDb / allmovie. Precrime stops murders before they happen. But what happens when its boss is named as a future murderer?

All right, so this film adaptation of the novella began its life as a sequel to 1990's Total Recall, starring Schwarzenegger. And although that didn't go far before Carolco went bankrupt, it may explain some of the choices here: on the one hand the film's saying you should take this stuff Terribly Seriously, with grim blue-tinted Tom being brave and manly. On the other hand we have a jetpack chase, leading straight into a factory chase, and an eyeball bouncing down a corridor. (They don't.) I've noticed before that Spielberg as a filmmaker seems to have a split personality, such as with the big look-at-me moments in Schindler's List, and that's very much in play here.

And it's not Tom Cruise's fault, or a majority opinion, but I find him hard to sympathise with: I always get the sense of watching Tom playing the guy, not of watching the guy. Yeah, his character here is a drug addict, but only in that convenient cinematic way that doesn't actually stop him doing his job.

A lot of this film is for the visuals. Great big gesture controls! Paperback book sized USB sticks! Cars that turn sideways and go down vertical roads! Carving the names of predicted murderers on wooden balls because that's hard to fake, and then rolling them down a track. The production design is gorgeous, and being shot on Super 35 and enlarged helps too, but so many of the decisions were clearly made to pick the thing that would look good rather than the one that would make any kind of sense that again I'm pushed away from any feeling of immersion.

Which means I have time to think: why does being prevented from murdering someone automatically get you a no-trial life sentence with no parole? Consider that guy at the beginning, who walked in on his wife with her lover and if not prevented would have killed them both. Give him thirty seconds to think, and chances are he'd say something like "no, no, you're right, I'm not a murderer, let's just get divorced". If that were what happened rather than bam, out of society forever, then it wouldn't be so tearingly important that the psychics are never wrong… and so the whole thing falls apart.

Colin Farrell does a good job here as the guy who thinks he's the hero, doing that standard conspiracy-thriller thing of taking his suspicious to the Top Guy who turns out to be In On It… but it is a standard thing that we've seen many times before, and it just feels like a lack of genre savvy. (Also someone else then does the same thing. And we get two separate full explanations of the plot. I wonder if test audiences complained about being confused?)

Yes, of course there are people who saw an advertisement that recognises people and calls them by name, and thought "this is a really great idea". ("Hi, Bob, how are those [embarrassing purchase] working for you? Want to buy some more?")

There's fridge logic, and there's stuff that made itself obvious even while I was watching. Cars have fuel right there in the factory? And no override switch, like the ones that we've already seen all cars have? Why the articulated chairs during the not-helicopter assault, compared with just piling out of a door? Because it looks cool.

I've never been a great Spielberg fan, and this doesn't make me re-evaluate that, but it's still enjoyable. All right, it doesn't need to be a two and a half hour film, but neither does it feel like one. Two, at most.

Once more if you want more of my witterings you should listen to Ribbon of Memes.