It's 2054 and Pre-Crime law enforcement has prevented all murders in Washington for the last six years. Using the premonitions of Pre-Cogs - three psychic humans - Chief John Anderton (Cruise) and his team are able to foresee crimes and arrest the perpetrator before harm is done.
Anderton is a man driven by the righteousness of Pre-Crime, mainly in an attempt to reconcile himself to the abduction and murder of his own son. That is until the Pre-Cogs see images of a murder where he is the killer, sending him on the run and throwing his belief in both Pre-Crime and himself into turmoil.
With "Minority Report", Steven Spielberg has ditched the romanticism of "A.I." in favour of the paranoid creepiness of futuristic noir. Instead of robotic children in desperate need of love, we have a haunted and embittered cop who uses drugs to escape his emotional pain.
Sparing us another visual re-hash of "Blade Runner" futurism, "Minority Report" presents instead a believably advanced landscape where cars are like Scalextric, but shopping centres still look the same.
Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski ("Schindler's List") creates a powerfully simple landscape of icy blues and greys, a sleek yet bleak backdrop for the philosophical musings.
The film is consistently thrilling, if a little over-explanatory towards the end, and is given its human side largely by an authentic performance from Cruise. He is convincingly lonely and needy whilst giving a full dose of action-man bravado against some stunning visual effects.
With CGI that remains integral to the plot, the film's futuristic vision is dazzling yet remains unnervingly dark, wowing the eyes whilst challenging the mind. Whoever thought paranoia could look so good?
Minority Report (2002)
