One Of The Best Sci-Fi Thrillers Of This Century Just Got A Huge Upgrade
Twenty-three years later, this Philip K. Dick adaptation holds up.
Perhaps the greatest difference between the 1956 Philip K. Dick novella “The Minority Report” and the 2002 film Minority Report is the fact that on the page, John Allison Anderton (Tom Cruise) is an old guy close to retirement, and in the film, he’s a vibrant 40-year-old who looks 25. In fairness, Dick may have imagined a balding guy in his fourties when he wrote “The Minority Report,” since, at the time, Dick was only 28. In other words, Dick could never have pictured that an older guy, on the run, trying to escape a predetermined murder charge, could have ever looked like Tom Cruise. And yet, despite many other changes between the text and the screen, Minority Report remains one of the more faithful-ish Dick adaptations, and is worth a rewatch today.
Twenty-three years after its theatrical release, Minority Report just got a slick new 4K Steelbook Limited Edition. The film looks better than ever, and remains one of Spielberg’s more timeless attempts at depicting an intentionally hyper-stylized future. And yet, despite how well its aesthetics have held up two decades later, the thing that makes Minority Report so good is the way it conveys the core concept from Philip K. Dick: a paranoid thriller, propelled by incredible world-building, with just enough wonky plotting to make it interesting.
The premise of Minority Report remains one of Dick’s best: In the future, a system called “Precrime” uses precognitive mutants to take vague images from the future, and, with the use of computer analysis, predicts murders before those murders happen. In the novella, this system also includes other crimes, and early on, the somewhat on-the-nose dialogue makes it clear that this conception of crime and punishment is entirely dependent on “absolute metaphysics.”
The idea that a major law enforcement system in Washington D.C. (NYC in the novella) is built entirely on slippery philosophy about guilt being determined before action is part of the messy brilliance of Philip K. Dick. Many of his stories and novels are like this: built on a fantastic premise that is both extremely compelling and barely believable. As many have debated for years, Dick’s writing style is sometimes ham-fisted; in the novella, characters are astonished, and then say they are astonished out loud. This kind of hand-holding is tempered, however, by interesting and compelling twists, in which Dick’s basic world-building is the thing that is baked into why the twists unfold the way they do.
In a sense, “The Minority Report” has a lot in common with Dick’s famous story “Paycheck,” which, weirdly enough, became a somewhat forgettable movie directed by John Woo in 2003. In both stories, there’s a kind of closed-loop paradox situation, but what makes Minority Report so compelling is that time travel isn’t required to make a time-travel-esque closed-loop paradox work.
How Was Minority Report Received At The Time?
Spielberg and Cruise celebrate the opening of Minority Report in 2002.
In 2002, Minority Report was something of a blockbuster comeback for director Steven Spielberg. The previous year, in 2001, Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence, another sci-fi flick based on a short work of fiction (Brian Aldiss’s “Supertoys Last All Summer Long”), was less well-received by critics, and, in terms of interesting sci-fi themes, is far less interesting to watch today, despite some great performances. This was also three years before Cruise “jumped the couch” and became, briefly, deeply unpopular in 2005. It was also the first “fun” Spielberg movie in a while; 1997’s The Lost World: Jurassic Park, which, despite its good points, was obviously not the director’s best.
So, Minority Report was notable in 2002 because it proved that yes, Spielberg could still make amazing, mainstream blockbusters. And those blockbusters, like 1993’s Jurassic Park, could retain the quality and depth of the literary source material. In other words, in 2002, Spielberg was back.
Why Is Minority Report Important To See Now?
One of the best sci-fi movies of the century?
What Spielberg manages with the film version of Minority Report is to take some of the rough edges of Dick’s writing and smooth everything into a paranoid thriller, which, smartly, doesn’t even try to ape Blade Runner, but ends up being in the same league anyway. The futuristic cars of Minority Report, and the virtual screens scream THIS IS THE FUTURE, but aren’t silly or distracting. This future is nice to look at, but also doesn’t feel too fake-futurey to be distracting.
Thankfully, what Minority Report gets right about science fiction cinema is also what Dick knew all along: the point wasn’t to predict the future; that’s boring. Rather, the point was to use the future as a setting to tell an incredible one-of-a-kind story. It’s an aggressively entertaining film, with a dark edge that both honors Dick but improves on the source material, too.
Other than Richard Linklater’s 2006 film A Scanner Darkly, there hasn’t been a Philip K. Dick movie as good as Minority Report since 2002.
What New Features Does Minority Report Have?
Samantha Morton and Tom Cruise in Minority Report (2002).
The main thing you’re getting with the new Minority Report 4K release is the improved, remastered image and sound, which boasts a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track. The special bonus features are imported from the 2010 Blu-ray release, which includes:
- A feature with Steven Spielberg about the design of the movie
- Director’s commentary
- Storyboards
- Deleted scenes
If you’re building a serious science fiction physical media library, this release is essential.
