Minority Report

- The characters played by Max von Sydow and Tom Cruise sit together, talking ... hmmmm, where's the chess board? ;)

This week's movie rental was Minority Report ...

a 2002 American neo-noir science fiction thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg and loosely based on the short story of the same name by Philip K. Dick. It is set primarily in Washington, D.C., and Northern Virginia in the year 2054, where "PreCrime", a specialized police department, apprehends criminals based on foreknowledge provided by three psychics called "precogs". The cast includes Tom Cruise as PreCrime Captain John Anderton, Colin Farrell as Department of Justice agent Danny Witwer, Samantha Morton as the senior precog Agatha, and Max von Sydow as Anderton's superior Lamar Burgess. The film is a combination of whodunit, thriller and science fiction.>

I saw this at the theater when it first came out but I'm going back over past Tom Cruise movies, and this was the first on the list. It was actually pretty good ... good acting, nice special effects, interesting concept as expected from Dick. The only thing I really disliked was the way it looked .... they bleach-bypassed the negatives to give it a "noir" feel but I thought it just looked washed out.

Rogerr Ebert gave the film 4 out of 4 stars in his review. Here's just the beginning of it ...

At a time when movies think they have to choose between action and ideas, Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report" is a triumph--a film that works on our minds and our emotions. It is a thriller and a human story, a movie of ideas that's also a whodunit. Here is a master filmmaker at the top of his form, working with a star, Tom Cruise, who generates complex human feelings even while playing an action hero ....

And here's a trailer ...