BY DANIEL BAIG | Note: I'm not going to bother with plot summary. If you don't know what a "pre-cog" is already, try watching the trailer or reading another critic's review. Or just go see the movie. Instead, I offer some random thoughts/reflections on Minority Report . . . Warning -- NOT spoiler-free.

 Coincidences of art unintentionally mirroring life, and vice-versa, as well as when art by chance mirrors other, simultaneously appearing art, are fascinating things to note and analyze. In them we perhaps get a sense of the Zeitgeist.

The release now of Minority Report happens to provide examples of each.

A new, recently published novel, The Life Before Her Eyes, by poet Laura Kasischke, starts out by depicting the violent death (by murder) of a young girl. Yet, though the character's life ends, it simultaneously continues on into its imagined future -- what might have been -- should have been -- existing alongside/sharing the same space as the fact that it will not be.

A very similar situation is described in one of Minority Report's best, and certainly to me, most affecting, scenes. The scene in question is lyrical and sad and moving at the same time; it represents both sterling writing (Minority Report's screenplay is credited to Scott Frank and Jon Cohen) and commanding, mesmerizing acting/line reading by Samantha Morton. I would have appreciated and enjoyed this scene even more if Morton had not been placed in it facing away from an open window, leading me, partly on the basis of the violent scene it comes on the heels of, and partly just as a result of perhaps having seen too many violent movies, to watch the whole thing half-cringing, fearing and rather expecting her monologue to be end-punctuated by a bullet entering her skull or her back. (Thank heavens, it wasn't.)

And then, on the intersection-of-life-and-art front, Minority Report's thematic obsession -- just how much giving up of personal liberty is a safer society worth? -- couldn't seem more topical now, what with John Ashcroft's Department of Justice doing away, for many people, with a number of civil liberties we've kind of gotten used to (like habeas corpus), in the name of guaranteeing public safety.

 One of the most affecting and powerful elements of Minority Report, though it perhaps could have been emphasized and explored a little more, is the idea that this almost perfectly killing-free society that the movie depicts -- obviously, a wonderful thing -- directly depends on the perpetual misery and mental torture of the pre-cogs, who are, after all, people, though, as a visitor is told in the movie, it helps not to think of them that way.

This aspect of the movie has strong resonances with Ursula K. Le Guin's devastating, once-you-read-it-you'll-never-forget-it 1976 short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

The scene in all Minority Report which most moved me was an unexpected (and beautifully photographed) "happy ending" shot for this part of the story.

 Minority Report is actually three different movies, which at times blend well together, but just as often make for a rather uncomfortable fit:

First of all, it's a straight-ahead action flick, with terrific sci-fi trappings.

It's also an imagining and exploration of a semi-dystopian, semi-utopian future, a not-so-distant one with very visible roots in our actual present.

And finally it's a murder mystery.

Of these three different movies which Minority Report is made up of, only that last one, the murder mystery, lacks originality and imagination. If you don't know, fifteen minutes into Minority Report, who the killer/setter-upper/secret bad guy is, you probably haven't seen many movies in your life. Similarly, if you are actually fooled into thinking, as Tom Cruise's character is, that the new guy in the situation, who's broadly hostile from the get-go, must be the source of the treachery . . . well, perhaps I envy you your naivete; you're probably surprised by plot developments at the movies far more often than I am.

Even the setting for the final unmasking and undoing of the villain is overly familiar. Shades of Harrison Ford confronting his betrayer in The Fugitive, for one.

(Of course, in many ways, Minority Report is just an update of The Fugitive. The memorable poster for that 1993 movie -- Ford, running, edges blurring -- reminds me of something else I really wondered about on the way home from Minority Report: when Tom Cruise's character John Anderton is about to be arrested, he's told not to run. His reply, of course, as you know from the commercials and the trailers, is "Everybody runs." ((They've even been referencing it for the movie's publicity -- ON JUNE 21, GET READY TO RUN, etc.))

But, well -- huh? I'm confused. Cuz they don't run. Nobody runs, but John Anderton. They don't get a chance. We see how well the PreCrime squad works, in the movie's very lengthy opening sequence. They come swooping in and grab the ((about to be a)) perp before he has a chance to do anything -- there's no time for the ((was about to be a)) malefactor to run, jump, hop, skip, crawl, creep, or amble away. At all. So what's all this about "Everybody runs"?)

And then, not only is the resolution of the mystery of who set John Anderton up not terribly surprising, when you find the reason for the set-up, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's not at all clear why the desired result of the set-up would have any real affect on the outcome of . . . well, I don't want to give too much away. But the reasoning on the part of the mastermind behind the nefarious plot seems dubious, at best.

 The PreCrime system in Minority Report only is operational in D.C. This is necessary for the murder set-up aspect of the plot to work (although as I indicated above, the logic behind that set-up is very shaky), but, if thought about, leads to a lot of problems and questions:

We're told that there have been NO murders in D.C. for 6 years. Wouldn't you think people from every other city in America would start moving to D.C. in droves? Wouldn't you think other places would want to start copying the system long before 6 years had gone by?

Eventually we discover a very elaborate way a murder had to be carried out, to get around the PreCrime system. But none of this was necessary!! The murder victim was summoned under false pretences to the spot where she was murdered. The murderer could have just told her to meet him in some place outside the district!!!!!!

Also, in the murderer's very elaborate planning out of this murder, he, duh, had to be thinking very carefully about the murder! Why didn't THIS show up on the pre-cogs radar? They don't ONLY handle red-ball (last minute, crimes of passion) murders. They also have brown ball, pre-meditated homicides. Surely this counts!!

 In its sci-fi action identity, there's some pretty darn cool stuff in Minority Report, most obviously those amazing crawling "spiders," self-ambulatory retinal scans used for checking out the identities of everyone in a building. Spielberg imaginatively shoots some of the sequence in which they're used from above, on a set with no ceiling, so we can watch the little critters make their way from room to room in one frame.

(A thought about the spiders: these things crawl around on the ground, and then you have to let them walk on your face, right around your eye. Yuck! How dangerously unsanitary! Think about all the infections that's inviting. Does nobody sue in the future?)

(Another, slightly more serious question about this sequence: would jumping into a bathtub filled with ice water really make your body heat cease to register? Wouldn't you, uh, have to be dead to get the desired effect?)

As far as the other action sequences go, some are more effective than others.

It was a little disconcerting, so soon after Attack Of The Clones, to find myself watching yet another our-hero-is-trapped-on-a-conveyor-belt-in-a-factory-and-about-to-be-involuntarily-"assembled"! scene.

There's a great sequence in which Samantha Morton, as the most gifted of the pre-cogs (the fact that she holds this status of being more talented than the two male pre-cogs becomes a funny laugh line at one point in the movie) helps Cruise/Anderton evade the police as he's on his way to his rendezvous with destiny, so to speak. Using her knowledge of what's about to happen, she keeps him one step ahead of his former comrades. It's a very well-written and well choreographed part of the film.

Of course, the question of WHY she so proactively helps him to avoid capture, since she knows he's going to murder a man if he successfully gets to his destination, something she doesn't want to happen, isn't at all clear . . . As long as you don't think about that, the sequence is great; once it starts to occur to you that it doesn't make sense, in terms of either character or plot, it comes to feel gimmicky, though a cool gimmick nonetheless.

The jetpack sequence deserves kudos for being a great idea, and for trying. The execution, though, leaves a little to be desired. It's been edited confusingly. Also, some attempts at humor in it, of the type you've really, really seen before in movies -- a family is sitting at the dinner table together, an old person is sitting in an armchair -- when suddenly somebody crashes through the ceiling, etc. . . . well, come across as . . . attempts at humor of the type you've really, really seen before in movies.

 It's in Minority Report's third and strongest identity, as a vision of the future, where the attempts at humor actually work, terrifically. The film's portrait of what's to come is shaped primarily by two very logically emphasized and expanded on current trends: the ongoing surrender of privacy in, and the constantly increasing, rabid consumerification of, our society. There's an hysterical moment in a futuristic Gap, building on the way good commission-based salespeople today remember what you've bought in the past. And there's another brilliant sequence involving advertisements which individually target each person who walks past them; this is the kind of prediction we've been reading about for a long time now. To actually see it finally is funny; it's an even more annoying reality than you might have imagined!

A neat new law enforcement tool is the "sick stick" -- a baton that, when you're touched with it, causes you to barf.

The super magnetic highways, where the driving is done for you, and which go both vertically and horizontally, are very cool. Do they look real? No, not for a second. They're far too obviously CGI work; they have that weird, dirty "Scooby-Doo look" (to use a new reference). They don't look nearly as convincing as the actually physically-there stuff in Blade Runner, for example.

Also, the movie is set in only 2054. (Any special significance to that year?) 52 years is, I would suggest, just too optimistic a time frame in which to expect anything like these massive, almost unimaginably impressive feats of engineering.

Another interesting note about the future: the Washington, D.C. PreCrime squad will use Jango and Boba Fett's vertically oriented spaceship to get around town. (Also, the cars on the super magnetic highways will be modeled after those seen in Tron!)

Another, slightly more depressing note about "the future": it's pretty surprisingly almost all white! All the more surprising considering it's Washington, D.C.!

(So much for that current rapidly increasing trend, obviously not as interesting as the ebbing of privacy, of people more and more marrying and having kids outside of their own racial group . . .)

 Another possible trend?: The movie seems to argue against worrying too much about drugs. Tom Cruise's character Anderton is shown to be a drug addict by night, while still having no problems being a highly capable, super-efficient -- indeed, the district's best -- cop during the day. (Plus, he pick up his drugs during nightly jogs -- so even though he's an addict, he's still keeping in great shape!)

That reflection in turn leads to another one -- are there never any (almost) murders at night? How nice of everyone of a homicidal bent to wait until Anderton shows up for work every morning -- but, since we're told that pretty much the only (almost) murders still (almost) being committed are "crimes of passion," well, it's a little hard to buy. Wouldn't a lot of crimes of passion take place at night? The "passionate" hours? When people, also, by the way, are more likely to be drunk?

 Spielberg indulges in some rather glaring, uncharacteristic "art film" moments. Anderton tracks down the reclusive and much older than him scientist who started PreCrime. While grilling her in her greenhouse about the ins and outs of the system, she all of a sudden, in mid-conversation, grabs Tommy boy and gives him a big, erotic, open-mouthed smooch -- and then they keep going with their discussion. Cruise does allow himself a slight widening of the eyes at the moment, but that's about the extent of his reaction.

Huh??

Tim Blake Nelson, as a high tech prison warden, apparently was directed by Spielberg to deliver each of his lines as if he was at the bottom of a well, no matter how close he is to the person he's talking to, or how trivial what he's saying.

I kept wanting Tom/John to ask a few more questions, like (directed to the randy scientist, after her unsolicited spit swap), "What the hell was that about?", or, to Nelson's character, "Why are you BELLOWING at me?? I'm right in FRONT of you!!"

Spielberg feeling artsy-fartsy may also explain the casting of Max von Sydow, as that actor is known for his work with the great Scandinavian master of artistic cinema, Ingmar Bergman. The problem is, von Sydow brings to the part he plays in Minority Report too much baggage -- he's already played this same role (practically) before -- in 1995's Judge Dredd. That movie was set in a dystopian future where peace is kept by resorting to extreme means -- an elite squad of specially trained law enforcement officers who use advanced technology, whose head is the esteemed, avuncular von Sydow, who helped establish the system. Minority Report, on the other hand, is set in a semi-dystopian future where peace is kept by resorting to extreme means -- an elite squad of specially trained law enforcement officers who use advanced technology, whose head is the esteemed, avuncular von Sydow, who helped establish the system.

Also, it doesn't seem quite believable that a foreigner, an identity we're constantly reminded of because of von Sydow's accent, would hold the post that his character does.

 Speaking of accents and casting choices . . . Colin Farrell plays a character who at one point tells us he grew up in Ireland. Fine. But it's odd, because he doesn't speak with any hint of an Irish accent. Which is actually really odd, since Colin Farrell, the actor, is . . . from Ireland.

 In the future, there are practically no colors. There's no red, no green, no yellow, no orange, no violet . . . There's only gray, white, black, and washed-out blue. This is as a result of Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski's decision to leach out all rich colors from the film. Movies by Lars Von Trier and his Dogma 1995 comrades are more colorful.

How you feel about this aesthetic choice is of course purely a matter of taste. A lot of people seem to admire it. Personally, I found it just made me sleepy. I think if this is really what they wanted, they should have just gone all the way and done the movie in black and white, like a true noir. It could have looked amazing that way.

But I really just found silly all the smoke they fill John/Tom's apartment up with to make the light even hazier and more diffuse. This was something Spielberg and Kaminski first did in the family's house in A.I.; here, they've gone totally overboard. I found myself wondering if Anderton's apartment was actually on fire. Perhaps in one of his drugged-out stupors he left the iron on?

 WARNING -- BIG SPOILER Minority Report, at least until its ending, is rather ambivalent as to where its sympathies lie in the debate about just how much a murder-free society is worth, in terms of liberties given up. The slick campaign commercials we see in it advocating PreCrime seem to have been done to make us, the audience of this movie, feel uneasy about them -- but that may just be a reaction that comes automatically because they seem so much like real campaign commercials -- and yet, they make a lot of (emotional) sense. The people featured in them talking about how their loved ones' lives could have been saved if PreCrime had existed, or the survivors talking about how they're alive because of PreCrime, have pretty darn compelling arguments. I myself couldn't think of a good argument against the PreCrime concept, other than the aforementioned misery the pre-cogs are subjected to as their constant existence.

But the movie seemed to feel it had to, and so it came up with the idea of doubt -- it turns out it's possible that sometimes, just sometimes, there's the tiniest chance that the person wouldn't have committed the murder.

To which, as I'm watching Minority Report's depiction of a murder-free Washington, D.C., I say -- "Who cares? Too bad! Murder-free society is ABSOLUTELY worth this little element of doubt you're talking about! ABSOLUTELY."

But, unbelievably, the movie then turns around and says, no, society will naturally decide, based on this new knowledge, that it's NOT worth it.

Which is pretty funny.

Just about everyone knows that numerous -- possibly hundreds -- of innocent men have been executed in this country by the state. Lately DNA testing has been freeing men right and left off of death rows. Yet the country as a whole still overwhelmingly supports the death penalty. In other words, our society has, collectively at least, decided that, forget about doubt, the occasional innocent person being executed is acceptable. This even despite the fact that the death penalty has been proven over and over again to not serve as a deterrent to murder.

So the idea that in 52 years our society will all of a sudden say, "Forget about it -- the idea of even one guy who was thinking about committing murder, but ultimately maybe wouldn't have gone through with it, going to prison just isn't worth an end to murder!" . . . Well, I'd say it was irony (actually meant as a commentary on the death penalty, perhaps), but it sure doesn't play in Minority Report like irony. It plays as sincere.

Which plays as ludicrous.