Steven Spielberg: Minority Report

Filmed from March to July 2001, Minority Report was not influenced by the September 11 attacks later that year, yet retrospectively it seems the first of Steven Spielberg's attempts to grapple with the aftermath of the tragedy. A neo-noir in which crime is committed and prosecuted in the mind, Minority Report proves disturbingly prescient in its vision of a world in which murder is punished preemptively. Though based on an even older Philip K. Dick story, the film feels like the meeting point of the Patriot Act and the impetus for the Iraq invasion, albeit the focus lies not on wars and national defense but mere law enforcement. As the PSAs encouraging support for a national PreCrime system argue to the people, "That which keeps us safe also keeps us free."

Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise) believes that motto with all his heart. Having lost his son years ago to an unknown kidnapper/murderer, John looks at PreCrime as a way to prevent such pain from afflicting anyone else. Using a trio of genetically engineered psychics to predict when murders will occur and who the perpetrators and victims will be, Anderton and the rest of Washington D.C.'s unit have reduced the murder rate in one of America's most violent cities to zero. The resultant utopia resembles that of Demolition Man: exceedingly bright and almost eerily calm. Only where Demolition Man presented its peace as the product of nanny-state liberalism, Minority Report shows how instant detention has cleared the streets.

Perhaps that's why the brightness of Spielberg's future D.C. is so garish and uninviting. Using the bleach-bypass method he employed for Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg casts his world in a quasi-chiaroscuro, not fully employing black-and-white but suggesting the obliteration of a moral gray area in this new societal order. Anyone predicted to kill by the "PreCogs" is guilty and arrested before the act is committed. There are no extenuating circumstances, no appeals, only a quick journey to a massive prison that resembles a high-tech Guantanamo. Some of the police offers working in PreCrime have never even covered a homicide. They simply trust in the system, which clearly marks people as either innocent or guilty.

But naturally, there isn't much drama in a world where evil has already been figured out and dealt with, and soon Anderton's faith in the new way of things is directly challenged. First comes the intrusion of the bureaucracy, in this case Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), a representative of the attorney general. Before PreCrime can go national, the federal government wants to make sure there are no flaws. The fact that Witwer is even investigating the system cracks the illusion of the system's infallibility, and his intervention sets in motion events that lead Anderton to a potential flaw, at which point his world turns upside down.

Predicted to kill a man he's never even heard of, Anderton must flee and try to clear his name, and Spielberg stages a number of impressive chases as the chief ducks his co-workers. He leaps across maglev cars racing at hundreds of miles per hour in every direction, hitches unwitting jetpack rides off the officers come to arrest him and dukes with Witwer in a car manufacturing factory before driving away in the car that is constructed robotically around him. Spielberg's direction is at his most fluid and dynamic, the welcome return of his more coherent, formal style communicating as much energy as Saving Private Ryan with out all that camera jostling tedium. A sequence in which tiny, retina-scanning automatons move through an apartment looking for Anderton is filmed, De Palma-style, with a top-down camera gliding over the partitions of rooms, peeking in on the domestic bliss and drama of the tenants as the mechanized creatures scurry around looking for their mark. As a showcase for Spielberg's talent with action filmmaking and pacing, Minority Report is his best pure rush since Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Yet it also displays some of the director's deepest conceptual probings. Like so many of Spielberg's films, Minority Report details a loss of innocence, only here this loss is visited on an adult instead of a child, and more than once. Anderton's world is shattered once when his son disappears, but he also loses the new, cocooned world he creates around himself when his name comes up as a future killer and he is put on a path to undermine the PreCrime program. Spielberg finds complexities in the man by staging him as both perpetrator and victim, someone who deliberately sets out to uncover the truth and is then wracked by those revelations.

The titular minority report refers to an aberration among the hive-mind visions of the three PreCogs, a "disagreement" on how a future might play out. Anderton goes so far as to abduct the most powerful of the PreCogs, Agatha (Samantha Morton), to try to find his own minority report, to be told that he really doesn't have to kill the unknown man he's been predicted to murder. However, if he did have a minority report, he himself would disprove the fallibility of PreCrime and the necessity to dismantle it. And yet, as the "inventor" of PreCrime (Lois Smith) tells him, the best way he could destroy the system would be to kill the man, thus proving its inability to fully protect people. No matter what Anderton does, everything will change, and he'll be destroyed by it.

Naturally, Spielberg uses this foundation to toy with the notion of fate. Agatha, once sprung from her holding chamber to accompany Anderton, can predict even small occurrences that happen without fail. Yet it is also she who tries to urge Anderton not to carry out his predicted destiny, arguing that his knowledge of his future gives him the power to change it. But it is precisely that knowledge that ultimately leads him to the doorstep of a man he does not know, at which point he discovers something that makes him capable of the murder Agatha and her siblings foresaw. This constant mixing of paradoxes, ironies and quandaries is visualized in the film's key shot, perhaps the single most striking shot of Spielberg's oeuvre, that magnificent two shot of Anderton and Agatha holding each other, their heads seemingly growing out of each other's. As Agatha shares a hive mind with her siblings, so does she swap thoughts with Anderton for a moment: having stolen Agatha to try to clear his name, Anderton now feels that he must go through with the predicted action, while Agatha the psychic tries to convince him to change his fate.

This is heady stuff, exceeded only by A.I.'s uncompromising views on humanity itself. But apart from the director's more current interest in moral complexity, Minority Report also features a unique take on the classic Spielberg theme of neglectful parents. Here, he flips the dynamic, so that instead of focusing on the wronged child, we see the parent coping with his failure, whether perceived or real. Anderton blames himself for Sean's kidnapping, and he can hardly live with himself for it. Loyal to the legal system and outwardly so strong, Anderton retreats into a drug haze when in private, watching old home movies as he dopes himself to blot out the pain for a few minutes. The aforementioned retired PreCrime pioneer likewise comes across as the regretful parent, viewing herself as having failed children who were born different and then experimented upon without care. Though not as direct an examination of Spielberg's dearest preoccupation as Catch Me if You Can, Minority Report nevertheless represents one of the director's last great looks into one of his foundational hangups, this time from a different angle that exposes new moods and interpretations.

Like Spielberg's other 2002 film, Minority Report represents a meeting of the director's two best sides, the populist audience-charmer and the serious-minded artiste. Some criticize the ending, and I agree there are a few issues. Any time you see Max von Sydow in a film, you can pretty much bet he's guilty of whatever the crime is, which dampens the suspense somewhat. As to the charge that its "solution" to the PreCrime system is too absolute, I never could gel with that reading. I've always believed that it's better to let a guilty man go free than to cage an innocent one, and by revealing the flaws in the system, Anderton and others have no choice but to scrap its progress. True, Spielberg doesn't even try to address the larger framework of justice, but that's a subject for another film. Perhaps, continuing off his Kubrick high, the director incorporated the lesson that the late, great director imparted with his altered finale of A Clockwork Orange, that dismantling a bad cure for horrible actions is as important as finding a working method of treatment for crime. Minority Report doesn't set out to find a bold new solution to law and order but to discard a flawed one. And in the face of subsequent foreign and domestic policy in this country, the film's message has since come to resemble a warning.

The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)

Thus far in his slim corpus, each Terrence Malick film has solidified and purified Malick’s transcendentalist belief in the connection of man and nature, even when he shows horrible, destructive acts. The murder spree in Badlands fits with uncomfortable harmony with the flat plains and scattered, gnarled grass lining the sides of Midwestern country roads. Days of Heaven moved deeper into that territory to bask in the glow of our amber waves of grain, yet the mangled love triangle and plot to steal the farmer’s wealth contrasts to the invasion of locusts naturally laying waste to the area. The Thin Red Line builds further on this contrast, presenting even the monstrous environmental and human cost of war as an exaggerated of the destruction inherent in an ecosystem even as it pushed gently and spiritually for an end to such horrors.

Malick’s films, like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poetry, make me want to walk in a field, palms outstretched, letting leaves and blades of foliage brush against my fingertips. When I experience their work, I feel that I can go outside and be jolted by the current running through nature, running through us as well if we’d stop breaking the circuit. Their conceptions of the universe are heady, allegorical and concerned less with what’s before their transparent eyeball than its spiritual essence (even the romance between Smith and Pocahontas feels like an encapsulation of the pure love of nature for those who can tap into its grace). Yet they also are some of the most tactile artists to ever live, offering intoxicating panoramas of nature and the past, present and future it contains. Unlike Emerson, however, Malick lacks the self-absorbed narrow-mindedness that undercuts his own idealism. Malick seeks to capture it all, even when he leaves out one side entirely (as he did in The Thin Red Line). His view of destruction as but one facet within nature is but one example of his more universal belief in the force that connects us.

That Malick would make a film about Native Americans seems so obvious it’s a wonder he didn’t find the inspiration to do it about 30 years before he released The New World in 2005. Perhaps it was for the best, though: by building off the moral, philosophical and natural themes he’d refined to that point, Malick crafted unquestionably the most singular film to chart the English settlement of America and the interaction with the tribes already there. It is not about environmentally indifferent white settler vs. the attuned native, though certainly conflict and discrepancies exist, as do moments of horrific violence that destroy so much that nature csually covers over in a season. Nor is it a Disneyfied version of John Smith’s romance with Pocahontas, a symbolic union of an open-minded Englishman bonding with a purer spirit, though elements of that exist as well.

What The New World is instead is an attempt to come to grips with the awesome power of a new, seemingly limitless region. Relative to the Europeans, the Americas may as well have been a new world entirely, a place totally unaffected by the influence of the world as it was known. Likewise, the Native Americans come into contact with a new people with a wholly different cultural perspective and social ethos (not to mention virulent diseases).

After all, the first shots of wonder belong not to the Englishmen, who view land with a combination of dehydrated delirium and relief, but the Indians, who regard the great ships drifting to coast with stunned curiosity and awed apprehension. The settlers disembark and immediately set about building camp, scarcely stopping to take in their surroundings, the sound of the first felled tree echoing in a nearby field teeming with inspecting Powhatan warriors like the dying screams of a fallen comrade. Only John Smith (Colin Farrell), a mutineer brought to shore in shackles and freed under probation, explores this uncharted land with reverence.

Smith innately understands the future of America, sensing in its vastness the principles of democracy and republicanism that will take root in its fertile soil. As his comrades back at the rudimentary Jamestown squabble over rank and class, Smith finds himself sent to negotiate with the Powhatan king against protests over his low social status, which morphs into tacit enthusiasm as the men consider the likelihood of the natives not pummeling him with a club. Ironically, it is because of their caste system that Smith finds himself thrust into the nature he loves, where he can ruminate “Here the blessings of the earth are beloved by all.” Later, however, Smith comes into some authority, and he immediately imposes dictatorial control over Jamestown when it looks as if he might help the ailing settlement incorporate with the Indians. Malick’s universality flirts with the political here, laying out not only the ideological foundation of America but the contradictions in its actions.

Nevertheless, this preemptive insight into America’s political future factors into the structure of the film, which democratizes the image as much as Godard’s Marxist camera in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. This is especially true of the extended edition released on DVD and Blu-Ray, surpassing even the original “Italian” cut of the film before Malick trimmed it for “commercial” considerations, relatively speaking. That film was poetic to its core, but this longer cut breaks up the stricter focus on Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher, in a mesmerizing performance that should have translated into a much busier career than it did_ to allow for greater contributions from all its players, not just Smith and Rolfe but supporting figures who drift through Malick’s more ambient tone poem like vague trills, ever quite themes or motifs but always distinctive.

The narration too shifts, moving off more identifying visual accompaniment to borderline free-associative impressionistic collage of sight and sound. It’s never difficult to tell who’s speaking, but the images often move entirely out of the perspective of the narrator into that of another character (or characters), moving beyond even a vaguely political aesthetic into a deeper, more spiritual connection linking everyone.*

That is not to say that the film presents a trite, hippie “We’re all the same deep down” message. Malick, for all his poetic abstraction, has always had a realistic side, and he plainly delineates the two cultures through their interactions with each other. When the Englishmen set down on land, one of Capt. Newport’s (Christopher Plummer) first order is to level trees in the surrounding area to build a fort and to ensure clear vision against any attackers, already exploiting the land for gain. Smith’s time with the Powhatan, learning their customs, their social interactions and their innocence, becomes all the more stunning when he returns to Jamestown and his blissful time with the Indians is thrown in sharp relief against the misery, backstabbing and animalistic savagery within the starving colony.

What Malick finds, however, is a spiritual link binding all these players to each other, as well as to nature. The longer cut contains more microscopic gestures between characters, tiny mirror movements that close circuits to let the current flowing through everything pass between them. Even by Malick’s standards, The New World is a film comprising almost nothing but grace notes, interspersing playful interaction, aching rumination and pillow shots of trees and rivers into each segment until distinguishing between them becomes futile. The narrative takes on a sort of shared consciousness, an impressionistic voyage that ultimately reveals an objective truth about us, an objective truth no one can articulate, not even in Malick’s flagrantly literary internal speech.

Framing that objective connection are the ubiquitous shots placed at such a low-angle that cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki practically has to aim the camera straight up to capture any action. This only exacerbates the film’s unabashedly spiritual and religious nature: some of its first shots are of characters looking up to the sky, Pocahontas beckoning to the cosmos with open arms and Smith, hands shackled in forced penitence, gasping up at rain dripping through his hot brig cell on the ship. Sunlight beams down on these characters, illuminating their attempts at sovereignty and collaboration, and smoke and fog always obscure the more violent battles and atrocities like Adam and Eve trying to hide their sins from the Lord. What Malick seems to be suggesting, however, is not the connection of the Indians and/or the Englishmen to God but that humanity is God.



Malick sets all of his films in the past; his most “recent” pictures take place in or after the WWII era. But all of these films feel current, and temporal states often seem beside the point in Malick’s work. This transcends Emerson’s, well, transcendentalism for omniscience, albeit gained through unification and oneness with the world. The aforementioned hints of politics in Smith’s internal monologues and the film’s structure cast Smith as both the symbol of arriving British colonists and for the future revolutionaries who will make a new nation of these settlements. He experiences the present but represents the future, though his actions and thoughts tie him to that distant time so closely that the split becomes less contrast than contrapuntal. The New World may, even judging from its title, concern immersion in the unfamiliar, but it demonstrates how every person has the whole of Earth’s history and future coded into intermittently and involuntarily accessible places within us.**

A common misconception concerning Malick’s films posits that they juxtapose man with nature. Both The Thin Red Line and this film show warfare, while Badlands and Days of Heaven use their Midwestern amber waves as backdrops to killing sprees and intrigue, respectively. However, Malick positions the brutal actions of humanity as a part, however exaggerated and senseless, of the turbulence inherent in nature. Note the preference of ambient noise over scored music in the extended cut and how natural sound nevertheless proves an adequate soundtrack: when Smith loses his Powhatan guide to the chief early in the film, his on-guard wandering through an overgrown field is punctuated by the shrill buzz of crickets, a natural glissando ratcheting up tension. Nature herself starves out the Englishmen, who only truly set upon themselves and the natives when hunger drives them to desperation.

Everything has its contradictions, which is why The New World is so hard to pin down: it captures so much (too much, for some) of the messiness of life. Charting Pocahontas’ evolution from cherubic, mystical savior through romance and diplomacy and ostracism and, finally, comfortable life as the toast of the English court is interpretive and realistic, a fitting split for a film that combines painstaking historical accuracy with outright myth.

“That fort is not the world,” Smith says at one point, subtly critiquing the Western bent even of films sympathetic to the Indians at the centuries of hardships they would soon endure. It’s a lesson Smith—and, later, Rolfe—forgets, seeking to bask in Pocahontas’ unique energy even as he molds her into someone he can make his own. This is more true of Rolfe than Smith, who does try his best not to let the other Englishmen “contaminate” her with their base, simple needs in their starved madness, but both men see her spiritual power through Western lenses. Each sees in her a chance for a new start: Smith sees her as the path to becoming a new, good man after his pirating days, while Rolfe views her as the only means to heal his broken heart from his English wife's death. Their desires for individual new lives, of course, serve as a microcosm for the second chance America represented to those who could brave the voyage; in that sense, tying together colonial idealism with the romantic longing between the two Johns and Pocahontas is not only artistically valid but logical.

Pocahontas herself learns Smith’s message when she eventually goes to England with John Rolfe (Christian Bale), arriving in an Old World that’s new to her. Malick thus expands on his view in a cyclical fashion, returning to the same shots and motifs with different players, altering the meaning. Reflections of actions, ideas, even of nature mirrored in the waters of the Virginian swampland visually prefigure the cycle of birth, death, separation, reconciliation and exploration that gyrate through the film. The director even subverts visual expectation by not only beginning on a ship arriving but ending on it too, even if the former accompanies birth imagery and the latter death knells. Additionally, ending with another arrival suggests that the story is not done, that a new iteration of the cycle will begin with new players, using our modern awareness of the repeated atrocities of colonial and native exchanges to fill our imaginations as to the outcome. However, if this film is so rooted in what came before, not only in terms of its cyclical movement but in the context of all cinematic depictions of colonialists meeting and battling Native Americans, how is it that everything in it feels as if it’s being viewed for the first time?

This extended cut, adding 22 minutes to the debut Italian cut and nearly 40 to the theatrical version, pushes the film over that hump separating it from loose-narrative romance into the purest embodiment of Malick’s Emersonian ethos, as well as the best response to the ethnocentrism within Emerson’s and Whitman’s supposedly universal view, never shying away from the contradictions in Smith’s ultimately trite interpretation of the magnificent world around him. By incorporating more of the characters and finding the right balance between human and nature (which is not to say that they are evenly split, only that we get a better sense of place within this gorgeous and intimidating world), Malick finds a more holistic view of our connection to nature and the history and future each of us carries inside.

I do not mean to say that the extended cut is “better” than the theatrical: both have their strengths. I find in the theatrical cut a certain thrumming force that vibrates to my frequency and lapses me into a trance. But I have a better idea of what’s being communicated in this longer cut without being sucked out of the experience of Malick’s film, and in fact I feel more connected to its pulses than I was before, more able to get my bearings inside its hypnotic flow and see where I’m going instead of being swept along. I shall be interested to revisit the theatrical version to see just how much the elongated shots and deeper levels of personal interaction alter the meanings, to see nature confounding these people, even those stereotypically placed at one with it. Malick can get seemingly infinite mileage out of this film, his tweaks opening up whole new connections and altering entire perceptions.

One of the tattoos on Smith’s body says “Carpe Diem,” which may be the simple moral at the heart of this story. When the characters surrender not only to the power of nature but of each other, they become one with the present and experience life in all its beautiful chaos. Death is always the least poetic aspect of a Terrence Malick film, a tragically blunt act that disconnects that figure from the force tethering all flora and fauna and leaving those alive to reel at the shockwaves. (This supports the idea that Malick frames his religious reaches around a God of man and nature and not a conventional Judeo-Christian reading). The New World, a film set 400 years in the past, resides more firmly in the present than just about any film I can name,*** and if it hits dead-ends at times and has to reverse out of them, isn’t that a byproduct of living in the moment and following the flow wherever it leads?


*And by filtering its semi-idealized aesthetic through the innocent eroticism of Pocahontas’ mesmerizing effect on all those around her, Malick recalls Whitman as much as Emerson.
**Though I’ve resolutely avoided as much Tree of Life chatter as possible, that film appears to expand on this point even further, moving beyond the planetary scope of this film into the universal.
***Edward Yang’s Yi Yi is all that comes to mind; it too works with a cyclical intimate epic of life and death.