I'm in the bay area at present, staying with the folks (I'll elaborate later). Managed to catch a second run showing of Minority Report this evening. I'd been very keen to check out this flick, but never made it to the theaters while it was out. Luckily for me, a local "All Seats $3" theater was showing it, albeit a single show daily at 9:30pm. The movie starts out nicely, an interesting foundation, storyline developing well, and of course beautiful cinematics courtesy of Mr. Spielberg. About halfway through I began to notice that a lot of the dialog seemed contrived, to the point where the actors appear to be just spitting out words solely to advance the plot. Or beyond advancing the plot, advancing the thinly veiled moral message of the film. The precogs, the psychic zombies that predict the future to police waiting to prevent murders, whisper disjointed lines in scenes that seem like outtakes from that SNL parody of the Calvin Klein "Obsession" commercials (except for the fact that instead of being dressed in evening wear sipping champagne, the players are in ribbed bodysuits floating in a pool of goo).

As you can tell, I was developing some reservations about where the movie was headed, but nevertheless I was still convinced of the potential of the story. However, the last third really destroyed any possible appreciation for it I may have had. The pivotal scene in which Tom Cruise is confronted with the murder he has been foretold to commit ("will he or won't he?") is ruined by the precog in the background whispering "you can choose!". The ultimate villain of the film is then gradually exposed in a manner so predictable and unshocking it would hardly be worthy of a B-grade thriller, let alone a film Roger Ebert gave 4 stars. The overall problem of the movie is that the possible issues it could have intelligently explored (the exploitation of the precogs, the nature of free will) are steamrolled in order to put together a run-of-the-mill action/suspense pic. It ends a lousy action flick with a black and white moral draped on top. Such a shame ... I really believe Spielberg could have made another Blade Runner with a better screenplay.