The American Future

Steven Spielberg’s latest film, Minority Report, is one of those futuristic science-fiction nightmare fantasies that keep you wondering whether the problem is the script or your own failing powers of concentration. It confused me right off the bat and kept me confused most of the way.

Let me see if I can make a little sense of it. In the year 2054, the government — the Federal one — has established a crime-prevention program. Relying on three “Pre-Cogs” (short for pre-cognitives, I guess) — people who have a mysterious power to envision violent crimes before they occur — it sends special cops to arrest criminals before they strike. The Pro-Cogs inexplicably lie floating in an isolated pool inside the Justice Department, where their brain waves are constantly monitored.

But one of the special cops, Tom Anderton, played by Tom Cruise, gets an advance peek at one of the Pre-Cogs’ visions, projected onto a futuristic TV screen: he sees himself shooting a man he has never seen or heard of. To escape arrest, he goes on the lam and tries to find out who the prospective victim is in order to avoid committing the crime. Can he avert his apparent fate while remaining free?

The government agent becomes a fugitive outlaw, pursued by his own agency. Anderton discovers that the state he has served is worse than the criminals it’s been chasing. As in many futuristic movies, the ultimate danger is a totalitarian government armed with the most advanced weaponry.

It’s a grim story, with special effects that are more sickening than amazing, unless you are the sort of moviegoer who is willing to pay to watch eye surgery performed in a filthy slum apartment.

After the first hour, I decided that if this movie ever ended, I’d run from the theater waving my arms and warning others not to waste their money. This is the first time I’ve ever reacted so adversely to Spielberg’s work. But the second half nearly won me over.

Futuristic movies usually date badly. The real future, when it gets here, is always so different from the one people had imagined that it makes their predictions laughable. Old movies made from H.G. Wells’s novels, for instance, prove only that Wells was a very fallible prophet, whose vision of science and technology smacked of magic. He thought progress would mean miracles. He imagined a total transformation of the world, while failing to foresee all the actual incremental changes with which we’ve since become familiar. History not only refutes predictions, it makes them seem naive.

Spielberg’s vision of the future is so outlandish that it’s already implausible, in a way that, say, the wondrous cloned dinosaurs of Jurassic Park were not. The central implausibility in this film is the poorly explained power of the Pre-Cogs. It doesn’t seem a logical or believable extension of anything we already know, as good sci-fi should.

On the other hand, Minority Report is, in one respect, all too plausible. None of its ordinary human characters knows, asks, or cares by what authority the Federal Government exercises its enormous new powers. No matter how ominous the government becomes, nobody seems to have heard of the U.S. Constitution or to think of appealing to it. The state simply seizes any powers it craves, no questions asked. Its only limits are technological, not legal.

Even with his life at stake, Anderton seeks only to save himself, not to expose the state. The film deals with metaphysical questions of “predestination and free will,” as one reviewer notes, but it never asks the more practical political question: how we got from Jefferson’s Republic to this incomprehensible Leviathan. Totalitarianism seems to be our destiny.

When you come right down to it, the scariest characters in Minority Report aren’t the villainous government officials — one of whom is played by Max von Sydow with his usual subtlety — but the passive American people who never question the government. There is nothing “futuristic” about them.

These Americans already exist outside the movie, and they form the almost invisible backdrop of the story. We hardly notice them because we take them for granted. The more powers the government grabs, the more American flag stickers they attach to their car windows.

Spielberg shows the U.S. Government arresting prospective “criminals” who haven’t done anything yet, with no popular protest. Here his only error is to place it in the distant future.

Joseph Sobran