Word: spielbergism
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Although Cruise and Spielberg, friends for two decades, have been developing the script since 1999, the movie turns out to be topical, a celluloid mirror of current events. Jointly financed by DreamWorks and Fox, it opens amid controversy over Attorney General John Ashcroft's decision to put a terrorism suspect in military detention. Many have noted the similarity between the movie's idea of Precrime and the legal ramifications of arresting but not charging suspected terrorists...
When he's not working, Cruise isn't on the Hollywood scene. He keeps to himself or a small group of intimates. Asked to name his best friends, he pauses. "My family," says Cruise, who is close to his mother and three sisters. "Cameron Crowe, Steven Spielberg. And some people that I work with. Penelope, of course." He's referring to Penelope Cruz, his current girlfriend. The romance has been met with equal parts skepticism and speculation. "If you believe the media," says Cruise, "she's pregnant, we've broken up three times, and we've been married already...
...happen in three years. Steven Spielberg's last movie, AI, was set in 2051, in a bipolar world: sleek surfaces and a carnival-carnivore underbelly. Now, in Minority Report, it's 2054, and the future is more recognizable: tomorrow, only more so. Copies of USA Today flash instant headlines as readers hold them. Cars race down vertical freeways on the facades of mile-high office buildings. On a Washington skid row, eyeless bums peddle the newest nose candy...
Part of the high-IQ fun of Minority Report--Spielberg's sharpest, brawniest, most bustling entertainment since Raiders of the Lost Ark and the finest of the season's action epics--is its mix of future and retro. Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow), who might be a more benign John Ashcroft, and his protege John Anderton (Tom Cruise) run a system that prevents murders by arresting people before they commit them. Yet the Precrime apparatus is so goofily anach-ronistic--three young mind readers floating in a tank and billiard balls rolling through plastic tubes--that your brilliant...
Last time out, Spielberg tried humanizing Kubrick. This time (working from a Philip K. Dick story and an excellent script by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen), he borrows Hitchcock's Catholic belief that we are not all criminals, but we are all guilty; our humanity is our original sin. Anderton--on the run for a murder he hasn't thought of committing of a man he doesn't know--is oppressed by guilt because his young son was kidnapped while they were at a public swimming pool. Indeed, water, as both symbol and character, is everywhere in this film...