Its Washington DC, 2055, Detective John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is the chief of a new form of crime prevention that is being tested in the nation's capital. The program, known as "Pre-Crime", allows the police force to foresee murders. As head officer in charge of the program Anderton is under pressure to see that "Pre-Crime" delivers, as his superiors push for the program to go national. Coupled with that pressure is the grief Anderton is dealing with due to the loss of his son and separation from his wife. The tide turns completely when Anderton apparently commits the "Pre-Crime" murder of a man he doesn't know and is forced to run.
Minority Report is one of the best sci-fi films I've seen in years. Recent highlights of that genre would include Alex Proyas's Dark City (1996), an under-seen gothic think-piece, and Andrew Niccol's Gattaca (1997), a love story and cautionary humanistic tale. I went into this screening with Spielberg's disappointing AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001) in mind. Thankfully, Spielberg keeps the hokey family values to a minimum and delivers a tight, well paced, intelligent sci-fi action/thriller.
The film is a testament to the magnificent imagination of the creators, notably Spielberg, cinematographer Janusz Kaminski and production designer Alex McDowell, and the seamless integration of the main concepts in Philip K. Dick's short story on which the film is based. In the film, Washington DC is a highly stylised (though not dystopian as was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, 1992, which was also based on a Dick short story ) realm of digitalized advertisements, surveillancing eye scanners, robotic "spyders", glider cars, vertical freeways and a pre-emptive police force with prodigious powers of locomotion.